I’ve said before that I take after George Orwell. Disinformation scares me more than bombs. As bad as they are, bombs don’t lie. They don’t make it impossible to tell truth from falsehood. They are trying to kill you. They don’t try to make you feel insane.

But there’s one thing that scares me even more than that. It’s indifference. As bad as things are right now, as unpopular as this president is, I don’t think enough Americans are scared enough, or enraged enough. As bad as things are, I fear that most people, but especially middle-class white liberals, are not inspired nearly enough to care.

White and relatively affluent people, even when they think of themselves as liberals, have the power to turn the whole thing off, as if it were just another tasteless reality-TV show. They can go to work with other white and affluent people, maybe even a majority of whom think of themselves as liberal, and pick their kids up from school, where white and relatively affluent kids also go to school, and not think much about it. They can go the whole week without having given Donald Trump a second thought.

This is possible even here in New Haven, where the Elm City is split more or less into thirds, demographically: a third white, a third African American, a third everybody else. Like other cities in which white people do not prevail numerically, white people here, on average, live in mostly white neighborhoods, send their kids to mostly white private schools. Nonwhite people are visible, of course, but they are not, generally, friends or colleagues of white people. This is not a judgment. This is the world as it is.

A major consequence of this being the world as it is: caring is a choice. Fascism is about punching down, but it’s not punching down on white people (not yet). To be sure, many white people do care about the damage Trump is doing to our communities and institutions, our discourse and democracy. That, however, is still a choice. White people are not yet compelled to care in the way a black woman is compelled to on seeing white men strolling down her street wearing what appears to be “Nazi garb.”

Another major consequence of this being the world as it is: even if white people care, do they care enough? I’m dubious. It’s natural to focus on the 2020 presidential election. My fear is most white liberals will celebrate if Donald Trump is defeated and then … stop. They won’t go farther. They will pat themselves on the back, just as they did after Barack Obama’s victory, while ignoring, as they did after 2008, the fascist politics that would quickly take over the Republican Party within a mere two years.

The Republican Party no longer recognizes the validity and hence the legitimacy of Democratic control of any branch of state and federal government. Republican allies, especially white evangelical leaders, are whipping their followers into a frenzy, warning that impeaching the president is tantamount to defying God. Trump has already called rivals “enemies of the people” and “human scum.” How do you treat enemy human scum? Not with respect. Political violence is the one and only answer.

White liberals, I suspect, don’t care enough. But it’s not only because their skin color shields them from the worst of fascist politics (so far). It’s also because they are liberal. Liberals, but especially white liberals, don’t truly understand why anyone would vote for a troglodyte like Trump. And they don’t understand, I suspect, because they have not experienced the depth of authoritarianism that animates everything about him. People who have, however, are Cassandras warning it’s all going to get much worse.

Liberals, but especially white liberals, are deeply convinced that there is a right side and a wrong side to history. Racists are on the wrong side. Sexists are on the wrong side. All shades of bigotry are on the wrong side. And because they are on the wrong side of history, it’s just a matter of time before things work themselves out. Eventually, the white liberal thinking goes, all will return to normal. The right side will prevail.

The right side of history might prevail, but not without struggle, pain and sacrifice. But even then, there’s no guarantee. It’s just as plausible that the reverse will happen. Imagine, for instance, the president’s reaction to losing in 2020. Will he concede to the will of the people? Will be respect the peaceable transfer of power? Um, no. He will no doubt blame defeat on an international conspiracy to bring him down, thus fueling and justifying any reaction, including political violence, to a new Democratic president.

As a white liberal, I know lots of people who say they tune Trump out. As a white liberal who has experienced the depth of authoritarianism that animates everything about Trump, I come close to freaking out when I hear that. A cyclone is coming for us, but too many act like it can’t touch them or the people they care about. It will.

Indeed, it already has.

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: 02 December 2019
Word Count: 856
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I’d rather not talk about Rick Perry, but, alas, he has forced me to. The US Energy Department secretary made headlines this week, saying God chose the president:

“God uses imperfect people through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect. And I actually gave the president a one-pager on those Old Testament kings … And I shared it with him and I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people who say that you say you were the chosen one.’ And I said, ‘You were.’ I said, ‘If you are a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.’ ”

So once again, we are faced with an apparent paradox: why would white evangelical Christians stand cheek-to-jowl with such an un-Christian president? Perry has his way of explaining things, a “biblical” explanation. But another way of looking at it is so obvious as to be quite invisible: Donald Trump is as Christian as evangelicals are.

That we ask the question at all may be part of the problem. We keep asking why white evangelical Christians support such an un-Christian president because we believed what they said about Barack Obama, but especially about Bill Clinton. We believed their outrage over Clinton’s diddling an intern in the White House, thus sparking a process that led to his impeachment. We believed it was all in good faith. We believed it was based on genuine religious sentiment. We believed they meant what they said.

Well, what if they didn’t mean it? If we imagine for a moment that they meant none of that, what we are seeing now makes a lot more sense. All of this talk about a biblical understanding of Donald Trump as the chosen one makes more sense. This “biblical understanding” is a rationalization for a conclusion they’d already come to, which is a conclusion with little grounding in religion. It has more to do with power politics.

Put another way, more accurately: power politics is their religion.

So it doesn’t matter that Trump paid off at least two women to keep quiet about having extra-marital sex with him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a proud self-proclaimed “pussy grabber.” It doesn’t matter that he abandoned Syrian Christians. It doesn’t matter that his administration confiscated infants from immigrant mothers at the border. All of his actions are irrelevant because evangelical Christians have already made up their minds, a process totally in keeping with the history of the cult of American tradition.

“The cult of tradition” is something I’m borrowing from Umberto Eco. He was talking about European tradition. I’m substituting “American.” In the current context, that tradition has held that the United States is a Christian nation given by God. We must ask: who was it given to? You already know. They didn’t look like Barack Obama.

The cult of tradition was necessarily syncretistic, a combination of different forms of belief that tolerates contradiction, Eco said. “Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth” (my italics).

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. […] No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.

For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. (“Ur-Fascism” is the title of Eco’s article.)

The president’s critics are familiar with the idea that his followers constitute a cult of Trump. What his critics fail to understand, mostly, is that this cult was always already functioning under different names in different places for different reasons. But once the leaders of this cult of American tradition understood in 2016 what Trump was about, the melding of interests was easy and natural. There was no contradiction.

The president’s critics are also familiar with the argument that Trump is a fascist leader who will not tolerate constitutional limits on his power. That he’s a fascist and that his followers are evangelical Christians is also not a contradiction in terms. To the contrary, it is syncretistic. Everything alludes, allegorically, to the same primeval truth

There is no such thing as abuse of power when one has been chosen by God to rule. There is no such thing as obstruction of justice when God alone decides who is worthy of justice. Since God chose Trump, only God can end his presidency, and any attempt to impeach and remove him is, by consequence, a sinful attempt to obstruct God’s will.

That white evangelicals genuinely believe this to be true should not in any way be mistaken for religious sentiment that other Americans are bound to respect. We should not give this authoritarian strain of Christianity any more benefit of the doubt politically than we would to a man who yells “fire” in crowded theater. Yes, he has the right to free speech, but not at the expense of everyone else’s rights and freedoms. Evangelical Christians have religious freedom, but no right to impose it on others.

That white evangelical Christians believe they are an oppressed minority should not in any way deter other Americans from fighting like hell. Their worldview is categorically incompatible with a just and equitable democratic republic. Their politics is their religion, and their opponents should act accordingly.

Is Trump as Christian as evangelicals are? Yes, it’s obvious.

Once you see them for what they are, that 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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 November 2019
Word Count: 952
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It has become increasingly clear that Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican in the House impeachment hearings, has been working directly or in tandem with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney. Donald Trump’s most powerful defender could be a fact witness in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people.

To explain, I have to put on my Leo Tolstoy hat. When this chapter in our history is written finally, it’ll look like War and Peace and feature characters by the hundreds.

CNN reported late Friday that the California representative traveled to Vienna in December of 2018 after the midterm elections. He met with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former head prosecutor. That’s according to Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s henchman.

Parnas is under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. His attorney told CNN that Parnas worked with Shokin and Giuliani to smear former Vice President Joe Biden and promote a Kremlin lie: that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the US in 2016.

I’ll get back to Nunes in a minute, but first: Shokin was the Ukraine prosecutor whom Biden lobbied to be fired when he was the vice president. It wasn’t because Shokin was too hard on the gas company Hunter Biden worked for. It was because Shokin wasn’t hard enough. (Biden was speaking for the Obama administration, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. They were pushing an anti-corruption agenda.)

Shokin is the author of a statement dated September 2019, per Bloomberg, in which he claimed — falsely — that Biden had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and that Ukraine, not Russia, conspired with the Democrats to undermine US national sovereignty.

Importantly, Shokin’s immediate predecessor as Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, said the same thing — Biden/Burisma + 2016 — when John Solomon, at The Hill, interviewed him. Solomon’s series of interviews and columns were cited by the anonymous whistleblower complaint, which started the current impeachment process.

Shokin and Lutsenko were corrupt Ukrainian government officials. They were in bed with Vladimir Putin. According to a New York Times report over the weekend, and according to testimony by Fiona Hill last week, the argument that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the 2016 presidential election is standard-issue propaganda straight from the Kremlin. In other words, both Shokin and Lutsenko were repeating an already established lie.

Shokin and Lutsenko are connected in another way.

John Solomon’s attorneys are Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. (You may know them for their frequent appearances on Lou Dobbs’ show on the Fox Business Network.) DiGenova and Toensing put Solomon in touch with Lutsenko via Lev Parnas. Parnas was working with DiGenova and Toensing’s law firm. Indeed, Parnas watched Solomon interview Lutsenko at The Hill, according to a Pro Publica report.

DiGenova and Toensing were also hired by a Ukrainian oligarch (i.e., mobster) who’s fighting extradition to the US. That oligarch is Dmitry Firtash. Firtash’s henchman procured the false statement from Shokin (that Biden had him fired and Ukraine attacked America). DiGenova and Toensing billed Firtash $1 million, according to Bloomberg.

When you’re digging up dirt on the American president’s rival in the hope that the US Department of Justice will go easy on you, legally speaking, that’s money well spent. Firtash probably wrote a check for that amount in Vienna, where he is on the lam. And Vienna, as you’ll recall, is where Viktor Shokin met Devin Nunes in December 2018.

We now know, thanks to reporting this morning from the Times, that Rudy Giuliani and his goons worked directly with Firtash. They offered to help with his legal problems in the US if Firtash hired attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing.

DiGenova and Toensing later went to the Justice Department to plead his case with Bill Barr. They probably hinted that they had “evidence,” thanks to Firtash, that confirmed everything Barr’s boss already believed was true but was entirely false. This “evidence,” moreover, could rationalize Barr’s internal investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, which the president has repeatedly said is a hoax. This “evidence,” remember, comes from the Kremlin. What we’re seeing is the making of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and undermine popular sovereignty.

I haven’t yet seen reporting connecting Nunes to Dmitry Firtash. Moreover, Nunes has said he and his staff were conducting an investigation separate from Rudy Giuliani’s. But it happens their “investigations” have the same contours. They’re both about the Bidens. They’re both about the 2016 election. They both originated in the Kremlin. These are the same talking points Nunes brought to House impeachment hearings last week, talking points that Fiona Hill blasted as aiding and abetting Russian interests, partly because they create conditions in which the Kremlin can repeat its 2016 attack.

At the very least Nunes is a fact witness to a crime.

At the most, he’s implicated in a criminal conspiracy that dwarfs Watergate.

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: 25 November 2019
Word Count: 802
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The president’s last line of defense, according to Bloomberg reporting this morning, is that he never told anyone explicitly to extort Volodymyr Zelensky into a conspiracy to defraud the American people. If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is. But absurdity has a deep history in the tradition of political theater. That Donald Trump didn’t state clearly the magic words — Go forth and commit criminal acts in my name — may be all the Senate Republicans need to protect the worst president since the nation’s founding.

Emphasis on “may.” The Senate Republicans have already moved their original line of defense to keep pace with damning evidence that came to light this week. Lindsey Graham led a resolution in the Senate last month to condemn the House investigation. More recently, he’s told home-state supporters that as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he would kill off a trial before it got started. He’s less resolute now.

During a meeting yesterday at the White House with Trump and a group of Senate Republicans, Graham revealed there weren’t enough votes in the Senate to dismiss the case outright. There are 53 GOP senators. He would need 51 to dismiss. So some Republicans seem to be feeling the squeeze between party and country. That’s probably why Graham and the Senate Republicans had to convince the president that the question, as of now, wasn’t whether the case should be heard but how long the trial should be. The consensus appears to be about two weeks, according to the Washington Post.

That depends on what the House Democrats decide the next step is. Before Gordon Sondland testified, the Democrats were focused on abuse of presidential power. After testimony by the EU ambassador, however, the Democrats have grounds for returning to obstruction of justice. Sondland said everyone was “in the loop,” meaning everyone knew what Trump wanted from the Ukrainians and why. “The loop” included the vice president, the secretary of state, the former head of the White House National Security Council and the acting White House chief of staff. These are the same people whom Trump has barred from working with the House investigators. As long as he forbids their cooperation, the Democrats are justified in charging Trump with obstruction.

As the Post’s Ruth Marcus argued earlier this week: “The administration’s high-handed order that witnesses not cooperate with the House probe and refusal to turn over relevant documents is an act of obstruction — and a likely count in the articles of impeachment. But the goal isn’t proving obstruction — it is getting at the truth.”

The truth has been in plain sight for months. Robert Mueller outlined in his report to the Congress at least 10 instances in which Trump obstructed his investigation into Russia’s disinformation campaign to move public opinion against the Democratic candidate in favor of the Republican. The House Democrats now appear ready for the next phase of the impeachment process. Politico reports this morning they want to hold at least one hearing related to Mueller’s report. But there should be many more.

The blinding takeaway of Mueller’s report was that the Russians hurt Hillary Clinton to help her opponent. Implicit but crystal clear in that conclusion is that the president cheated to win. Furthermore, he thought he got away with it after Mueller’s report and subsequent House testimony had little if any affect on the public’s opinion of him. (Trump has always been unpopular, but the report didn’t make him more so.) Emboldened, the president tried cheating again, this time by involving Ukraine’s vulnerable president in a conspiracy to undermine another rival. The phone call at the heart of impeachment hearings took place the day after Mueller finished testifying.

Cheating (via bribery, in this case) is betrayal. Betrayal is a violation of public trust. Public trust is the root of the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Here’s how House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff explained it recently:

“Bribery … as the founders understood bribery … was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader. It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest. Here you have the president of the United States seeking help from Ukraine in his reelection campaign in the form of two investigations that he thought were politically advantageous, including one of his primary rival” (my italics).

The truth being in plain sight, however, is no guarantee of removal. I really want liberals to understand that. We are entering a dark period in which the true and awesome power of indoctrination, disinformation and propaganda will be revealed. The truth will set you free, as they say. In politics, though, the truth must be set free.

And only the people can do that.

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: 22 November 2019
Word Count: 804
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For what seems like a long time, I have not let a week go by without reminding Editorial Board readers that Donald Trump wasn’t only involving Volodymyr Zelensky in an illegal scheme to benefit himself personally. He’s trying also to rewrite the history of the 2016 election to wound enemies (Joe Biden and the Democrats) and help friends (Vladimir Putin).

The entire Republican establishment has backed him up. Devin Nunes and others have shamelessly advanced the “false narrative” that it was not the Russians who attacked the US in 2016 but the Ukrainians, and that it wasn’t Trump’s campaign that conspired with foreign saboteurs but Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

This narrative has its roots in Russia. As if to remind us, Putin said yesterday that he’s glad to see the “political battles” in the US have taken the focus off his country: “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.” Indeed, everything we are seeing coming to light now has been an effort to validate — to make real — this hoary Kremlin lie. Turning falsehoods into political reality is what fascists do. There’s more here than the abuse of executive power. The president has betrayed his own country by serving another’s interests.

If Putin’s lie sticks, we won’t be able to defend ourselves adequately against Russian disinformation going into 2020, thus leaving ourselves vulnerable to a repeat of 2016. I don’t need to remind you that liberal democracy is about self-government, and that self-government relies on good information. Leaders are supposed to govern by the consent of the governed. But what is consent when the electorate believes lies?

I worry about repeating myself but it can’t be helped. For one thing, all of the above is just not getting the attention it deserves. For another, fact witnesses in the House impeachment hearings keep bringing us back to the same place, to the chagrin, it should be said, of Democratic leaders who’d like to get away from Russia talk. Today, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, is set to blast the GOP for carrying Putin’s water. The following is from Hill’s prepared opening statement:

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).

Gordon Sondland’s testimony has been problematic. He has lacked candor, as they say in the FBI. But the EU ambassador has been consistent about suggesting a difference in Trump’s mind between Ukraine investigating its “meddling” in the 2016 election (a lie) and saying it was going to, and that saying it was more important than doing it. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff: “[Zelensky] had to get those two investigations if [he was going to get a White House visit].” Sondland: “He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.”

Later, in an exchange with House Democratic counsel, Daniel Goldman:

Goldman: You understood that in order to get that White House meeting that you wanted President Zelensky to have and that President Zelensky desperately wanted to have, that Ukraine would have to initiate these two investigations. Is that right?” [The second investigation was into Hunter Biden’s job at a Ukrainian energy firm.]

Sondland: Well, they would have to announce that they were going to do it.

Goldman: Right, because they — because Giuliani and President Trump didn’t actually care if they did them, right?

Sondland: I never heard, Mr. Goldman, anyone say that the investigations had to start or had to be completed. The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise was that they had to be announced in some form. And that form kept changing.

Goldman: Announced publicly?

Sondland: Announced publicly.

It would be illegal for Trump to elicit foreign help in winning reelection. So the Republicans have seized on the difference between saying and doing as if it proves the president is guiltless. But it’s the reverse. It’s damning. As Editorial Board subscriber Rhea Graham put it in a question to me: “So the impeachable act was using a quid pro quo to create propaganda for treasonous purposes?” The answer to that must be yes.

I don’t want to repeat myself. But I guess I should.

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: 21 November 2019
Word Count: 750
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He might have a chance if he stayed silent. He won’t.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed White House emails to reveal Monday morning that Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, had kept senior officials abreast of efforts to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Bidens before Donald Trump’s infamous July 25 phone call with the young Ukrainian president.

So: A plan was underway, a plan predating the whistleblower complaint.

This is important to note, because a key pillar of the Republican Party’s defense has been pushing to reveal the identity of the CIA analyst whose report to the Congress started the current House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president.

The Republicans persist though witness after witness has given credence to, or verified details of, the complaint. For instance, Bill Taylor, the current ambassador to Ukraine, said last week his aide overheard a phone call in which Sondland told Trump that Ukraine was ready to move on “the investigations.”

They persist in spite of that fact because intimidation is what these Republicans do. The whistleblower’s anonymity neuters their kill-or-be-killed instinct, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. And the more they try, the more they prove critics right: today’s GOP is unfit to govern.

To critics, the problem isn’t a lack of evidence. The problem is getting the American people to understand that intimidation, and outright thuggery, is what the president’s core supporters like about him. And the problem, for his critics, is that the American people don’t fully understand that intimidation is an abuse of power at odds with democracy. We can’t govern ourselves when one side aims to humiliate the other.

This is why Friday was an important day for democracy. Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, described in open testimony to the House Intelligence Committee “her role advancing U.S. interests in some of the most dangerous countries in the world until a smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani and other Republicans led to her being recalled,” according to Bloomberg News. As if confirming that Yovanovitch is not imagining things, Trump posted an intimidating tweet at the moment she said she felt intimidated by him and his Republican allies.

Not only was it important for the American people to see these events collide in real time; it was important that Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, drew our attention to Trump’s tweet and to Yovanovitch’s reaction to it. “It’s very intimidating,” she said.

Intimidation works in a closed space where only power matters, not norms of human behavior. But by bullying a female career diplomat out in the open, where rules of conduct are as varied as the American people, Trump told on himself, as they say. Once he did that, he couldn’t take it back. No president has that kind of power.

In a closed space, Trump can act with impunity, but in public, his impudence can be damning. He ends up underscoring the claims against him. Yovanovitch said she felt intimidated. Trump intimidates her for saying she felt intimidated. Case closed. Yes, some Republicans, hangers-on like Ari Fleischer, want us to wonder how a tweet could possibly intimidate anyone. Others rationalize it, saying Trump has a right to free speech. I’d guess any woman who’s ever felt bulldozed has something to say, and I’d guess quick attempts to excuse actual presidential harassment are going to backfire.

Because the president’s present misconduct is evidence of past misconduct, House investigators are right to use it. Think of it this way: Anything you say can and will be used against you. Trump is ignoring, actually vaporizing, his best defense, which is silence. If he didn’t say anything, he might have a chance. But he’s using the world’s biggest and loudest megaphone to declare his guilt. Schiff seems ready to see Friday’s attempt to intimidate a witness (Yovanovitch) as yet another impeachable offense.

(Trump intimidated another witness on Sunday. Jennifer Williams is Mike Pence’s foreign policy advisor. In testimony this weekend, she said she took notes on the July 25 phone call and thought it was “inappropriate.” She also implicated the vice president in Trump’s attempt at bribery. Trump in essence called her a nobody.)

The thing about the Yovanovitch case is that Trump, Giuliani and their Republican allies (especially former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions who took Russian cash in exchange for lobbying for Yovanovitch’s ouster) did not have to smear her to get rid of her. There was no need for that. Any president can call back any ambassador at any time for any reason. That’s any president’s legal and constitutional prerogative. But there’s a good reason to mount a campaign to smear a career diplomat. You don’t want anyone to believe what she says. Why? Because what she says is a threat to you.

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 November 2019
Word Count: 800
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Friday morning saw the second stage of public hearings in the House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president. Friday’s witness was Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine. She was pushed out by the Trump administration.

I’ll digest her testimony later. For now, I’m going to focus on the opening statement by Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee. I won’t bore you by decoding it bit by bit, but I do want to raise awareness of a larger theme: what he’s doing is fascism.

I don’t mean to dismiss Nunes by using the F-word. To the contrary, I’m using that word to draw attention squarely to his statements and deeds, and to the stakes we are facing. Too few of us fully appreciate the stakes, I suspect, even otherwise brilliant reporters and pundits paying close attention to the ins and outs of the investigation.

Too few fully appreciate the stakes because of the nature of Nunes’ behavior. From the perspective of someone deeply informed about the known facts of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, Nunes probably sounds, well, you know, crazy. I can imagine reporters and editor not having the foggiest idea of what he’s saying, and deciding to just not include some of his crazy out of respect for him and the need for getting on with the job.

But the crazy should get as much, or nearly as much, focus as the facts of the case against this president. The crazy tells us how committed many of the Republicans are to liberal democracy, which is to say little apparent commitment. Some might say the crazy suggests the Republicans don’t take these proceedings seriously. I think it’s the reverse. They are meeting a serious challenge with something injurious and sinister.

What something? This: The president is the victim of an international conspiracy to undermine the 2016 presidential election in favor of his political enemies. It was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who attacked our sovereignty. It was the Democrats, not Trump’s campaign staff (i.e., Paul Manafort), who conspired with foreign spies to defraud the United States and sabotage the will of the people. They tried once and failed, and now they’re trying again, this time to “overthrow the president,” Nunes said. This isn’t the literal word of his opening statement, just the spirit. As Jonathan Bernstein said this morning, Nunes is “100% committed to loony conspiracy theories.”

This conspiracy theory has its roots in the Kremlin, you will be shocked to learn. It is, moreover, the “false narrative” that compelled Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman to come forward and testify. He feared rightly that it threatened to subsume the findings of the special counsel’s report as well as imperil national security and US interests abroad.

This conspiracy theory, furthermore, was in the whistleblower complaint. It cited a series of interviews and columns in The Hill featuring Yuriy Lutsenko, a former top prosecutor in Ukraine. Lutsenko said unnamed “officials” had evidence of Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee. He said Barack Obama blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from delivering “evidence” about the election to America. He said Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s former president to fire a prosecutor investigating an energy firm his son worked for.

This conspiracy theory, in fact, can be traced to Rudy Giuliani, who’s in connection with Ukrainian mobsters turning Russian lies about 2016 into reality. (Lev Parnas put The Hill’s John Solomon in touch with Lutsenko by way of Solomon’s attorneys, Victoria Ann Toensing and Joseph diGenova, who are frequent guests on Fox News.) This conspiracy theory, finally, has purchase at the highest levels of American power. It doesn’t have to be true for powerful people to force it into being “the truth.”

To put all this another way, most normal people tend to believe that truth is power. But that’s not how fascist politics works. In fascism, power is “truth.” If this president is not impeached, it will be in part because Trump and the Republicans successfully created a fake reality wholly antithetical to the goal and practice of liberal democracy.

This is why calling it a “conspiracy theory” and leaving it at that isn’t enough. Even if Trump is removed, some Republicans will not be chastened. They will instead point to his downfall as evidence of what they’ve been saying all along — that the president is a victim of an international conspiracy. And they will use that “truth” as the basis for whatever future moves they make, and that future could be worse than Donald Trump.

The way to begin combating the crazy is paying attention to it, however crazy-making that might feel. We can’t dismiss it. Indeed, dismissing it works in favor of fascist politics. What Devin Nunes is doing is serious. It is injurious. It is sinister.

To few people fully appreciate that.

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: 15 November 2019
Word Count: 811
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The House is set this week to begin the first in a series of impeachment hearings. As we listen to testimony and consider the facts, we should bear in mind the big picture.

So far, the focus is rightly on Donald Trump’s extortion — the correct legal term — of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for personal political gain. Our attention is on his warping of American foreign policy, putting the service of our national interests below his own. That alone is an abuse of power that the framers themselves thought was worthy of indictment by a majority of the US House of Representatives.

But as the Editorial Board has argued, that’s not the big picture. Focusing on Ukraine is a tactical decision on the part of House Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and others apparently believe they have enough evidence, and are going to procure more, that can impeach (indict) Trump. This crime, however, is almost certainly just one of a galaxy of crimes that may later come to light. Some Republicans are prepared to go to the wall for the president. Only a full context can reveal the depth of their betrayal.

Betrayal? Yes. To paraphrase Pelosi, all roads lead to Moscow.

It would be one thing for the Republicans to argue, as they are, that Trump didn’t do anything wrong in asking Zelensky to investigate corruption in Ukraine. It would be one thing if that investigation just happened to include corrupt practices by an energy firm on whose board of directors sat Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. It would be one thing to suggest, as some Republicans are saying outright, that the president hasn’t done anything worse than any other president. They’ve all done a little quid pro quo.

But it’s another thing entirely for Trump to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid in exchange not for an investigation but for Volodymyr Zelensky’s public declaration that an investigation is underway. It’s absolutely another thing when the president refuses to meet with Zelensky at the White House unless he announces that his government plans to investigate the Bidens. According to all witness testimony from Trump-appointed State Department officials, it was clear to everyone involved that there was a difference in the president’s mind between Ukraine investigating and just saying it was investigating, and that saying it was more important than doing it.

What conclusions can we draw from that difference? For one thing, that actual corruption, whether or not it involved the Bidens, was beside the point. For another, that actually investigating corruption didn’t matter either. What mattered to Trump was Zelensky announcing an investigation in order to give the impression that it’s valid and legitimate though it had no grounding in fact. Public statements that have the appearance of truth but that are empty of truth are classic tools of propaganda. The president didn’t withhold military aid in exchange for an investigation. He tried to straw-boss Zelensky into becoming an accomplice in turning lies into reality.

The question then: why would Trump put a higher value on propaganda than on his own country’s national interests (which were said to be anti-corruption for the sake of liberal western-style democracy). To answer that, we have to ask another question: who does the propaganda serve? To be sure, it serves Trump, but that’s not all. We know that’s not all because the president linked three things in his bid to extort Zelensky, according to testimony by George Kent, a senior State Department official. Those three things were “investigations, Biden and Clinton.” Yes, meaning you-know-who.

With the addition of Hillary Clinton to the mix, we know the president wasn’t just trying to rig the next election against a leading Democratic rival. He was trying to rewrite the history of the 2016 election, meaning write Russia right out of it. The president says he believes, and wishes the rest of us would believe, that it wasn’t the Russians who attacked our sovereignty in 2016. It was the Ukrainians. And it wasn’t his campaign that conspired to defraud the American people. It was the Democrats. If the Democrats are the bad guys, then he’s the good guy, and whatever role Russia played in Clinton’s defeat was only to the extent that it exposed the enemy within.

This disinformation story has its origins in Russia. Efforts to validate this “false narrative” — to make it real — began with Paul Manafort, continued with The Hill’s John Solomon and concluded, to the best of our knowledge, with Rudy Giuliani, who has led Trump’s “shadow diplomacy” to Ukraine. Giuliani’s goal has been finding ways to launder Russian propaganda through mainstream political discourse. That has given him the confidence to cast even a combat veteran as a disloyal saboteur. To put this in the starkest of terms: Trump’s interests are not America’s. They are Vladimir Putin’s.

This is the big picture to bear in mind as the House begins impeachment hearings. This is the context in which the Republicans are operating. To know this is to know the potential depths of their betrayal. Just remember: all roads lead to Moscow.

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: 12 November 2019
Word Count: 851
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I’m dismayed to discover that some members of my generation have sided with the generation before us in condemning a trendy catch-phrase among younger Americans. Of all people, Generation X (born 1965-1980) should know better than to join the wrong side of a generational war raging at least since Richard Nixon’s second term.

Let me rephrase. It’s not a war in the sense that two sides are clashing. It’s more one-sided. It’s only when young Americans, whether Millennials or Generation Z (ages 7-22), stand up and say something about the war that you hear anything about it in the mainstream news media. Baby boomers own and run the news media. They make the big decisions. Their hold on our news media, our political culture, and what we’re even allowed to talk about is so complete as to be invisible. So when young Americans come up with a flippant catch-phrase like “OK, Boomer” to acknowledge the war, it’s news. There’s never been “friendly generational relations.” Young people are getting woke.

Let me rephrase again. It’s not so much a one-sided war as a kind of slow-motion sabotage of the very society that created the richest and most politically powerful cohort the world has ever seen. It’s no stretch to say young white baby boomers had every advantage one could imagine from a government shaped and informed by the compromises of the New Deal (later the Great Society). Free college, low-cost housing, thriving wages, and an ever-expanding economy. It’s no stretch to say this same generation did not want to share the blessings of an expanded democracy with the generations that came afterward. The ladder was dropped down for them. They climbed it. They pulled it up behind them. And that started with Generation X.

We should know better. Generation Z, which includes my own daughter, is going to face problems boomers refuse to concede are problems at all. Generation X should understand this well. We have been living under the shadow of the boomer generation our entire lives. So much so in fact that many people forget we even exist. And there’s another thing we understand. Most boomers don’t get it. Never will. Many Gen Xers get it. We have for a long time. Let’s not make common cause with the wrong side.

What do we get? Lots, but what comes to mind is that the boomer generation isn’t really what we’re told it is. To be sure, baby boomers in their youth protested the Vietnam War, marched for civil rights, went to Woodstock, and all that. But that warm nostalgia is contravened by an ice-cold fact. Since 1972, a majority of boomers has voted for the Republican candidate in all but one presidential election. That was Jimmy Carter in 1976, probably due to Watergate’s reformist aftermath. Other than that, boomers went with the Republican each and every time. Yes, not all. But most.

Again: Not all, but most. And I’m not singling out a majority unfairly. This is fair. Because the biggest generation in size and influence voted for the Republican candidate in all but one presidential election in nearly half a century, boomers are responsible more than any other group of Americans for the dominance of the Republican Party between Reagan’s election in 1980 and the financial panic of 2007-2008. They are responsible for the long contraction of government activism in the lives of ordinary Americans. They are responsible for massive inequities of power and wealth. They are responsible for assaults on the law, morality, the environment and on the truth. They are responsible for what was the “conservative consensus” in which everyone, even liberals, agreed that government was best when it governed least.

That consensus cracked with the election of the first black president. That’s when limited government, fiscal responsibility and all the other conservative principles were no longer sufficient for a generation suddenly awakened by societal change. The America they grew up in was no longer the America they were living in, and they lashed back against Barack Obama the way they lashed back against 1960s social justice movements. Only this time, instead of creating a new world on an egalitarian foundation of the New Deal, they longed to create a new world on a foundation of selfishness and greed. Democracy wasn’t the solution. Democracy was the problem.

The biggest American generation in size and influence looked at the younger and rising generations voting for hope and change in 2008, and said no. You can’t have the house. We’ll burn it down first. This is what the boomers should be known for. Not peace and love. The “culture war” is drawn out generational conflict that on occasion spasms violently. Only the young are not equals to the old, because the old have all the money and power. Young Americans are right to suspect that older Americans are trying to harm them. But most boomers refuse to call it a war. They’d have to look at themselves if they did. It’s easier to blame “political correctness” or condescend to youth facing incredible challenges. It’s easier to be offended by “OK, Boomer.”

If anything, “OK, Boomer” is too timid. It tries to avoid offending people offended by the acknowledgement of political reality. By virtually everything. Though we failed, Generation X wasn’t timid. We don’t have much, but at least we can offer that.

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: 07 November 2019
Word Count: 894
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Today is Election Day here in New Haven and in cities and towns around the country. It’s what some call an off-off-year election, meaning that it’s between a midterm — midway through a four-year presidential term — and the next presidential election.

Off-off-year elections are notorious for having low turnout, and low turnout is bad for democracy. For this reason, some political scientists argue that democracy would be better served if more elections were more in sync, and there’s something to that. If municipal elections were held at the same time as statewide and congressional elections, there might be more participation. Democracy would be in better health.

Like I said, there is something to that, but only something. I’ve always found that argument to be rather wooden, bloodless and amoral, as if democracy were in service to questions of convenience. Mind you, I understand that when voting is more convenient, people vote more. I don’t begrudge anyone for trying to create systems that encourage voting. I want barriers to be torn down with extreme prejudice. But I don’t think the discussion should stop at mechanisms. It should include values. It should include a vision of a just society. In short, it should be small-r republican.

Another way of putting this is that we need to cultivate a democratic culture, one in which Americans vote because voting is what Americans do, and it’s what Americans do, because a democratic culture compels them to. I don’t think we have anything close to that, not even here in New England, the cradle of American democracy. New Haven is run by Democrats, has been for ages. The question isn’t whether a Democrat will win, but which Democrat, so party primaries draw a modest amount of attention but general elections generally don’t. By Election Day, the fight’s been over for weeks.

A democratic culture reveres the rights of citizens but also their duties, and the overwhelming duty of each and every citizen is to participate in the exercise of self-government not only for their own good but for the greater good. I respect the argument against compulsory voting (forcing people to vote or pay a fine), but compulsory voting is attractive to republican liberals like me, because it has the potential, at least, to snap citizens out of the idea that voting is something you did if you feel like it. I don’t think we’d be talking about compulsory voting if we had a democratic culture making demands of citizens. In the absence of that, many of us dwell on compulsory voting.

With this in mind, consider two reports, one from the New York Times and one from the Washington Post, that assessed where we are one-year from the next presidential election. In both, Donald Trump is unpopular — his approval rating is under 50 percent—but the states in which he’s well-liked create conditions in which he could lose the national popular vote by even more than he did last time and still win, thanks to the Electoral College.

These reports collectively shocked some people, if my Twitter feed is any indication. Some were amazed he could win again, seemingly under the impression that a president mired in scandal can’t be reelected or that a Democrat is a shoo-in. I don’t know. But the reaction suggests to me a couple of things. One, that people do not understand that people don’t vote for presidents — states do — and they don’t know this, because we don’t have a democratic culture that would inform them of the truth.

Moreover, the reaction suggests something terrifying — that people are so convinced Trump can’t win reelection they won’t bother showing up next November. So let me clear: Donald Trump can absolutely win reelection. He is the incumbent. Incumbents have a colossal advantage. He is a Republican. He has an Electoral College advantage. He has a money advantage. He is also a narcissist. An international right-wing media apparatus will repeat every lie. So will our enemies in places like Russia, China and Iran. Trump is indeed a criminal. We believe crime doesn’t pay. In 2020, it could.

But voting Trump out should not be a voter’s animating principle. The animating principle should be voting for its own sake because that’s what Americans do, and that’s what Americans do because a democratic culture compels them. Ideally, it would compel them so much that few racist barriers would be strong enough to stop Americans filled with the righteous spirit of democracy from having their say.

We aren’t there yet. We may never be. But we need to do the work.

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 November 2019
Word Count: 764
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