The conventional wisdom is Nancy Pelosi has no leverage in her bid to force Mitch McConnell to hold a fair impeachment trial in the Senate. The thinking is the House speaker can delay sending articles of impeachment, but the Republicans there aren’t in any hurry. She can waste more time. The Senate majority leader is still going to “win.”

I’ve always thought the conventional wisdom is myopic. Pelosi does not have to bear the weight of a lying, thieving, philandering sadist making a fetish of exoneration. McConnell, however, does. When they impeached him, the Democrats cut Trump in ways he’s never been cut. He’s bleeding. The only way to stop it, from Trump’s point of view, is for the Senate to clear him, and maybe not even then. Trump is, has been and always will be weak. Impeachment made it apparent to all. His ego won’t let it go. The only thing he wants to know from McConnell is when they’re going to acquit him.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom does not account for ongoing reporting about the president’s extortion of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. The Center for Public Integrity and Just Security sued for access to administration emails showing the Pentagon was fully aware that blocking millions in aid money was illegal.

The US Constitution and federal statutes gives the Congress, and only the Congress, authority over how money is spent and why. Trump can’t legally withhold money allocated by the Congress for Ukraine even if he does so to encourage anti-corruption efforts. It’s not his call. The Pentagon made its objections clear, but Trump ordered the money withheld anyway. In other words, the president knew he was breaking the law even as he was breaking it.

Though the articles of impeachment are about abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress, not about this particular crime, news of Trump’s lawbreaking affirms them in effect. It may also bring more pressure to Republican senators facing reelection this year. Protecting his majority is the only political factor McConnell truly cares about.

The conventional wisdom does not account for recent events either. It’s becoming clearer each day the president didn’t have a good reason two weeks ago for bringing the United States to the brink of war with Iran. The administration said Trump was justified in ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. It said Iran’s top general in charge of its proxy wars in the Middle East was planning an “imminent attack.” Well, it turns out the administration was — how do I say this? — covering Trump’s ass.

On Sunday morning, Mark Esper was explicit in saying he saw “no hard evidence that four American embassies had been under possible threat when President Donald Trump authorized the targeting of Iran’s top commander,” according to the AP.

Compare that to this morning’s reporting from NBC News’ Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube. They said the president authorized Soleimani’s assassination seven months ago. They wrote: “The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final sign-off on any specific operation to kill Soleimani” (my italics).

That leaves us to infer a reason based on the known context of the president’s choice. That known context was captured by the Wall Street Journal. Deep inside a story about Trump’s national security team, seven reporters said: “Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate” (my italics).

The president authorized the killing in June but waited to sign off on it until right before his impeachment trial was set to begin in the Senate. It is reasonable, therefore, to suggest Trump ordered a man’s death for political reasons, not for national-security reasons (there aren’t any). I suggest he tried creating an image of himself as a war president too important to remove from office. I suggest Soleimani’s assassination is just one more way Trump has abused his power, and hence affirmed his indictment.

Does this mean Pelosi will “win”? I don’t make such claim. But the politics of this intra-branch stand-off is more complex than many in the Washington press corps believe. Pelosi has more leverage than she appears to. McConnell has less. She doesn’t stand with a president continuing to commit impeachable acts. He does.

Even if the Senate clears him, McConnell’s conference must explain acquittal to voters in the face of inevitable reporting showing even more wrongdoing by the president. Trump has always tread impotently. Are the Senate Republicans going to follow his path?

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 January 2020
Word Count: 764
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The plain truth can often be so obvious as to be invisible. That’s my more charitable interpretation of the press corps’ coverage of Qassem Soleimani’s assassination. My less charitable interpretation? Reporters and editors in Washington, D.C., will find a way to avoid seeing the plain truth because the plain truth is too unbearable to see.

It would be unbearable to think the president ordered a man dead in order to give Republican Senators a means of defending him against an indictment for abuse of power and obstruction. It would be unthinkable for him to bring America to the brink of war in order to create an image of a “war president” too indispensable to remove.

As a result, the press corps has been busy this week reporting in granular detail virtually every aspect of Donald Trump’s decision last week to target and kill Iran’s top general in Baghdad. Everything, that is, short of reporting the plain, obvious and unbearable truth: the president ordered a man’s death because he was impeached.

That reporters and editors in Washington, D.C, find ways to avoid seeing the plain truth was brought to mind by this morning’s Wall Street Journal. In a piece about the president’s new national security team — how its “cohesion” resulted in Soleimani’s assassination — seven esteemed reporters committed one of journalism’s professional sins. They buried the lede. Nearly 30 paragraphs into a 2,200-word story, they said:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said (my italics).

Now, these are unnamed sources. They were speaking on background. In isolation, I wouldn’t make much of this. But in context, it matters — so much so, it warrants its own reporting, which we have not yet seen. That context would be the absence of legitimate non-political reasons for ordering Soleimani’s death. In all the reporting I’ve read, administration officials can’t keep their stories straight. On the one hand, that suggests no good reason. On the other, that suggests the most obvious one.

The buried lede suggests something else worth exploring. The president may not have been alone in seeking to please Republican senators who will sit in judgement of him during the impeachment trial. It may be that a Republican senator — Lindsey Graham comes to mind — encouraged the president to act on Soleimani. In that case, we would have to face yet another unbearable truth: some Republicans in the United States Senate are conspiring with the president in defrauding the people to maintain power.

Though unbearable, it’s plain and it’s obvious. The Republicans really are dumping constitutional principles once dearly and closely held for the sake of power. Graham and other Republicans declared their intent to violate preemptively the oath all impeachment jurors take to “do impartial justice, according to the Constitution and law.” Graham and Mitch McConnell, the current Senate majority leader, were highly principled during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Now that the defendant is a Republican, however, those principles are rather beside the point.

What’s good for Clinton is not good for Trump — that’s not a matter of hypocrisy. I can’t stress that enough, because that’s another unbearable truth. There are two value systems, according to the Republican theory and practice. There is one set of laws, rules and norms for Republicans. There’s another set for Democrats. One protects. One punishes. The GOP benefits enormously when the press corps sees just one.

It seemed hypocritical when Rand Paul, a Republican senator, said yesterday he was ready to debate separations of powers after administration officials told him and GOP Senator Mike Lee not to talk about military intervention in Iran. Lee said “it was un-American. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.” Their Democratic colleagues might have thought they prepared to support the conviction of Trump for the same offense. Lee made it clear he wasn’t. He told Fox News Thursday the president is the best.

Again, this isn’t hypocrisy. According to Republican theory and practice, Republicans get to be principled. Democrats do not. Republicans get to have the right to respect and deference. Democrats do not. When the Republicans impeached a Democrat, they stood on high moral ground. When the Democrats impeached a Republican, according to Republicans, the Democrats did no such thing. The Republican got to call witnesses. Democrats do not. There are two value systems — separate and unequal.

That, to me, is not just a plain truth. It’s not just an unbearable truth. It’s a pernicious truth. The Republican Party can and will commit unthinkable acts to maintain power — like permitting foreign interference and encouraging acts of war, not to mention suppressing the vote and enshrining minority rule in constitutional and statutory law — even when those acts slowly eat away the foundations of our democratic covenant.

Now imagine a press corps reporting the plain and obvious truth.

I think things would be different.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2020
Word Count: 828
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The Iranians fired a dozen rockets last night into American compounds in Iraq. The strikes were retaliation for the president’s decision to assassinate that country’s top general. As the bombs fell, George Conway, a fierce conservative critic of Donald Trump, said something we should all bear in mind. It rings with a crystalline truth.

“It’s extremely difficult now to escape the conclusion that [Trump] started a war because he was impeached,” Conway wrote on Twitter. “I’d be perfectly happy to be wrong about this, but the evidence is hard to ignore. He let all sorts of transgressions by the Iranians go previously, and is perfectly happy to kowtow to evil foreign leaders … but suddenly, he chooses the option that the military thought too extreme to actually select, and then threatens to commit war crimes. What’s different now?” (my italics.)

Impeachment, he said.

The president hasn’t quite started a war. The news this morning is the Iranians sent warning they were going to strike. The result was no American or Iraqi casualties. Iran is likely to move on to more covert actions, as it has for decades in the Middle East. The goal appears to be pushing US forces out of Iraq entirely. Barring retaliation from the US, tensions may have peaked for now. Trump is making a statement later today.

That we’re not quite at war yet doesn’t diminish Conway’s point. There’s a reason Trump ordered Qassem Soleimani’s death. It wasn’t keeping Americans safer. It wasn’t killing him because he deserved it. The reason, once you think about it, is rather plain to see: Trump is trying to make himself out to be a war president. A war president, to his way of thinking, can’t be removed from office. A war president, he thinks, always gets reelected (false). The New York Times reported Tuesday the Trump campaign promoted Soleimani’s death days after his assassination. He’s telling us. Are we listening?

Well, some are.

According to a new Morning Consult survey (Jan. 4-5), majorities favor Trump’s impeachment as well as his removal. This pattern is growing or holding steady. (His job rating has been underwater since forever.) Fifty-two percent approve of impeachment while 42 percent disapprove (50 percent approve and 39 percent disapprove among independents). Fifty-one percent approve and 43 percent disapprove of removal after a Senate trial (independents were 47 percent approve to 40 percent disapprove).

I have no idea whether public opinion will change Republican Senators’ minds. My immediate point is the public is listening when Trump says killing Soleimani is good for him politically. (Well, he thought it was; as I argued Tuesday, it’s backfiring.) That he is saying this at all is more evidence the House Democrats were right to indict him and the Senate Republicans are wrong to sweep his serial crimes under the rug.

The Morning Consult survey raises another point. The Washington press corps tends to be myopic. It pays attention to one thing at a time, creating the impression that news events are unrelated. This is why Politico can run a piece Tuesday evening asserting Mitch McConnell “won” and Nancy Pelosi “lost” after McConnell said he had enough votes for trial rules excluding witness testimony. (That Pelosi “lost” is strange given McConnell can’t move until she sends articles of impeachment.) But if the new poll numbers are any indication, normal people are connecting the dots.

Soleimani’s death is just one more way Donald Trump has abused the powers of his office. He did it when he involved a foreign government in a conspiracy to defraud the American people. (That is, extorting Ukraine to “investigate” a chief rival.) He did it again when he ordered the assassination of a leader of a sovereign nation, which gives Senate Republicans reason to acquit him in order to protect a “war president.” (For that matter, he did it when he fired FBI Director James Comey for greenlighting a special counsel investigation showing decisively he’s an illegitimate president.)

Put another way, normal people are not waiting for the Washington press corps to catch up to them. They aren’t waiting for White House reporters to figure out the precise reason Trump did what he did — whether firing Comey, extorting Ukraine or killing Soleimani. They know the truth despite the absence of all the facts. They made up their minds. Every time Trump violates his oath of office — whether to defend the US Constitution or the United States itself — he deepens feelings already acutely felt.

George Conway is right. It is indeed difficult to escape the conclusion Trump escalated an international conflict because he was impeached. Unfortunately, the press corps will likely continue trying to escape it. Fortunately, normal people won’t.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 January 2020
Word Count: 782
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It’s becoming clearer by the hour. There was no legitimate reason for Donald Trump to order the military assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.

The allegation that Soleimani was planning an offensive against Americans is turning out to be malarkey. That he deserved death isn’t reason enough. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama chose not to target him. They feared what might happen.

With Soleimani dead, ISIS is set for a comeback. Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad will regain lost strength. Iran says it will restart nuclear weapons development. Iraqi politicians are pushing for US troops to exit, leaving Kurdish allies to face threats of genocide.

Was one man worth all this? No.

It’s becoming clearer by the hour. Trump had his own reasons for assassinating Iran’s second most important political figure. Those reasons had little if anything to do with satisfying his oath to defend and protect the US against all enemies. Those reasons appear to be similar to the reasons he involved Ukraine’s president in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people. He stood to gain from both personally.

To be sure, Mike Pompeo may have rolled him. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the secretary of state had long advocated for targeting the Iranian general. But an impeached president is a desperate president. Headlines are dominated by Trump’s disgrace and what comes next for him in a Senate trial. It figures Pompeo’s interests may have aligned perfectly with the president’s interest in changing the subject.

But like all things Trump, it’s backfiring.

He forgot, or didn’t bother trying to remember, that a president can’t start a war on his own. He has to ask the Congress for permission, or at least inform members what’s going to happen, and why. The closest Trump came to doing that was telling US Senator Lindsey Graham as they were golfing at Mar-A-Lago. Assassinating a top-ranking figure of a sovereign country is a BFD. Not telling the US Congress about it is an even bigger BFD. It’s the kind of BFD that might get a president impeached.

Remember: there was more to the Ukraine conspiracy than getting a foreign government to interfere with the people’s right to fully consent to Trump’s governance. He held up military aid to Ukraine under the false pretense of seeing corruption eradicated. But it doesn’t matter what his reasons were. The Congress has the power of the purse. The Congress decides what money is spent, and why. That he held up the money at all violates the Constitution as well as federal statutory law.

We know this is true thanks to the Center for Public Integrity and Just Security. Both outlets sued to gain access to administration emails showing without a doubt the president knew withholding military aid to Ukraine was illegal but ordered it withheld anyway. Importantly, this truth came to light after the House impeached him. In other words, the US Senate has, or should have, more than articles of impeachment to consider.

There is clear evidence of the president knowingly breaking federal law.

It remains to be seen if the Senate moves ahead with a fair impeachment trial. But whether it does is unlikely to stop the House from returning to its interrogative posture. Trump just gave the House Democrats, especially Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, another reason to hold public hearings. He gave them a reason to tell another story before the 2020 election — about a president so desperate to distract us from his impeachment trial he ordered a man killed, possibly starting a war.

Even if the Senate trial was a charade, it could take place as the House subpoenas testimony explaining why the president choose to assassinate Qassem Soleimani. Such a context would almost certainly ramp up pressure on Senate Republicans up for reelection this year. Side-by-side televised proceedings might undermine the Republican defense and underscore the rationale for removing Trump from office.

But even if the Senate acquits, the president faces another peril of his own making. As I said, evidence of lawbreaking with respect to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act came to the light after the House impeached him. Moreover, Schiff said today he would not rule out subpoenaing John Bolton, the former head of the White House Security Counsel. Schiff also told my friend Greg Sargent his panel will be fully engaged in uncovering the facts behind Qassem Soleimani’s death. Put all these together and you have the making of — yes, it’s hard to believe — yet another impeachment inquiry.

Is that likely? I wouldn’t say that. But this president and these Republicans depend for their success on the Democrats “playing by the rules.” That rule in this case is you never impeach a president twice. Well, Trump is no ordinary president, and there is no double jeopardy when it comes to impeachment. Anyway, it seems a round two would merely be an extension of round one. Trump abused his power for political gain once. He’s abusing it a second time. And he’ll keep abusing it until his last day in office.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 January 2020
Word Count: 846
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Political scientists are weighing in after the president ordered last week a missile strike that killed Iran’s second most influential political figure, Qassem Soleimani. The presumption is Donald Trump believes escalating conflict abroad will lift pressure at home or aid reelection. Michael Tesler said Saturday in the Washington Post this is called the “rally effect.” The UC Irvine professor also said the president is getting everything wrong.

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein concurred this morning. “If Trump is seeking a confrontation to help him win reelection, he’s almost certainly making a big mistake,” he said. “[That’s] more or less the consensus among political scientists—contrary … to the Wag the Dog assumptions in the popular culture about the popularity of war.”

Others presume Trump is escalating conflict abroad to boost support at home. Elizabeth Warren spent a good deal of time Sunday on Meet the Press asking why the president decided now was the time to strike. “We are not safer because Donald Trump had Soleimani killed. We are much closer to the edge of war. The question is: Why now? Why not a month ago? Why not a month from now?” She answered her own question: “Trump faces the start potentially of an impeachment trial. … Why now?”

Rukmini Callimachi, who covers Al Qaeda and ISIS for the New York Times, wondered the same. Soleimani was well known for mass murder by proxy. The US government knew where he was. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama decided against targeting Soleimani. His death would have been too inflammatory. In this context, Callimachi tweeted Saturday, “it’s hard to decouple his killing from the impeachment saga.”

The most prominent neutral skeptic was Jake Tapper. The host of CNN’s State of the Union cast doubt on Mike Pompeo’s claim killing Soleimani prevented an imminent attack on Americans. (Callimachi said she was told the intelligence behind that claim was “razor thin.”) This government has said so many things “that were not true,” Tapper said. “Do you understand that there might be a special responsibility to provide proof and evidence to the American people of the imminence of this attack?”

Perhaps the president’s greatest critic is Donald Trump. In the fall of 2011, Trump said the following of Barack Obama: “Our president will start a war with Iran, because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. We have a real problem in the White House. So I believe that he will attack Iran sometime prior to the election, because he thinks that’s the only way he can get elected. Isn’t it pathetic?”

Yes, it is.

Let’s take a step back to note a few points. First, when Trump accuses people of wrongdoing, that’s the most reliable indicator of what he is doing or planning to do. The only time we know this president is telling the truth is when he’s projecting.

Second, the president is no longer getting the immediate benefit of the doubt even from a Washington press corps habituated to giving all presidents an endless supply of benefit-of-the-doubt. Telling more than 13,000 lies or falsehoods since taking office (according to the Post) will do that. As CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote, telling gigantic whoppers — “deliberate, significant attempts to deceive and manipulate” — will do that.

But more than lies are at work. We are seeing, I think, a material consequence of impeachment. Being indicted by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction, and thus violating the public trust, has resulted in a depth of distrust. The Washington press corps might have been more credulous back in May when Trump first considered targeting Soleimani. That, however, was before we knew he involved Ukraine’s president in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people. That was before the impeachment inquiry made a majority of Americans more aware of the fact that the Ukraine conspiracy was not the first time Donald Trump cheated.

When Dick Cheney said Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators, that seemed plausible to many people at the time. Nearly everyone in the run-up to the 2003 invasion was willing to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt. (That changed later on, of course, when the occupation soured and it was known the Bush administration lied to the American people to justify invasion.) When Mike Pompeo said the same thing last week about Iranians, his statement was met with howls of laughter. After three years of lies and a perennial fog of illegitimacy, there’s little chance of Trump being taken seriously about something as significant as war.

Which leads me to my final point.

The president is proving the Democrats were right.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 January 2020
Word Count: 852
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Donald Trump ordered a missile strike that killed one of Iran’s top generals in Baghdad. Qassem Soleimani was no ordinary commander. He was the most elite of Tehran’s military elite. He was said to be Iran’s second most powerful leader to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His death sent oil markets reeling. It opened the door to open war with Iran.

Edward Luce, of The Financial Times, said: “Most urgent question is whether Trump understood massive implications of killing Soleimani. If not, and I suspect not, we’re faced with very real risk of self-escalating World War I-style blunders into war.”

Soleimani was evil, but his death by American hands is not necessarily a good thing. Israel has assassinated leaders of terrorist groups — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. It has killed Iranian officials in Syria. “But it never killed someone like Soleimani,” Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international affairs at the University of Illinois, told me. It doesn’t brag about it either, as the Trump administration is.

Fred Wellman is Iraq War veteran and CEO of ScoutComms, a marketing firm for military families. He told me last night Soleimani was “a titan of the Iranian military. One of their national heroes. He has been the puppet master in Iraq for years. But understand he is a high-ranking Iranian military official, not a non-government terrorist. If we executed him, that’s an act of war on Iran and a huge escalation.”

This morning, Wellman added that Soleimani “was in many ways the face of Iran. His death isn’t bad news for many of us who served. He was a murderous thug. The question remains what’s next. We really don’t have the military that invaded Iraq.”

Someone tell Mike Pompeo. The US secretary of state was on CNN this morning rationalizing the president’s decision. He said Soleimani was involved in a plot to kill more Americans, but didn’t provide details. He said, “I saw last night there was dancing in the streets in parts of Iraq. We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom.”

That should sound familiar. We had to invade Iraq in 2003 because it was involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We had to invade Iraq because it possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (nuclear bombs). We had to invade Iraq because doing so would, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he said.

Every single word, including “a” and “the,” was a lie.

I don’t know what’s next any more than anyone else, but if Pompeo is any indication, we should be very concerned. Grossman said: “The main geopolitical affect of the Iraq War was empowering Iran, facilitating Iranian expansionism in the Middle East. There’s a decent chance the main geopolitical affect of killing Soleimani is finishing that job, getting Iraq to push the US out and fall further under Iranian influence.”

As David Frum, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter and a supporter of the Iraq invasion, wrote in May, war with Iran would “mean repeating a mistake, only on a much bigger scale: without allies, without justification, and without any plan at all.”

What I do know is that the president and his party have run out of ideas. Just as they peddle the lie that tax cuts bring prosperity, they peddle the lie that military power brings freedom. Yet the Republicans keep pushing the lies — and frankly why not?

Not one person was ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths since 2003. Not one person was ever held accountable for the trillions of dollars wasted. Not one person was ever held accountable for the countless American arms and legs blow off. “In a world where the pundits who advocated for war in Iraq lost their jobs and the politicians who voted for the war in Iraq lost their jobs and the people who carried out our war crimes were prosecuted, this would almost certainly not be happening,” wrote Jesse Brenneman, a former public-radio producer.

As long as the Republicans are never held accountable, they can continue perverting American patriotism. We’re already hearing the same propaganda we heard in 2003 — anyone opposing war with Iran opposes America. These are the same people by the way who turn a blind eye to Russia’s attack on our sovereignty in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Love of country is in fact love of party. It’s loyalty to lies.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 January 2020
Word Count: 772
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When I heard the news this morning, I was surprised by my sadness. I knew Julian Castro was a long shot for the presidency. He’s never won statewide office. He’s never polled more than 1 or 2 percent in early states. Yet Castro seems to me to represent America’s better angles — values and ideals currently under attack or in retreat. That he suspended his campaign feels like those values and ideals are suspended as well.

They aren’t, of course. They are always at work. That these values and ideals are not visible in the administration — that they are suppressed by Donald Trump’s policies of sadism — doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. Castro’s ideas especially with respect to immigrants, immigration law and the border are not going away. Whoever wins the nomination is going to capitalize on Castro’s spirit. The nominee is going to make room for Castro’s supporters in the national Democratic coalition. More importantly, Castro’s supporters are going to fight for a space in it. As Hall of Famer and former Sunday Night Baseball color commentator Joe Morgan used to say, that’s the way it is.

I suspect many Democrats forget this. I suspect many Democratic activists in particular believe if their candidate loses, their ideas lose, too. If their candidates lose, they themselveslose, as if their individual identities are balled up in the success or failure of individual candidates, as if Castro’s struggles are their struggles, as if when the press ignores Castro, the press ignores them, too. While there is utility in going all-in for candidates — this is a competition after all — let’s keep some perspective. Democratic Party politics isn’t static. It isn’t homogeneous. If it were, we’d be defending “three-strikes laws,” proposing more “welfare reform” and calling pot a “gateway drug.”

OK, yes, Joe Biden said marijuana is a gateway drug. His critics glommed on to that bumbling statement as evidence of the Democratic Party being hopelessly stuck in the past, and why candidates like Castro — and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — can’t gain traction. The party is still in thrall to Wall Street interests, critics say. The party is still too bigoted to recognize a generational, multi-racial and rising electorate.

But the same can be said of Biden’s critics. They too are stuck in the past. Economic arguments advanced in favor of Bernie Sanders are the same economic arguments that leftists lost in the 1990s. Critics who blamed Hillary Clinton for her husband’s record were too sexist to recognize her own record of liberal accomplishment. Critics who blame racism for dooming Castro’s and Harris’s campaigns are shockingly colorblind. Black voters are behind Joe Biden. As long as they are, he’ll likely be the nominee.

Put another way, the president is a domestic fascist. Trump is advancing white supremacy just by occupying the Oval Office. He literally puts Americans of color at risk with his demagoguery. The El Paso massacre happened after the president, for a week, attacked cities and all the diversity they imply. Biden would not be in the lead if not for Trump. Black voters wouldn’t support Biden if not for Trump. Yes, racism is preventing Castro and the others from gaining traction, but let’s not be colorblind. They are not gaining traction because many black voters don’t want them to.

It’s fair to say Joe Biden is in the lead because everyone learned the wrong lesson from 2016: that Trump won due to working-class “economic anxiety” and that only a working-class warrior like the former vice president can win them back. But it’s unfair to blame Biden or the Democratic National Committee for that mistake. It’s also unfair to say Biden’s nomination would be a step backward for the party. He said pot was a gateway drug. Then he walked it back after public outrage. That he walked it back suggests a capacity — and a desire — to represent the heart of the Democratic Party. That’s what you want to see in a nominee. That’s what matters most of all.

When it comes down to it, parties matter most, not candidates. Candidates are, or should be, vehicles for expressing and advancing policy preferences of the majority of the candidate’s party. Nominees should demonstrate a capacity — and a desire — to hear what the majority wants before doing his or her best to incorporate demands into a winning message. As president, they should do the same while bringing around as much of the rest of the electorate as they can. Biden comes with baggage. His views are not the wokest by any stretch. But neither his lead nor his nomination (if he gets is) is at the expense of Julian Castro and the others. Parties aren’t static. They’re dynamic.

As Joe Morgan said, that’s the way it is.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 January 2020
Word Count: 794
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I was recently on Ian Masters’ radio show. The host of Background Briefing said something that stuck with me. It’s extraordinary, Masters said, that Donald Trump’s first instinct is to lie. He’s much more comfortable lying than he is telling the truth.

That’s one way of looking it. But I doubt whether the president knows he’s lying. More importantly, I doubt whether he cares. I doubt whether he cares one way or the other, whether a statement is true or false or in-between. The differences just don’t matter.

That they don’t matter to him is something worth exploring. Here’s how I responded to Masters: Normal people like you and me have some degree of respect for the facts. We may have opinions about the fact that it’s raining outside, for example, but we don’t doubt that it’s raining. For people like the president, that’s not how things work.

For people like the president, there is no authority independent of his own ego and self-interest. As a consequence, there can be no deference to the authority of facts. There is literally nothing to defer to. As a consequence of that, there can’t be any such thing as lying. It’s impossible. Whatever he says, true or false, is true by virtue of his saying it. “When the facts do not exist independent of your own ego and your own self-interest, there’s no such thing as a falsehood,” I said, “Everything you say is true.”

When there is no authority independent of your own ego or self-interest, disagreement is intolerable. It’s not possible for there to be differing opinions over the same facts to whose authority each person defers. Au contraire! When there is no authority independent of your own ego and self-interest, disagreement is betrayal. Disagreement is treasonous. Dissent is the enemy.

When a president recognizes no authority independent of his own ego and self-interest, even the American people have no authority. “Democracy” is meaningless, because the people are him. To disagree with Trump — whether administration officials or the press—is to betray the country.

If Trump says it’s not raining outside when it’s clearly raining, then it’s not raining. This is true by virtue of the president having said those words. Now imagine what it’s like working with such a person, being related to such a person, or (dear God) being married to such a person. This is an authoritarian politically as well as personally.

And this is the loneliest man in America.

The poet and essayist Adrienne Rich once said liars are lonely. They are lonely because they don’t want to be seen. Rich, I think, captures something essential about Donald Trump. Yes, the president wants to be the center of everyone’s attention, but remember what Stephen Colbert once said — we don’t really know him. We don’t know his school grades. We don’t know his real skin color. We don’t know his real hair. Everything about this president is unreal: a front, a presentation, a fraud. And there’s probably a simple reason for that, so simple as to be invisible: He’s a scared little man.

Why doesn’t he want to be seen? Why is he so scared?

Let me digress a bit into the history of psychology. For a long time, for most of my lifetime in fact, social scientists and policy makers pinned many of society’s problems on low self-esteem. The solution was nurturing people’s self-worth. If a boy bullied a playmate, boost his self-esteem. If a man acted violently, he might be lashing out due to low or lack of self-esteem. Such fear explained a panoply of social ills. For a generation and more, the goal was devising methods to combat emotional insecurity.

It turns out everyone was wrong, wrote Roy Baumeister.

Fifteen years ago, the renown sociologist wrote for the LA Times: “It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.”

It’s not fear rooted in insecurity. It’s fear root in self-regard, monumental self-regard. When Trump is proven wrong, he’s exposed. The facade crumbles. He is seen. This can be enormously painful, so painful, he’ll turn a democracy on its head, because democracy and its deference to the authority of truth is literally a source of pain.

Someone must be punished for that pain.

That someone is America.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 December 2019
Word Count: 787
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I’m, thinking about Barry, the man I worked under when I was 17. He was the manager of a local Italian restaurant. He was big and ugly and mean. Dumb, too, so dumb he once set himself on fire stripping the paint off a pizza oven with turpentine.

He also wanted to torture a stray dog coming round looking for food. I feared Barry, but I somehow screwed up the courage to stand up for the dog even if I got hurt. In the end, Barry backed down. Assaulting a minor would have been a state crime after all. (For inquiring readers, alas, I do not remember what happened to the dog. Sorry!)

My larger point, however, was that Barry is a quintessential Donald Trump supporter. What motivated him wasn’t ideology or self-interest. What motivated him wasn’t religion or fear. What motivated him was acting violently toward those he believed deserve it. He behaved cruelly because he liked it. Looking for other logical reasons would have been giving more credit to Barry than was needed to understand him.

He told me who he was, and I believed him.

In truth, I don’t know if Barry voted for Trump. He might be dead for all I know. But there are millions of Barrys. They are the fascists among us, veiled sadists whom the majority must continue taking seriously long after the Trump presidency is over. For proof, consider Astead Herndon’s reporting Sunday. The New York Times reporter went to rural Arizona in October to write about Trumpstock, a cultural celebration of the president. If Trump loses next year, a source said while reaching for his sidearm, “nothing less than a civil war would happen. I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

Using Barry as my guide, here are five thoughts on Herndon’s reporting.

It’s not about fear Herndon is one of the few reporters, perhaps the only one, to have said what needs saying. Lots of white Americans who support the president don’t do it despitehis racism, sexism, bigotry and the rest. They support him because of them. “These voters don’t passively tolerate Mr. Trump’s ‘build a wall’ message or his ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries — they’re what motivates them.”

Sadly, Herndon attributes bigotry to fear, as if to suggest the president’s supporters are afraid of what they don’t understand — as if that fear is why they support Donald Trump. Herndon: “They see themselves in his fear-based identity politics, bolstered by conspiratorial rhetoric about caravans of immigrants and Democratic ‘coups.’”

It’s not about fear, though. Attributing fear to fascism overlooks what fascists are doing: punishing people who are “defying” the “natural order of things,” which is to say, defying whatever it is some white Americans believe is rightfully theirs. For the people at Trumpstock, the election of the first black president upended the natural order.

It all goes back to Obama Herndon’s reporting should finish off the idea that Trump took over the Republican Party. He didn’t. It was already primed for a fascist leader. Whatever “conservatism” used to mean ended after 2008. Herndon’s sources “described a white America under threat as racial minorities typified by Mr. Obama … gain political power. They described Mr. Trump as an inspirational figure who is undoing Mr. Obama’s legacy and beating back the perceived threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants, whom they denounced in prejudiced terms” (my italics).

In 2016, when Trump held rallies in rural Arizona, he emphasized Obama’s middle name — Hussein — to suggest he was a secret Muslim and not an American citizen. The people at Trumpstock were still making a fetish of Obama’s middle name by the time Herndon arrived. One of them was explicit in connecting Obama and Trump. Herndon: “Stacey Goodman, a former police officer from New York who retired to Arizona … said her distrust of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate had led her to Mr. Trump.”

Socialism? They don’t care Thanks to Herndon, it should now be clear these people would not know socialism if they stepped in it. That word is merely one of a number used to express the same emotion, which is rage against undeserving people upending the natural order of things. When the Democrats wanted nothing to do with socialism (2008-2016), they accused them of socialism. Now that they want something to do with “socialism,” they accuse them of socialism. It’s meaning doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a byword for the enemy. “There is no difference between the democratic socialists and the National Socialists,” said Evan Sayet, a conservative writer who spoke at [Trumpstock]. Democrats, he said, “are the heirs to Adolf Hitler.”

Democrats as devils One of the reasons liberals believe Trump supporters are afraid of what they don’t understand is because they totally “misunderstand” the Democratic Party. They see it as something it’s not — e.g., a bastion of socialism.

But this itself is a misunderstanding. Fascists understand perfectly well what the Democratic Party is: a meaningful mechanism by which Americans who have been without power gain power. That’s the problem. The solution, for the fascists, is characterizing the Democrats as being so evil any action justified in defeating them.

This is why the president’s supporters swim in conspiracy theory. It isn’t just irrational belief in made-believe. To the contrary, it’s quite rational. They are using make-believe to justify whatever they want. Herndon: “Democrats were portrayed as not just political opponents, but avatars of doom for Mr. Trump’s predominantly white voter base and for the country.” Many have embraced the “QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking.”

The new Brownshirts When you have given up on the idea of sharing power — which is to say, when you have given up on democracy — then it makes sense, to the fascist, to start organizing in ways outside the norm. Herndon’s reporting should demonstrate that Trump supporters, now and after his presidency is over, constitute a new kind of Sturmabteilung. In plain English, this was the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the people willing to use violence to advance political objectives. Their enemies, like Trump’s enemies, were so bad, anything was justified. They went around the German countryside assaulting and killing people who stood in the party’s way.

We aren’t there yet, of course, but the Brownshirts took decades to grow into what they became, the SS. We may never witness organized murder quite like that, but Trump supporters don’t need to be that organized. There are plenty of lone wolves out there with plenty of access to plenty of firepower who are highly attuned to the president’s grievances. It may not be a civil war in 2020, but this much is certain.

There will be blood.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 December 2019
Word Count: 1,133
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The time I traded a measure of pain for a clear conscience involved a dog.

It was a stray dog. It roamed between the creek, the cornfield and the pizzeria I worked in. I was real skinny back then. Soaking wet, I was maybe 120 pounds. The manager that day was not. Barry (not his real name) was burly. Pushing 300, at least. Barry didn’t like dogs. That was fine. The problem was he wanted to torture this one.

Barry was like boys I knew growing up in rural upstate. Wild animals were a part of childhood. Wild animals were often entertainment. By that I mean, some people took pleasure in maiming and killing them. I once saw a boy in our trailer park delight in stomping a frog under his boot heel. He thrilled at seeing my horrified face.

I don’t know if Barry did that, but he was looking for fun during long night hours. The dog had come around. Its hunger was an opportunity. Barry made a big deal of his plan. He’d bait it, then kick it to teach it a lesson — don’t come beggin’ ’round here.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember three.

First was that Barry was intimidating. He was taller than me. He was older than me. He was wilder and angrier than me. He was the kind of adult I knew to whom fear equaled respect. So I feared him, and I showed it. The second detail is feeling this was wrong. It was wrong to kick a hungry animal. It needed food, not punishment. The third detail is deciding I was going to do something even if I suffered for it.

So I squared off with Barry. Jesus God, he was an ugly somebitch. He was dumb, too. That cost him later. There’s a still image in my mind’s eye of him running to the backdoor engulfed in blue flame. He set himself on fire stripping paint off the pizza oven with turpentine. The big dummy forgot to turn off the pilot light. We put him out in the end. When I saw him years later, his face looked the cheese pizza I ordered.

It wasn’t much of a change, honestly. He made his ugly uglier by dry shaving. He claimed it toughed up his skin. He made clear to anyone listening this was a good thing. The result, however, was a fantasia of nicks and blood over which hovered his hard black eyes. With hideous red lips, he said: “So what? Are you going to stop me?”

There are volumes of subliminal meaning in those words. Are you, a skinny teenager, going to stop me, a full-grown man more than twice your size? Are you, someone with no power, going to stop me, someone with power? This is what he was saying without saying. This is what he was asking without asking. He wanted me to say kicking a hungry dog was wrong. He wanted me to deny him the authority he said he deserved.

He wanted to punish me for denying him that authority.

Then, after our eyes locked, something changed. I could see it. Perhaps it was the realization what he wanted was going somewhere he didn’t want to go. Barry was about to commit a crime involving a minor. Was teaching a lesson to the dog — and me — worth the cost of answering to an authority greater than his own? Apparently not.

Barry is a Trump voter. I don’t know for a fact, but I have no doubt. If he wasn’t dead in 2016, or otherwise incapacitated, he voted for the president. If he bothers to, he’s going to vote for Donald Trump again. This is as true to me as the air I’m breathing.

Barry is an example of something some leftists will not admit. Class does not motivate him. Economic justice means nothing. Morality is irrelevant. Some leftist scholars believe liberalism failed to meet Barry’s economic needs, so they voted for Trump. But that’s not it. For millions of Americans like Barry, that cause and effect is not it at all. “Economic anxiety” was a convenient rationale for what they already wanted to do, which was doing what that boy did in the trailer part: stomp other beings. The point isn’t just to be cruel. The point is taking pleasure in acting cruelly to those whom they believe deserve such cruelty. They deserve it for the “crime” of being who they are.

Seymour Martin Lipset understood this in his own way. In 1959, he coined the phrase “working class authoritarianism” to describe “people who formed the base of the Nazi labor unions, the White Citizen’s Councils in the segregated American south, and race rioters in England. These people are “the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population. In a number of nations, they have clearly been in the forefront of the struggle against equal rights for minority groups, and have sought to limit immigration or to impose racial standards in countries with open immigration.”

As Jordan Michael Smith wrote in the journal Democracy in January of 2016, Lipset’s working-class authoritarianism “describes a Donald Trump rally almost perfectly.”

I have no doubt Barry is in the minority of Americans just as I have no doubt he voted for Trump. A majority believes in democracy. A majority, including many white working-class Americans, believe in minding their own business. But the majority has also become complacent or even indifferent to home-grown fascism. The only way to stop it is for the majority to no longer be indifferent. The majority must make a choice.

It must decide to trade a measure of pain for a clear conscience.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 December 2019
Word Count: 952
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