The Huffington Post’s Molly Redden wrote a story Christmas Day worth pondering a bit. It was a roundup of news articles since 2017 focusing on Donald Trump as a “lonely” president. With the title “Donald Trump Is The Loneliest Man In America,” Redden’s intent wasn’t sympathy. (Outraged Twitter readers made that mistake.) It was pointing out reporting tropes seeming to convey important information but don’t. At root, Redden said, correctly, these are “rinse-and-repeat stories of palace intrigue.”

At first blush, Redden’s was a throw-away story fit for the slowest news day of the year. But I think it has more value than that. At the very least, it’s an occasion for us to think about why any president is lonely but especially this one. I happen to find the claim entirely believable, however thin the sourcing typically is for these kinds of stories.

Donald Trump resides in a multiverse of lies that separate him inexorably from the human community. Moreover, he doesn’t value the opinions of the people he’s lying to. What he wants is something he can never have: respect from people who know the difference between obvious truth and obvious falsehood. What he wants is to dominate the people whom he can never dominate. And he can never dominate them, because they give deference to the authority of facts and morality more than they do to him.

Trump lives in a box of his own making.

The box may be his television. It should be no surprise one of the most perceptive observers of the Trump presidency has been a TV critic. In Audience of One, the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote Trump isn’t so much a human being as the rough outline of a human being, someone who has evolved into his own televised representation, a living avatar. He has, Poniewozik said, “achieved symbiosis with the medium. Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality.”

Before he started his victory speech [late on November 8, 2016], he searched one more time, over the heads of the crowd, for the red light of the TV-news camera, the one thing on Earth that was most like him. It never slept. It was always hungry. It ate and ate and ate, and when it had eaten the entire world, it was still empty.

Trump has always understood what he can do with his fabricated virtual self. That it is flat, two-dimensional and bloodless obscures its potential political power. We don’t talk about this anymore, but during the 2016 campaign reporters spoke often of Trump’s habit of watching himself on TV with the sound off. One takeaway is the televised representation surpassed all other considerations. What he actually said was secondary, if it mattered at all. What mattered was how he said it, and especially how he looked on TV while saying it. This, to my thinking, is how he can still project an image of presidential strength while being, empirically, the weakest president in our history.

That the president has achieved symbiosis with the TV medium may be why so many Americans believe they know him — why so many Americans believe they are like him and thus share his feelings of victimhood — without our knowing much about him. Stephen Colbert, another perceptive observer, said in August that’s the odd thing:

We actually know nothing about him. … We don’t know his school grades. We don’t know his actual skin color. We don’t know what his actual hair is like. We don’t know what he’s worth. We don’t know anything about his conversations with other world leaders. We don’t know anything about him. That’s the odd part. For a guy who likes to always have a camera pointed at him and always talk about himself, there’s very little we can say about him with certainty.

Knowing little about him is to the president’s advantage. But knowing little about him must take a psychological toll. The poet Adrienne Rich once said in 1975’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence that someone who lies is someone who does not want to be seen. “The liar lives in fear of losing control,” she said. “She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness” (my italics).

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

Why doesn’t Trump want to be seen? That’s for later, I suppose. For now, Trump is empty. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein might have said. There is no man. Only a rough outline of a man. He is adored by millions. He respects none of them.

Is Trump the loneliest man in America?

I think so.

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: 26 December 2019
Word Count: 850
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Richard North Patterson has a long essay in The Bulwark arguing that the president is mentally ill and therefore unfit to govern. Actually, has been unfit. The former chairman of Common Cause said Donald Trump’s “narcissistic personality disorder” has been evident for years even to people inexpert in the workings of the human mind.

Patterson isn’t saying anything new. He’s adding to a growing conversation. What I want to contribute, however, is that this isn’t helpful. We shouldn’t see mental illness where there is plain ordinary sadism. We shouldn’t pathologize Trump’s ignorance, pettiness and greed. If we do, we don’t see what’s in front of us. Evil is rational.

What’s more, pathologizing evil glosses over intent. Trump has done bad things, but he can’t help it. He’s sick! Well, that won’t cut it. Trump and the Republicans are making choices for reasons. Making choices for reasons is rational. Seeing evil as rational, however, is unthinkable for some. So they instead search for mental illness.

If the president is crazy, about half the adult population is crazy. Half the adult population finds ways, even two decades into the 21st century, to rationalize inflicting violence on their own children. Once you understand that something as evil as beating, harming and humiliating children is commonplace, you understand why focusing on mental illness makes matters worse. Evil isn’t crazy. It’s wrong. We should say no.

Since becoming a father, I have known many parents of young children. They, like me, delighted in seeing our kids’ minds flower. They, like me, thrilled at the sight of their learning, experimenting and taking pleasure in small things. We loved them because we needed to love them the same way we needed to breathe. This held true even during those challenging moments when they melted down and lost their goddamn minds.

During these moments is when a parent makes choices that will affect a child pretty much forever. On the one hand, you can offer comfort and soothing words in the near-total absence of understanding in any coherent way what’s happening inside the child’s head. For reasons confounding to grown ups, the fact that the Beanie Boo was blue, and not pink, is real and legitimate cause for thrashing, wailing and sobbing. There’s nothing to be done for it. You can’t make her feelings less intense. You can’t reason with her. All that can be done can be measured in hugs and kisses, and time — time you may not have, but that’s the price of loving unconditionally. You love her because you must love her. Eventually, the very young child comes to her senses.

This requires good faith on the parent’s part, a commitment to believing that the child is not willfully throwing a fit, that she literally can’t not melt down for no reason a parent can identify, and that she does not intend to violate etiquette and other social norms by expressing ingratitude for a Beanie Boo that’s not the right color. Losing her mind is part of the experience of being a toddler, ergo part of the daily challenge of being a tired and bewildered parent. This experience is normal and natural and expected — for the child. For lots of parents, however, it’s not normal in the least.

More normal, more than most realize, is the exercise of bad faith in parenting, intended or not, the commitment to believing the child is willfully throwing a fit, that she is choosing to melt down and otherwise violate etiquette and other social norms due to being given a blue Beanie Boo instead of a pink one. To millions of American parents, such displays of disrespect must be addressed with correction, which is to say punishment, which is to say violence, which compounds the child’s suffering by orders of magnitude she won’t understand until adulthood, if ever. More than 50 percent of parents say they spank their children after three years of age, according to one study.

What are you going to do? Tell them their mentally unfit to be parents? No, they are making choices. Rational but bad choices. Evil requires a moral response, not a medical one. That’s the same conversation we should be having with respect to the president. “Narcissistic personality disorder” is beside the point. Or it should be.

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: 24 December 2019
Word Count: 715
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The president has been indicted for abusing his powers and for obstructing justice. News from Washington this morning is that Donald Trump is seething about the stain of impeachment on his presidential legacy. That’s a very, very polite way of putting it.

The truth is less courteous. The truth, I think, is that the president has been cut in ways he’s never been cut. No matter how bad he has behaved, no matter how weak he has appeared, the president has been able to act like nothing can touch him. This ability has led even the most cynical reporter to believe he’s encased in Teflon, as if he really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and none of his supporters would balk.

But those supporters yesterday saw something new. They saw the president being held accountable for his constitutional crimes. They saw the president’s defenders in the House try desperately to stop it, but fail. It wasn’t the first time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handed his ass to him. She has done that repeatedly. But it was probably the first time the president’s supporters were closely paying attention when she did it.

Sure, they hate her. They’ve always hated her. That’s nothing new. What is new, however, is the president’s weakness. The Democrats cut Donald Trump, and now he’s bleeding.

The thing about authoritarian-minded Americans is that authority is the thing. Their authority. What Trump does and says — the substance of his conduct — doesn’t matter. He looks strong. He acts strong. He campaigned on that perception of strength. Trump punches down, sure. That’s cowardly, yes. That’s beside the point. To the authoritarian mind, appearingstrong is strength. And if Trump appears strong, they are strong. If he appears weak, they are weak. Such is the bond between cult followers and cult leaders.

The news out of Washington this morning is that the president is seething about the stain of impeachment on his presidential legacy. Ha! Donald Trump is a nihilist. There is no tomorrow! “Legacy” means nothing to someone with zero sense of shame. What makes Trump seethe isn’t damage to his historical reputation. What makes him seethe is what makes all con men seethe. Once the spell is broken, there’s no going back. Trump’s spell has been looking invincible. But now he’s cut, and he’s losing blood.

He won’t die, of course. He could be reelected! Trump’s ego won’t stand for it, though. The president must stop the bleeding. His allies say impeachment is a distraction from carrying on with the people’s business. Impeachment, however, will be the president’s singular obsession from now on. He must prove he’s still invincible. And he’ll need help.

That’s where the Senate comes in. Only acquittal will stop Trump’s bleeding. Acquittal means the Congress was wrong. It means the president isn’t weak. It means his supporters aren’t weak. Authoritarians always sound like they are rugged individualists. They always sound like they don’t need approval from anyone. But authoritarians like Donald Trump and the 34 percent of Americans constituting his hard base of power desire approval above all. House Democrats cut. Only Senate Republicans can heal. A mountain is about to fall on top of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s head.

I don’t think he knows it yet. McConnell said this morning that Pelosi was playing games. She did not immediately send two articles of impeachment to the Senate. She said she wouldn’t do that until she got assurances that the Senate would conduct a fair and constitutional trial. She said she won’t remit when the foreman of the Senate jury (McConnell) has said he’s already made up his mind. McConnell, for his part, said her refusal to remit is proof that the House impeachment process was “shoddy work.”

She has the leverage. He doesn’t. I know it looks like the reverse. It looks like Pelosi is saving the Senate Republicans from taking the worst vote of their lives. It looks like Pelosi is playing “constitutional hardball” without any tangible objective. But McConnell will want to acquit more than she wants to remit. The mountain won’t fall on her. The president’s desire for exoneration to recast his invincibility spell before a chunk of supporters stop paying attention is only starting to mount. The longer Pelosi waits to send the articles, the more likely McConnell is to give in her to demands.

Authoritarians always sound like they don’t play by anyone’s rule. But rules are how they get what they want. They get what they want when their opponents obey the rules while they cheat. Pelosi, in not sending the articles right away, is playing by her own rules now. She’s therefore pinned McConnell between the House and the president.

The longer McConnell dithers, the more the president bleeds.

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: 19 December 2019
Word Count: 794
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Today is the day the full House debates two articles of impeachment before voting on them. Already, the Washington press corps is asking what impact the vote might have on the 2020 presidential election. My take? Now’s not the time for that question.

For one thing, the election is still far away. For another, we can’t know until we get there. So everything written and said between now and then is speculation. It is speculation, however, that has immeasurable impact on what eventually transpires. Put another way, the press corps, in asking the question, manufactures an outcome.

Now’s not the time for that question because now’s not about normal politics. Once Donald Trump is indicted, he will stand accused of abusing his power to defraud the American people of their right to informed consent to his governance. He will stand accused of mounting the greatest effort to obstruct justice in American history. He will stand accused of violating his oath of office and perverting the Constitution.

Attempts to speculate about the impact impeachment will have on the next election are attempts to minimize the seriousness of what’s happening. That, of course, is precisely how the Senate Republicans hope the Washington press corps spends its time: overlooking the gravity of the moment in favor of normal partisan politics.

With the press corps speculating, it doesn’t seem unseemly to amplify the naturally partisan aspects of the impeachment process. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is confident he can work openly with the president’s attorneys without raising suspicion of a rigged Senate trial. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will handle the impeachment trial, believes he can end it without calling a single witness. Both men stand ready and willing to violate their oath to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.”

Now, no one expects 100 Senators to be truly impartial. I don’t think the framers were that dumb. It is, however, important to say one is acting impartially. To say one is acting impartially is to behave in accordance with a constitutional standard of conduct. For impeachment trials, the framers required a special oath in which Senators vow to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.” That’s in addition to the regular oath of office all Senators swear to. That an impeachment trial requires a double oath tells us how important it is to appear to maintain the highest standard.

So even if 53 Republican Senators have in fact already made up their minds, they should not, as Lindsey Graham did, say publicly that he’s already made up his mind. Even if a Republican Senator is not in fact an impartial juror, he should not, as Mitch McConnell did, say publicly that’s he not an impartial juror. On the contrary, both men should push their colleagues toward a fair, thorough and complete trial. They should allow House managers to call witnesses. They should allow Trump’s counsel to cross-examine. They should enter into evidence what the House found. They should do what the Democrats did: maintain at least the appearance of a constitutional standard.

The Democrats have had some success in accusing McConnell, Graham and the rest of violating their oath to do impartial justice. But little has been said about the other way they are planning to break their promise. They are supposed to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws. This part of the oath stands in direct conflict with the Republican effort to spin the impeachment process as just more partisan politics. This part of the oath stands in direct conflict with the press corps’ horse-race reporting. An impeachment trial is indeed the ultimate political remedy for a criminal president. But it is not random. It is not unchained. An impeachment trial is bound to the Constitution and laws, because the US Constitution is law. It is the highest law.

Impeachment is law.

An oath is law.

A purely political process would not be what we saw in the House. What we saw in the House was orderly, deliberate, transparent and lawful. A purely political process would be what the Senate Republicans are preparing to present to us, a process in which rules of evidence don’t matter, in which standards of conduct don’t matter, in which burdens of proof don’t matter, in which nothing really matters but power. It’s no wonder when you think about it that Rudy Giuliani has been saying publicly and loudly to anyone who will listen that the president approves of his going to Ukraine to dig up more dirt on the Democrats. If nothing matters but power, corruption can flourish out in the open.

If an oath is political, anything is permissible.

Alas, the Washington press corps is not having this discussion. It’s too hard. It’s easier, and more profitable, to wonder how impeachment will affect 2020. It’s speculation, but it is not benign. In asking the question, the press in fact manufactures an outcome.

An outcome favorable to the Republicans.

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: 18 December 2019
Word Count: 841
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Alexander Heffner, host of The Open Mind on PBS, has a clever and thoughtful piece in this morning’s USA Today worth considering on this dreary gun-metal-gray Monday.

His argument is that the Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are right to impeach the president. Foreign interference, he said, is precisely what the framers feared most. In protecting the US Constitution, he said, they have begun a new era of “liberal originalism to safeguard law and order in America. By “liberal originalism,” he means interpreting the Constitution in the fullness of its context, past and present.

What makes Heffner’s piece clever is its turnabout. It’s the Republicans who are supposed to be defenders of the Constitution, not the Democrats. It’s the Republicans who are supposed to be “constitutional conservatives,” as we heard so many times during Barack Obama’s presidency. But now, under Donald Trump, we have a GOP standing against limited government, state’s rights, fiscal responsibility and the rest. We have a GOP, Heffner said, fully “cannibalized” by “Trump’s authoritarianism.”

But this turnabout works only if one accepted the premise that it’s the Republicans who are supposed to be all the above things. It works only if one believed that the Republicans meant what they said and that the party is now a “cannibalized” victim of the president’s authoritarianism. Moreover, it works only if one already believed that the Democrats were notdefenders of the Constitution. All of which is to say: it works if GOP propaganda equals truth. Things look different if you are someone, like me and other liberals, who already believed that what we are currently seeing in the GOP has always been there. It’s been hidden by layers of spin, equivocation, falsehood and lies.

Heffner’s turnabout does imply a philosophical truth I’d like to amplify, which is that the Democrats are conservative ideologically. Now, I don’t mean “conservative” in the way Republicans mean it (whether or not they believe it.) I mean “conservative” in the way Edmund Burke and others meant it. There’s no need to change things merely for the sake of changing things. Change must arise from a pressing need, and even when there is a pressing need, change must come from majoritarian will and the democratic process. In this sense, every single member of the Democratic Party is an arch ideological conservative. What makes them different from Republican “conservatives” is that they will change when it’s necessary. The Republicans won’t do that. They will blow up the political order if that’s what it takes to prevent change from happening.

Which is why they are radicals, not “liberty-loving” conservatives. True liberty is rooted in a system in which everyone is accorded the same rights and everyone has the same political obligations (i.e., voting). But the Republicans don’t really care about equality. Therefore, they don’t really care about liberty in any small-r republican sense.

To be sure, they care about their liberty, just not yours. Liberals often make the mistake of accusing Republicans of hypocrisy. Liberals often complain they are acting in bad faith. But, again, these allegations rest on a core presumption: that Republican behavior is based on a shared system of morality, justice and political values. It isn’t. There’s one system for them. There’s one system for the rest of us. Critics like Max Boot and Jonathan Capehart allege the Republicans are no longer principled. Not so. They are highly principled. The principles animating Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are the same principles that animated John Calhoun and George Wallace.

Heffner is right to say that the Democrats are behaving as the framers would have wanted. But it’s not because they are more conservative than the Republicans. It’s not because they are more liberty loving. I think it’s because they are more republican.

More republican than the Republicans? Yes. To be republican (small r) during the founding meant having a vision of the Good Life, and creating public mechanisms by which citizens could empower themselves to pursue happiness on their own terms. The Good Life excluded women. It excluded slaves. It excluded children. It excluded this continent’s original peoples. But it was a principle, nevertheless, that informed the framers’ understanding of the world, and that shaped much of our founding document.

The Democrats, I’d argue, are more republican than at any time in my adulthood. To be liberal used to mean neutrality in public affairs. It used to mean “negative liberty” (the absence, not presence, of the state). It used to mean pretty much anything that was not Big Government control. But since 2000, and especially since 2016, more Democrats realize that’s not enough. The common good has been neglected. It’s now desiccated. The common good needs replenishing. It needs republican Democrats.

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: 16 December 2019
Word Count: 861
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There is a difference between lies and malicious lies. One can lie while knowing the facts. One can lie while knowing the facts for the purpose of doing harm. The latter is what the president and the Republican leadership did Tuesday. I want to talk today about a more sinister level of mendacity: lying to injure one’s own country.

The inspector general of the US Department of Justice said Monday that the FBI was right to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. There was no spying. There was no attempted coup. There was nothing political going on. Yes, mistakes were made, but they were within the bounds of good-faith behavior. More plainly, the narrative the Republicans had been peddling, about a “deep state” in league with the Democrats and former Obama administration officials, was false.

Donald Trump and Steve Scalise, to name only two Republicans, said the opposite. They claimed the IG report didn’t debunk their fictional narrative. It proved it. They lied knowing the lie would injure our faith in truth. They lied with malicious intent.

That, however, was nothing compared to what Bill Barr did. The US attorney general made clear Tuesday in a series of statements during an interview with NBC News he was leading a concerted effort to validate — to make real — the Republicans’ malicious lie: that a “deep state” was out to get the president. Barr made clear he was part of a concerted effort to defraud Americans of their right to know the truth about 2016, and of their right to call on the government to prevent the same from happening again.

His statements weren’t just lies. They weren’t just malicious. They were treasonous.

Without citing any evidence of any kind, Barr said the IG report was incorrect and that the Department of Justice, led by his hand-picked investigator, would conduct its own investigation into the investigation. Barr said “there was and never has been any evidence of collusion and yet [Trump’s] campaign and the president’s administration has been dominated by this investigation into what turns out to be completely baseless.”

Yes, there was evidence of collusion. No, the investigation wasn’t baseless.

Bill Barr added that the FBI “jumped right into a full-scale investigation before they even went to talk to the foreign officials about exactly what was said. … They opened an investigation into the campaign and they used very intrusive techniques.”

All of which the IG report says didn’t happen. But here’s the worst, per NBC:

You see what he’s doing? He’s accusing the former Democratic administration of doing the same thing the House Democrats are accusing the current Republican administration of doing. It’s a terrible thing, Barr said, when the incumbent uses the state to rig an election’s outcome. It’s a terrible thing, Barr could have said, for an American president to extort a Ukrainian leader into announcing an investigation into his closest political rival. What the attorney general is saying without saying is that this is very, very bad when a Democrat does it, not so bad when a Republican does it.

Barr wants to conduct his own investigation. But actually investigating is less important than just saying he’s investigating. Actually unearthing evidence of wrongdoing is less important than just saying the IG’s report is wrong. And if this sounds like what Trump demanded of Ukraine’s leader, that’s because it is. The president didn’t want Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden. He just wanted Zelensky to say he was.

Barr saying an investigation into the investigation is underway gives Senate Republicans cover to do what GOP operative Matt Schlapp said they should do: “if impeachment comes to you, focus on how all this got started. Obama and Biden using their office to bring down Trump and to enrich the Biden family. Take the gloves off. Make it hurt.” Barr saying an investigation into the investigation is underway gives the Russians government lots of room to repeat its previous triumph. Barr’s lies are treasonous.

Indeed, Barr did for Trump what Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin did for Trump. Lutsenko and Shokin are former head prosecutors for Ukraine (basically Bill Barr’s counterparts). Both gave Rudy Giuliani and his cronies what they desired: false statements claiming that Joe Biden was dirty and that Ukraine, not Russia, undermined US sovereignty in 2016. The difference? Lutsenko and Shokin were in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. Is Barr? Unlikely. But given the lengths he’s going to defend Trump and, by extension, the Kremlin, that may be a difference without a distinction.

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: 11 December 2019
Word Count: 823
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I don’t often talk about how mad I am. I don’t often talk about how mad I am, because talking often about how mad I am prevents me from speaking clearly and rationally. I want to speak clearly and rationally. There is so much need for speaking clearly and rationally amid the endless streams of waste and filth polluting our public discourse.

But I can’t speak clearly and rationally at the expense of morality. Morality often begins with a feeling. The Gospels tell us of Jesus looking on the poor — he could hear and smell their misery — and he was “moved with pity.” But another way of putting it, another way of translating σπλαγχνισθεὶς, is that the rabbi felt compassion “in his guts.”

If you’re like me, your gut is telling you that so much is wrong. Your gut is telling you that so much is wrong and that so many people are ignoring, overlooking or knowingly rationalizing so much injustice in our country. I don’t mean to suggest anger with an unfair world. I don’t mean to advocate anger with the human condition. I do mean to suggest that rage is appropriate when bad people are allowed to do bad things, and when bad people create political conditions by which good people can’t satisfy justice.

Sometimes, it’s best to ignore your head.

Sometimes, it’s best to listen to your gut.

Florida saw a horrific crime Friday. A young military student started shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola. He killed three people and wounded several more before dying under police fire. The student was a Saudi national stateside for training. He bought the handgun legally. There are reports of his watching videos of mass shootings the night before. The FBI is investigating the scene as a potential act of terrorism.

Was it? The president isn’t waiting to find out. Donald Trump took to Twitter over the weekend. He said the murderer had nothing to us with the Saudi Arabian people. He said the murderer had nothing to do with the Saudi Arabian government. The FBI hasn’t begun investigating. How would he know? The Saudi king called to say so.

It’s wrong for the president to come to a conclusion about a crime before a crime has been investigated. It’s wrong for the president to tell us that something is true when he can’t yet know. It’s wrong for the president to trust uncritically the likes of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whose government not only murdered a Washington Post columnist last year, but bone-sawed Jamal Khashoggi into pieces for speaking truth to power.

More importantly, it’s wrong for the president of the United States to appear as if he were the Saudi king’s legal representation in the court of public opinion. In the absence of the king’s counsel (that is, Trump), the Republican Party and its right-wing media allies might be spewing all manner of Islamophobia, as they normally would when shooters are even the slightest bit brown. But the king and the president got ahead of the story, preempting what would normally be at least 24 hours of hysteria.

More importantly, it’s wrong for the president to deflect potential responsibility before we know whether the Saudis had anything to do with the Pensacola massacre. It was wrong for the current president to do that just as it was wrong for the George W. Bush administration to deflect attention away from Saudi Arabia and instead on to Iraq. (The majority of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi; none was Iraqi.) In both cases, money and power (oil and tyranny) appeared to prevail over the blind administration of justice.

Even more importantly, the president has opened the door to yet another government to interfere with the American way of life. Even if the FBI were to conclude that the Pensacola shooter was a terrorist, what then? Trump would defend the kingdom, as he defended the Kremlin against confirmation that it undercut Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a massive propaganda operation to move public opinion against her. In both cases, the president of the United States would appear to be in the tank for other countries, setting the stage of repeated crimes against America and our democracy.

Only next time, instead of memes and tweets, it might be bullets and bombs.

Gaslighting is what happens when bad people hurt other people, deny having hurt them and convince victims they are actually villains. Gaslighting is what happens when bad people act with impunity to the laws, rules and norms governing human behavior. Gaslighting is what happens when good people don’t listen to their guts.

Your gut is right. Listen to it.

And get mad.

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: 09 December 2019
Word Count: 780
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The House Judiciary Committee had its first impeachment hearing Wednesday. It heard testimony from four authorities on American constitutional history and law. The Democrats called three. The Republicans called one. That, for me, was the day’s news.

The numbers, I mean. Three to one.

All three witnesses for the Democrats said the case against Trump is clear. All three said the framers of the Constitution would have recognized the danger. All three said impeachment was the correct remedy. All three said Donald Trump abused his power to enlist foreign interference to deprive Americans of their right to self-determination.

Jonathan Turley, the GOP’s witness, didn’t necessarily disagree. That’s the first thing you should know. He argued instead that we can’t know yet if the president is guilty of impeachable offenses. There’s not enough evidence, Turley said, and proceedings are moving too fast. He didn’t say his colleagues were incorrect. He said hold your horses.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a constitutional law scholar. But neither are most of the Americans who watched the hearing. That’s why I’m pointing out the numbers. Three to one is something everyone can understand — three to one when even the one doesn’t really disagree; he’s just cautious, which is reasonable. Everyone gets three to one.

Think about it.

Most people most of the time have something else to do than pay close attention to politics. Nearly everyone has something else to do than take the time to read, study and make a career in constitutional law. If three scholars — from Harvard, Stanford and UNC — say the case against Trump is clear, well then, it must be clear. If one scholar says you’re going too fast, well then, maybe we should slow things down. This, I think, is a conclusion most people will draw. They don’t know law. They know three to one.

Some have wondered why the Democrats decided to schedule yesterday’s hearing. This question typically came from reporters and pundits who spend all of their waking hours talking about politics. For them, there’s little point to having scholars debate constitutional history and law on live television. To a Washington press corps desiring conflict and novelty above all else, the hearing wasn’t the spectacle they’d prefer.

But that was the point. The Democrats understand well that impeachment must be rooted in deep reverence for American history, American ideals, the rule of law and, most importantly, patriotism. It must be grounded in their sworn and solemn duty to defend and protect the US Constitution. They must give the lasting impression that they don’t want to do this, but must, because law and morality demand it. That’s the impression you get when three to one constitutional scholars give their blessing.

The Republicans understand yesterday’s impact. They have long stopped defending the president on the strength or weakness of the available evidence against him. For many of these Republicans, the authority of truth matters less than the authority of the individual speaking the truth. If they can erode or destroy that authority, they win.

This is why you saw so much effort to cast doubt on the trio’s motivations, their political preferences, their opinions past and present, their hoity-toity Harvard degrees, and their manicured hair and nails. They succeeded in getting the press to jump on some fabricated outrages and trivialities. They failed to make most stick.

The Republicans know that most Americans most of the time have something better to do than pay close attention to politics. They know that most Americans are going to say to themselves: Well, if three to one experts say Trump did it, I guess he did it. The Republicans used their best weapon, which is the very worst weapon. It didn’t work.

This is not to say the truth prevailed. The truth will never prevail on its own. The Republican Party and its media allies are right now lying to millions of Americans who mistakenly believe that one of the witnesses for the Democrats, Stanford’s Pamela Karlan, insulted the president’s youngest child, Barron Trump. She didn’t. She was making a point about the Constitution forbidding a president from acting like a king.

Contrary to what President Trump has said, Article 2 does not give him the power to do anything he wants. The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.

That this is not, in any way, an insult doesn’t detract from the utility of saying it is. By whipping up fake outrage over a fake insult, the Republicans and their media allies can move public opinion in the president’s favor. They can create a picture of a Democratic Party so hell-bent on overturning an election they’re willing to attack an innocent boy.

This is why truth alone won’t prevail. Only when truth is coupled with power can we defeat disinformation, propaganda and vicious lie after lie after lie. And lo, that’s what we saw this morning. Nancy Pelosi, in a solemn speech at the Capitol, called on the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to draw up articles of impeachment. Her bet is simple and clear. How many Americans will believe the truth more than lies?

Probably about three to one.

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: 05 December 2019
Word Count: 878
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The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Washington Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That won Giuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

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: 04 December 2019
Word Count: 825
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It bears repeating: Donald Trump was not only press-ganging Volodymyr Zelensky in an illegal scheme for partisan gain. He was rewriting the history of 2016 in order to wound enemies (Democrats) and help friends (Vladimir Putin) — as well as to give Kremlin operatives room to strike again.

It is in no way overstating the case to say the president of the United States is the head of an international conspiracy to defraud the American people.

It has remained to be seen how far the Republican Party is willing to go in defense of Trump’s conspiracy. Senate Republicans quickly conceded that Russia sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but stopped short of saying the president benefited (because admitting that would be admitting Trump is an illegitimate president.)

But now, as the impeachment process enters a new and dangerous phase, we are seeing new GOP behavior (though we have witnessed plenty of hints). David Drucker, a superlative reporter, wrote today that Republicans decided the best way to defend the president is to embrace “the claim of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.”

Let’s be clear. There was no Ukrainian interference. That’s according to the special counsel’s report, which cited one and a half dozen national security agencies. That’s according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. That’s according to every career official in the State Department who testified under oath last month.

The idea that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the US originated in the Kremlin. The idea that the Democrats, not Trump’s campaign staffers, conspired with foreign operatives is more than “conspiracy theory.” It is a fascist ploy to turn lies into truth. This is why I said recently Trump’s crime is so much worse than abuse of power. It’s treason.

And the Republicans, like lemmings, are heading for a cliff.

Now, it’s one thing to follow the party wherever it goes. Ordinary partisan activity, however vile, isn’t something I care to debate now. It’s quite another thing, however, to know what you’re doing is wrong and do it anyway. The Republicans can’t not know.

First, because intelligence officials briefed Senate Republicans, telling them explicitly the Ukraine-attacked-us story is pure Putin disinformation. Second, because Fiona Hill, a former member of the White House National Security Council, and a Russia authority, was clear about what House Republicans were already doing. She said:

In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016 (my italics).

And now we have another reason why the Republicans can’t not know they are participating in conspiracy to defraud the American people. Rudy Giuliani, who is not regarded for his discretion, confessed to knowing the Ukraine-attacked-us story was bunk. Not only that, the president’s personal attorney actually said he decided to pursue “evidence” of Ukraine’s attack in order to undercut Robert Mueller’s report.

I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false. I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’ve got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime.”

So: to defend Trump is to defend Russia.

Is that where the Republicans want to go?

Well, yes, if Tucker Carlson is any indication. The Fox News host is on the bleeding edge of attempts by Trump partisans to expand what the American people think is acceptable behavior. On his show last night, he said: “I’m totally opposed to these [US] sanctions [on Russia] and I don’t think we should be at war with Russia and I think we should take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

He went on to say the Democrats hate America more than Vladimir Putin does.

I think it’s fair for some conservative writers, like Charlie Sykes and Matt Lewis, to characterize the Republicans as dupes and stooges or parroting the Kremlin line. But at some point, we must face what it means for Republicans to know the truth but to advance Kremlin lies anyway, even when doing so slowly burns down the republic. At some point soon, we must stop calling them dupes, and start calling them the enemy.

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: 03 December 2019
Word Count: 731
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