You may have noticed I don’t spend time here at the Editorial Board sifting and sorting through the Democratic candidates’ policy proposals. It’s not that I believe, as some do, that public policy doesn’t matter in a presidential campaign. It’s that I think it doesn’t matter as much as the commentariat, hence the rest of us, tends to believe.

Elizabeth Warren released Friday her “Medicare for All” plan. The AP: She “proposed $20 trillion in federal spending over the next decade to provide health care to every American without raising taxes on the middle class, a politically risky effort that pits the goal of universal coverage against skepticism of government-run health care.”

Now, I’m no expert on these things, but the idea of covering the cost of the health and well-being of every American without raising taxes on the middle class is more than a bit of a stretch. To be sure, Warren says the very rich would bear the lion’s share of massive revenue required. And to be sure, costs would go down. (Obamacare, when allowed to function properly, lowered costs meaningfully. I’d surmise that “Medicare for All” would do the same.) But lots of policy experts, people who know what they are talking about, have said health care is so expensive none of that would be enough.

So the middle class is probably going to pay its fair share, too.

This, of course, is what Warren would rather not talk about, and she’s right not to. The president and the Republicans will accuse her of advancing SOCIALISM! whether or not she admits to raising middle-class taxes. The press corps, moreover, cannot be trusted to convey to voters the critical nuance among revenues, costs and benefits.

So Warren is right to gloss over an important detail. Is that lying? I’ll get to that in a moment. Glossing over it, however, does come with a downside, namely that her rivals can poke holes in her campaign’s “brand” for having a plan for each of the problems Americans face. If she can’t get this right, critics say, why should we trust her to get anything right? Joe Biden called her proposal “mathematical gymnastics.” He prefers building on the Affordable Care Act. He said that Warren’s plan would eliminate private insurance coverage. He said it amounts to a tax increase on working people.

He’s not wrong. But raising taxes on the middle class isn’t so bad if workers are getting something better, and getting something better is Warren’s goal. (The former vice president is preposterously wrong about eliminating private insurance; more on that below.) But again, Biden’s not wrong, and a “moderate” not being wrong is enough rationale for those worried about Warren being “too far left” to say that her plan and its rearranging of a third of the US economy is not just bad but disqualifying. It’s not.

Disqualifying is cheating to win an election, as the president did when it accepted, however tacitly, the aid and comfort of Russian operatives engaged in a one-sided cyberwar against his Democratic opponent. Disqualifying is not doing anything to stop a repeat of Russia’s 2016 attack on our national sovereignty. Disqualifying is asking Ukraine or China or any country fearful of Democratic leadership in America to sabotage the rule of law and the will of the people on the incumbent’s behalf. Disqualifying is committing crime after crime after crime with no end in sight.

But more than anything else, Warren’s proposal isn’t disqualifying because it’s only a proposal. It’s a proposal by a candidate, not a president. It’s a proposal that would have to get through the US Congress to be law. That means there’d be a thousand nips and tucks, so many you wouldn’t recognize the outcome from what Warren proposed originally. Does anyone believe the middle class won’t pay its fair share? Not me. Does anyone believe Congress would pass a law banning private health insurance? Let’s be serious.

In other words, the press corps, the pundit class and lots of Democratic normies are acting as if Elizabeth Warren’s proposal needs to be perfect, or close to perfect, in order for it to be legitimate. That’s not only unfair, but kinda, you know, fascist. They are acting like a president is going to get what she wants just by dint of being elected while overlooking the point of a democracy: everyone having a say. And lots of people are acting this way because they don’t like Warren or her politics, or don’t think she can win, which is jim-dandy except that they are not being truthful about it.

As for lying about a middle-class tax hike, you might think she is. I think of it as a benevolent omission. All of this is theoretical for the time being, so she may as well omit a major detail for the sake on getting on with the task of government of, by and for the people. That’s the point of Medicare for All. That’s the point of everything.

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 November 2019
Word Count: 835
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Most of the attention yesterday went to Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman’s testimony before House committees investigating impeachable offenses by the president.

There were two areas of focus. First was on Vindman’s direct witness of Donald Trump’s extortion of Ukraine’s president for political gain. Second was on Vindman himself and whether a decorated Ukrainian-American combat veteran is trustworthy.

I’ll get to why the second point is bosh in a minute. Meanwhile, there is a third area of focus that’s not getting the attention it deserves. One of the reasons Vindman came forward against the wishes of the White House was because he was worried about the president and his allies outside of government working to establish a “false narrative” about what happened in 2016 to undermine the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

That “false narrative” was about Ukraine. Vindman believed, per the New York Times, that it was “counter to the consensus view of American national security officials, and harmful to United States interests.” Moreover: “Vindman was concerned as he discovered that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was leading an effort to prod Kiev to investigate Mr. Biden’s son, and to discredit efforts to investigate Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his business dealings in Ukraine.”

This false narrative is something we have been seeing a lot lately. It’s what the Washington press corps keeps referring to as a “conspiracy theory.” But as the Editorial Board has regularly noted, there’s conspiracy theory that goes nowhere and there’s conspiracy theory that rulers use to supplant the truth, paralyze public opinion, and dominate the minds of those they rule. Trump is not engaging in conspiracy theory as much as making war against the truth so nothing is left but loyalty to The Leader.

What is the false narrative? That it was the Ukrainians who attacked our sovereignty in 2016, not the Russians, and that it was the Democrats, including Joe Biden and everyone in the Obama administration, not Paul Manafort and others on Trump’s campaign, who conspired with foreign leaders to undermine the will of the people. As a result, Donald Trump lost the popular vote, and few people came to celebrate his inauguration. He is the original victim and ultimate hero of this false narrative.

Where did this false narrative come from? Well, the whistleblower knew. He or she cited a series of interviews and columns in The Hill conducted and written by American journalist John Solomon. The subject of the interviews and a source for Solomon’s columns was Yuriy Lutsenko, the former top prosecutor in Ukraine.

Lutsenko told Solomon, per the whistleblower complaint, that unnamed “officials” had evidence that Ukraine’s government “interfered” in the 2016 US election in collaboration with the Democratic National Committee; that Barack Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine obstructed corruption cases by providing a “do not prosecute” list; that Obama blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from delivering “evidence” to America about the 2016 election; and that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s former president to fire the prosecutor investigating the energy company that Biden’s son worked for.

Sound familiar? It should. This is the “conspiracy theory” the president keeps talking about, and it’s the “conspiracy theory” that has gripped Trump’s media allies and pretty much the whole of the Republican Party. It is, in other words, a big lie akin to Obama being a secret Muslim and tax cuts fueling economic growth. It is a big lie that would have gotten bigger had not patriots like Alex Vindman said enough is enough.

One last question. How did Solomon find Lutsenko? Hold on to your butts.

Solomon’s attorneys connected them. His attorneys are Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. DiGenova and Toensing appear regularly on Fox News, echoing Trump’s false narrative. DiGenova and Toensing also represent Dmitry Firtash. Firtash is a Ukrainian oligarch—that is, a mobster—who’s fighting extradition to the US.

Now, Firtash wanted to get Trump’s attention probably to get out of the conspiracy charges against him. So he dug up dirt on Joe Biden! His associates cajoled a statement out of Ukraine’s former top prosecutor saying Biden “tried in 2016 to sway Ukrainian politics to help his son.” That, according to Bloomberg News, got Giuliani’s attention. Giuliani, of course, is Trump’s attorney. Giuliani also did business with Lev Parnas.

OK, so Lev Parnas worked for DiGenova and Toensing’s law firm. He arranged the interviews between Yuriy Lutsenko and The Hill’s John Solomon, according to documents reviewed by Pro Publica. (Indeed, Parnas watched the interview between them; he was later arrested on federal charges of campaign finance fraud.) From there, you have the creation of the “false narrative” that Alex Vindman said hurts America. Meanwhile, Lutsenko has recanted, saying everything he told Solomon was bogus.

I told you to hold on to your butts.

There’s more to this, more layers, but I won’t burden you with them. For now, the focus shouldn’t be on Vindman’s loyalty. The focus should be on the fact that he came forward, risking his reputation and even his life, to say the president seems to be parting ways with America. In one direction awaits the truth. In the other, lies.

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

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 October 2019
Word Count: 857
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We can’t let another day go by without talking about US Rep. Katie Hill.

You probably don’t know who she is. If you do, you know that she resigned over the weekend amid a House investigation into a sexual relationship with a staffer. You may also know that she’s openly bisexual and was a rising star in the Democratic Party for being an outspoken champion for the cause of women’s rights and liberty. Put these narrative elements together and you have what appears to be a classic Washington story of a power-hungry politician brought low by the temptations for the flesh.

There’s probably some truth to that, but it’s almost certainly not the whole truth. Another way of telling this story, a way that isn’t being told, is that Katie Hill is a victim of revenge porn, that victims of revenge porn are (almost) always women, and that women are always punished for having sex, especially if it’s not with a man.

There’s a lesson here we can all learn.

We’re not learning it.

Hill was a part of the biggest blue wave to crash the doors of the House of Representatives since the Watergate era. Per the Associated Press: “She won the last Republican-held House seat anchored in Los Angeles County, part of a rout that saw GOP House members driven out of their seats in Southern California. She was elected by 9 percentage points last year, ousting two-term Republican Rep. Stephen Knight and capturing the district for her party for the first time since 1990. … Hillary Clinton carried the district in 2016 by 7 points. Hill’s campaign had raised a healthy $2.2 million so far this year, putting her on track for a strong reelection bid.”

Last week, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into allegations that Hill had a sexual relationship with an employee in her office, which would be against a House rule forbidding sexual relationships with subordinates. Those allegations came to light after a right-wing political site called RedState.org published an article about a consensual three-way relationship Hill had with her husband and a female member of her campaign staff. The article included “intimate images” of the women together.

In other words, revenge porn.

Hill has denied having an affair with her legislative director, Graham Kelly, but she did admit to the Los Angeles Times that she had a relationship with a female campaign staffer during a rocky period with husband Kenneth Heslep. She is divorcing Heslep. She claims he is abusive. In her resignation letter, she said that she turned to others for intimacy during her campaign knowing it was inappropriate, and that she lamented that “the deeply personal matter of my divorce has been brought into public view.”

Now, as far as I can tell, the only thing Hill is confirmed to have done wrong was sex with a campaign staffer before she entered the House. This is not against House rules, because Hill had not yet taken the oath of office or her seat in the House. But having sex with a subordinate, whether a campaign staffer or congressional staffer, is going to be a problem for a Democratic Party acutely sensitive to charges of hypocrisy in the #MeToo era. Nancy Pelosi said her “error in judgment” was “untenable.” So this alone might have scuttled Hill’s career. (She might have been lying about denying an affair with her congressional staffer, too, but with her resignation, we’ll likely never know.)

What we do know is that someone leaked those images to RedState, meaning someone in that three-person relationship. (That is, if the device containing the images was not hacked.) That person, Hill claims, is Heslep, and I’m inclined to believe her. He knew what he was doing because there’s no other purpose for “revenge porn” other than being “sexually explicit images of a person posted online without that person’s consent especially as a form of revenge or harassment,” according to Merriam-Webster.

Importantly, “a person” is almost always a women. Men, on the other hand, are almost never subject to the humiliation of having their sex lives made public because that would be in keeping with the larger sexist attitude that men are supposed to have sex.

Women, though, are not. That goes double for a bisexual woman, triple for a bisexual woman in a position of rising power, quadruple for a  bisexual woman in a position of rising power who championed the cause of women’s rights and liberty. If she were a white man, there might be a sense of justice in seeing an ambitious politician brought low by the temptations of the flesh. But what happened to Hill was not justice — unless you’re a regular reader of right-wing political news sites like RedState. In that case, justice has been served. Hill’s “crime” wasn’t what she did. It was who she is. And for that, she’s been justly punished.

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: 29 October 2019
Word Count: 818
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Why are so many Republicans lying so much about the history-making House investigation into impeachable offenses by the president of the United States?

That, to me, is the central question behind yesterday’s publicity stunt by more than 30 House Republicans who broke federal law by barging into a secured room at the Capitol, delaying testimony by a Pentagon official for the coming House inquiry.

These Republicans did not defend Donald Trump on the strength of the evidence for or against the president but instead railed against due process itself. Arizona’s Andy Biggs exemplified their absurd complaint. He said: “This morning, I joined dozens of my colleagues to storm Adam Schiff’s secret, Soviet-style, Stalinist chamber to demand truth, transparency, and due process. We may have received threats for attempting to hear from today’s witness, but we are more resolved than ever to fight.”

That sounds damning — or it would if it were true. It’s a lie, all of it. The truth: every committee involved in the impeachment process — intelligence, oversight, judiciary, and finance — all of them have Republican members sitting on them. Yes, all of them. That’s how Congress works. And everyone knows this. Every Republican knows this. Their media allies know this. Because they do, we know for sure that the Wednesday editorial in New York Post asking what Democrats are hiding is a malicious lie.

The Republicans are indeed in the minority. They don’t control scheduling and other procedural matters in their respective committees. But we’re talking about dozens of GOP members with complete access to all the information the Democrats have access to. They have a say in how things are done. None of this is unfolding in secret. And yet the Republicans are attacking the process itself, claiming it’s rigged against Trump.

What are they hiding? asked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise after they “stormed” a closed-door session in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, where sensitive national security developments are discussed.) “Through those hidden, closed doors over there, Adam Schiff is trying to impeach a president of the United States. Behind closed doors. Literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election, a year before Americans get to go to the polls to decide who’s going to be the president.”

Steve Scalise continued: “Maybe in the Soviet Union, this kind of thing is commonplace. This shouldn’t be happening in the United States of America, where they’re trying to impeach a president in secret … The American people deserve better.”

Now that you know the truth — that Republicans have been sitting on impeachment committees from the beginning — you know that these Republicans were in fact protesting other Republicans. In fact, some of these “protesters” actually sit on the committees they were “protesting,” so they were “protesting” themselves! You also know that every single one of Scalise’s words, including “a” and “the,” was a lie, and that every word dripped with contempt for people uninformed about due process.

Moreover, since you now know the truth, you can see that Scalise was projecting. He accused his enemies of behaving exactly the way he and the Republicans are behaving, which is exactly the way totalitarians have behaved in history — they maligned norms and institutions by portraying them as decadent, immoral, corrupt or even criminal.

But again — nothing is being done in secret. The Democrats are following a set of House rules last updated in 2015 and adopted by a majority of House members under then-House Speaker John Boehner. Testimony is happening for now behind closed doors because it involves serious matters of national security. Everyone, though, will hear all the evidence once all the evidence has been collected. But this gang of Republicans objects to evidence-gathering because they know it’s damning. They are throwing fistfuls of lies in our faces in order to distract us from the emerging truth.

Recall the timing of this stunt. The “protest” happened Wednesday. On Tuesday, William Taylor, who was picked by the president to be the US diplomat to Ukraine, confirmed in testimony that Trump did indeed hold up military aid to that country with the explicit demand that Ukraine’s leader announce publicly that he would investigate Trump’s domestic opponents. That, as they say, is the smoking gun. Or as one Democrats put it, there’s a “smoking gun sitting on top of a smoking gun.”

Fortunately, neither the Democrats nor the press corps appears to be taking the bait. The Republicans really did commit a felony by entering the Capitol’s SCIF with smartphones in hand. They should have been arrested (and later prosecuted), but according to Fox News, that’s what they wanted. They wanted to be photographed being frog-walked out of the building, as if they were martyrs to justice. Accomplices to obstruction of justice is more like it. In any case, the press corps is viewing the stunt through the correct lens. NBC News said the Republicans are running out of ways to defend Trump. The Washington Post used the words “frantic” and “disjointed.”

Perhaps the Republicans really were protesting other Republicans. Maybe this spectacle was intended for Senators sitting on the fence more than devotees of Fox News. After all, House Republicans are doomed if Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, decides the Senate’s fate is no longer in line with the president’s. He has already signaled that Trump is toast if he threatens McConnell’s control of that chamber.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 898
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Elizabeth Warren is under enormous pressure to say the magic words: I will raise taxes on every American in order to fund universal health care for all. The pressure will continue, and it will surely intensify if she’s dubbed the Democratic nominee.

But the commentators, even the liberal pundits, are wrong. The Massachusetts senator should never say those words. Ever. If she did, she’s be playing by the Washington press corps’ rules, and once she did that, she’d be setting herself up for betrayal. The Washington press corps cannot be trusted to behave honestly, bravely or with integrity, much less with a sense of citizen duty or even patriotism, for God’s sake. (The Washington Post reported Monday that she’s going to explain everything. A bad idea.)

Think about it.

The story about the biggest story of 2016 — “but her emails!” — got none of the attention it deserved over the weekend. A State Department report released Friday said an exhaustive three-year investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state found “no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.” It is now a fact that the biggest story of 2016 was a collective fabrication. Yet the people who turned it into a “controversy” whose consequences have changed the world have said nothing. Only one person, Jeffrey Toobin, has taken responsibility for his role in poisoning public opinion and imperiling the republic.

Instead of soul-searching, what we saw over the weekend, and so far this week, is more of the same. I have seen reams of commentary about how the woman not running for president should not have spoken. She should not have suggested, commentators argued, that the Russians are grooming a Democrat to be a third-party spoiler. She should not have said that someone is probably Tulsi Gabbard, who does enjoy rubbing elbows with ethnic authoritarians. (Clinton did not name Gabbard in her interview.)

Largely missing from this commentary, however, is Clinton’s larger point, which is that the Russians continue to violate our national sovereignty. As if on cue, Facebook reported Monday that it disabled a network of accounts created by Russian operatives to spread propaganda about Joe Biden in key swing states. This news came after Bloomberg reported that a Russian mobster fighting extradition to the US provided dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for legal help from the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the very same guy, the Post reported, whose associates were funneling Russian cash into the campaigns of Republican members of Congress, a pattern the Senate intelligence panel recognized when it said that the NRA was “a foreign asset.”

So here’s Hillary Clinton, who has no skin in the game this time, warning us about something big and important that we all need to pay attention to, not for herself but for the good of our country, and not only is the press corps silent on its role in kneecapping her campaign, all it hears when Clinton speaks is some bitch bitchin’.

Now I ask you, truly: What would you do if you were Elizabeth Warren?

You could say be honest about what Medicare for All requires, and there’s something to be said about that argument. Warren could be upfront with the American people. She could explain that the 1 percent by far will pay the most for universal health care, but that even that won’t be enough. She could say don’t worry about paying more in taxes, because you’re going to pay less in health care. She could explain that it’s going to be no more painful than paying for Social Security. But the problem isn’t Warren’s lack of transparency. The problem in a media environment in which lies become political reality is that honesty can’t solve the problem. Indeed, honesty in a media environment in which lies become political reality can make the problem worse.

If Elizabeth Warren said the magic words — I will raise taxes on every American to fund universal health care for all — that would not prevent Donald Trump and the Republican Party from attacking her in ways that have no basis in reality. If she did say the magic words, she’d end up giving credence to those attacks. By attacking her uniformly and ruthlessly, even if those attacks have no basis in reality, the Republicans in effect bully the press corps into covering how she’s “handling” the politics of universal health care, thus validating the Republican line of attack, even if that line of attack has no basis in reality. Reporters knew all along there was nothing to the Clinton email scandal. But they pretended it mattered anyway because it mattered to the Republicans. When something worked last time, there’s no reason not to try again.

Warren is already getting a taste of what will happen if she says the magic words. The press corps has been framing the issue not as universal health care but eliminating private health insurance, as if that’s Warren’s goal. It isn’t. Getting rid of private health insurance would be the outcome of achieving something bigger, cheaper and better.

But the Republicans don’t want you to pay attention to bigger, cheaper and better. They want you to pay attention to something would be terrible if any real person were trying to do it. The fact that no real person is trying to do it has no relevance to the Republican plan of attack on Warren. They are going to lie until the lies become political reality, and no amount of honesty on Warren’s part is going to change 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 October 2019
Word Count: 930
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There’s only one thing in my mind that captures the absurdity and exhaustion of our present moment more than the dustup last weekend between Hillary Clinton and Tulsi Gabbard. It’s that the story about the biggest story of 2016 — “but her emails!” — got none of the attention it deserved. The people who are supposed to care about getting the story right don’t care about getting the story right, because if they did care, they’d see that they got it wrong, and that everyone now shoulders the burden of the error.

In an interview Thursday, Clinton said that the Kremlin continues to violate US sovereignty. She said Vladimir Putin likely has kompromat on Donald Trump, and that his operatives are going to elevate the visibility of a third-party candidate in 2020, just as they did in 2016. Last time, it was the Green Party’s Jill Stein who helped Trump take a plurality of votes in three decisive states. Next time around, Clinton implied the Russians are already “grooming” someone like the anti-liberal Tulsi Gabbard.

I’m going to assume you don’t know who Tulsi Gabbard is. That’s how well she’s doing in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination. She’s a zombie candidate. She has been for months. The only way she’ll get considered attention is to do what Clinton said she would do: run as a third-party candidate against the “Democratic establishment” with Putin’s blessing, thus abetting the incumbent by splitting the anti-Trump vote. Gabbard seemed to be preparing for that over the weekend, positioning herself as the anti-war antidote to the “the queen of the warmongers.”

Seriously, Gabbard is not worth taking seriously. The Hawaii Democrat stands with the world’s authoritarians, including India’s Narendra Modi and Syria’s war criminal Bashar al-Assad. But we are forced to pay attention in a media climate in which one remark by a person who isn’t running for president can trigger a pissing match all weekend long between Democratic normies and “the left.” Only it’s not even “a left” in any coherent or honorable sense as much as it is a clot of self-hating anti-American cranks who deny the US is a force of good, much to the liking of our enemies, who amplify this cranky incoherence by orders of magnitude, thus sabotaging our public discourse. There isn’t a circle in Dante’s Inferno in which you are trapped forever in debate with a thousand raging morons — imagine gangs of Glenn Greenwalds and mobs of Matt Taibbis — but there should be. That Fresh Hell is right here on Earth.

While journalists reported the “dustup” (though that gives Gabbard too much credit), while normies and lefties argued over the dustup, and while Russian bots sent the dustup trending all weekend long, nearly everyone ignored the most important story related to Hillary Clinton, the story that can teach us the most about what happened in 2016 and what we the people can do to avoid sending another weak-ass strongman to the White House. More importantly, the story is a lesson to the Washington press corps, which is a class of people reputed to care about getting the story right, but given how much they are paying attention to trivialities, like Gabbard picking a fight with a woman who is not running for president, I fear the lesson isn’t being learned.

The story I’m talking about was about the biggest story of the whole 2016 election being a fiction, a myth, a cipher, a blank space — all of it breathed to life by people who knew better but pretended not to. The story about 2016’s biggest story establishes forever that the Clinton email scandal was based on nothing more than Republican accusations against and conspiracy theories about the Democratic candidate that raised vicious sexist suspicions of a woman seeking power to the level of high treason, an accomplishment so successful that it emblazoned Clinton’s “criminality” on the minds of millions of Americans who to this day chant “Lock her up!” That story about the biggest story of 2016 was buried on A16 of Saturday’s New York Times while the story about Clinton emails a week before the last election earned no fewer than five mentions in the same elite newspaper of record, four on the front page and one in the editorial.

“Quiet Ending for Inquiry into Emails and Server” was the Times print headline. After three years of exhaustive investigation, the US State Department concluded that “there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information” while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. She didn’t do anything criminal, endanger Americans or undermine security. The Washington Post was more accurate about the greater significance, though. “The report appears to represent a final and anticlimactic chapter in a controversy that overshadowed the 2016 presidential campaign and exposed Clinton to fierce criticism that she later cited as a major factor in her loss to President Trump.”

I said the story about the biggest story of 2016 should be a lesson to the Washington press corps, a lesson that isn’t being learned, but I think it’s much more than that. Saturday’s story is an indictment, and one that’s being proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the press corps’ silence. I’ll be happy to be shown wrong when someone like the Times’ Maggie Haberman asks someone like US Senator Chuck Grassley if he and the Republicans regret weaponizing a lie in order to serve the candidacy of a president who has since 2017 lied more than 13,000 times. I won’t, however, hold my breath.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 921
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We should discuss this week’s heated meeting between Nancy Pelosi and the president. You know the one I mean — the meeting that was the subject of the now famous photograph of the House speaker rising above the table of power, index finger poised like a figure of supreme moral authority, demanding that Donald Trump, who looks like a petulant teen, explain why all roads lead to Russia and Vladimir Putin.

It seems that some Republicans are either discovering for the first time that everything the president’s critics have been saying about him, including that he’s puppet president in league with the enemy, is devastatingly true; or they are developing a narrative by which they can run for the exits while pointing to his worsening mental state as reason why they are fleeing for their lives. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our discussion should begin with reporting from CNN’s Jamie Gangel. At suppertime Thursday, she reported a conversation she had that afternoon with a Republican source in the room when Pelosi allegedly “stormed off.” The GOP source was “alarmed at [Trump’s] demeanor.” “Everyone left completely shaken, shell-shocked,” the source told Gangel. “He is not in control of himself. It is all yelling and screaming.”

Gangel asked the source if the president’s state of mind was getting worse. “100 percent,” the source said. Are you worried about his stability. “Yes.” Gangel said the source had talked to other Republicans who were in the room. According to Gangel’s source, one used the word “sickened” to describe their reaction to the president’s behavior during the meeting. The source added that the “generals were upset.”

Gangel concluded with a chilling implication. Republicans appear increasingly less concerned about Trump’s terrible decision to pull out Syria, betray our allies, and leave the region vulnerable to Russia. Gangel implied that Republicans are growing more worried about Trump’s mental health. “They were concerned about his demeanor.”

What should we make of all this?

First, that Kevin McCarthy is a liar. The House Minority Leader told reporters after the meeting that the president had been calm and reasonable, eager to get work done, while the House speaker had been the one to “storm off.” Pelosi has a reputation for being meticulous about decorum. She’s been on the Hill for decades. She doesn’t even tolerate cussing within earshot. It was never credible to accuse her of “storming off” from any meeting, much less one with the president of the United States. Now we know McCarthy is a sexist liar (who also takes illegal Russian money, but I digress).

Second, that the Republicans are starting to see more clearly that the president’s monumental weakness in foreign affairs has the makings of a nonstop crisis at home. Domestically, the Republican Party can shield Trump from his laziness, incompetence and impotence. Party actors can lie, right-wing media allies can amplify the lie, the president can see the lie on Fox, then repeat it himself — all of which gives the impression to his supporters that all is well. This process, or a rough variation of it, is probably why Trump’s approval rating, though terrible, is nonetheless rock steady.

The Republicans can’t protect Trump from himself as well in international relations. For one thing, he’s the head of state. Today’s Congress is a weak actor in that area. For another, the “adults in the room,” the people the GOP hoped and prayed in 2017 would steer Trump away from disaster, have been purged and replaced by yes-men. Without a superstructure to restrain him, the president has been going with his gut, which is to say, negotiating from a position of abject weakness, as he has throughout his career.

I mean, get this: at the meeting, he actually told Pelosi and the Democrats that the US had to pull out of Syria, because Turkey’s leader said he was going to invade whether he liked it or not. At the same time, Trump presented the Democrats with a letter he wrote to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saying he’d destroy the country’s economy if he crossed the line, whatever that is. The BBC said Erdogan threw the letter in the bin. Mike Pence negotiated a cease-fire. The AP said today that the shelling continued.

Chuck Schumer of all people was so very right. “The president could have said, ‘You go in, and you’re going to have real trouble,’ and 99.9 percent, Erdogan wouldn’t have gone in,” the Senate minority leader told the Post Wednesday. “He’s very tough with the media, with his letters. But when it comes face to face, he’s weak-kneed.”

Weak-kneed, getting weaker, and the Republicans know it.

Which brings me to my final point: Are the Republicans starting to see for the first time that everything Trump’s critics have been saying about him, including that he’s a puppet president in league with the enemy, is devastatingly true — that dude gonna err on Russia’s side every damn time; or are the Republicans crafting a clever story about a president in rapidly declining mental health, so they will have a reason, one beyond their control, for turning against him? After all, all roads do seem to lead to Putin.

I suppose we’ll find out soon.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 867
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“President Trump has made 13,435 false or misleading claims over 993 days” was a Monday headline in the Washington Post. That raises the questions: Will Donald Trump ever face any kind of consequence for lying at virtually the same rate as he breathes?

You could say he has. His approval rating has been underwater since the beginning. Lately, public support for his impeachment has reached majority status. But the approval rating is the more important of the two public opinion measures, and it’s been rock steady despite countless scandals and outrages. And if bad polling is punishment, and punishment is a deterrent, well, it ain’t working like it should.

Indeed, this president appears to have a boundless appetite for mendacity. In fairness, though, why would there be limits? With a tweet, Trump can dominate the news cycle thanks to the press corps’ habit of repeating and amplifying whatever he says, however many times he says it, without due consideration of its truthfulness. It’s hard to put sole blame on the alcoholic when everyone around him is pressing a drink in his hand.

When the press does call out Trump’s mendacity, as when reporters make explicit that a statement is misleading, false or a lie, they repeat it anyway. American journalists have not figured out that civil society needs a moral press responsible for monitoring the legitimacy of viewpoints engaged in the discourse of a liberal democracy. Worse, the press corps is not saying what needs saying most, because it doesn’t know what needs saying. And it doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, because it’s anti-moral.

Here’s what I mean.

Yesterday, the president gave voice to a conspiracy theory regarding the Democratic National Committee’s server, the one the Kremlin hacked in 2016 and whose files Russian agents laundered through Wikileaks in its cyberwar against Hillary Clinton.

Trump doesn’t believe that. He believes the security firm that discovered the hack, Crowdstrike, is owned by Ukrainians, that the server is somewhere in that country, and that the Obama administration knew all along. Trump believes the Ukrainians were digging up dirt on him in order to help Clinton win the election. He believes all the credible criminal allegations that have amassed over three years are not tied to him but instead his enemies. He’s the original victim. He will be the ultimate hero. And if all of this sounds rather familiar, that’s because it’s the same conspiracy theory Trump alluded to in his July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president, the same phone call now at the center of the House Democrats’ inquiry into Trump’s impeachable offenses.

The truth is this conspiracy theory is bunk. The truth is Trump couldn’t care less about the truth. What he cares about is your seeing the world the way he wants you to see it, which is always to his advantage. If he has to say again and again — and again! — that corrupt Democrats colluded with Ukrainian spies to sabotage his candidacy, and that this conspiracy resulted in losing the popular vote and in fewer people showing up to celebrate his inauguration than for the black guy’s — if the president must repeat himself ad nauseum until his lies become reality, well, that’s what he’s gonna do.

Repetition of lies, by the way, is fascism’s calling card. The truth is the enemy. What matters are perceptions that can be transformed with enough effort into the preferred “truth.” No one outside of Germany, for instance, believed Nazi propaganda about German Jews being poor, dirty, and diseased until Jewish refugees fled Nazi policies that had successfully cheated, sickened and impoverished them. Hannah Arendt called this a “little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda” in which vicious lies end up being vicious policy, thus validating the vicious lies and transforming them into “truth.”

Put this in today’s US in which the administration explicitly characterizes all immigrants as poor, dirty and diseased before enacting immigration policies that deliberately create conditions in which immigrants get sick, can’t find work or even bathe themselves. The lies become policy become evidence the president was right all along to build a border wall to stop alien vermin from befouling our nation’s purity.

The administration can’t turn the president’s conspiracy theory about the DNC’s computer server into policy, but Trump can trust the press corps to amplify his lies. And he can trust the press won’t say what he’s really doing. Instead of saying that Trump is trying to turn lies into reality, thus heightening awareness of this “little noted hallmark,” reporters will call it a “debunked” conspiracy theory, or an “unsupported claim,” or some such. They will scratch their heads, but repeat and amplify the lie anyway. They will make themselves complicit in Trump’s aim.

The press corps must do better.

It can raise awareness of what’s really happening.

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: 17 October 2019
Word Count: 804
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My writing life is guided by a few nuggets of wisdom.

One is normal people have something better to do — kids, school, jobs, good health, etc. — than pay attention to politics. Another is that you can’t know what you don’t know until you know it. Then there’s this from the ever-pragmatic Dr. Samuel Johnson: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

So today I’m reminding you that lots of people do not, or will not, understand what corruption is, especially if they profit from it. But profit isn’t the only blinding force.

Blindness is systemic.

We inhabit a transactional materialist culture, after all, in which something I can do for you is exchanged amorally for something you can do for me. That was more or less a benign state of affairs, I’d say, until the elites themselves started convincing everyone that greed is not only OK; it’s something American society should encourage.

That’s about the size of what happened starting around 40 years ago. It has only gotten worse. Institutions are no longer built on the ideals of responsible citizenship and the common good but instead on the premise of self-interested individuals competing, even if that means cutting each other down. Donald Trump is a terrible person, but it shouldn’t be surprising that his career as an apex fraud has tracked with the last four acquisitive decades. Another nugget of wisdom: we get the presidents we deserve.

At the moment, I don’t suggest we be less greedy to change things. For now, I think it’s enough to say and keep saying what should be completely obvious but it is not: corruption is bad. We need to say this and keep saying this, because our culture is corrupt. If we say this and keep saying this, the resulting awareness might trigger necessary reform. More importantly, by raising awareness, and laying the groundwork for reform, we might prevent the next apex fraud from becoming president.

What is corruption? “Dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery” is what the dictionary says. But it’s more complex than that. Any definition must include the compromise of morality. Is there anything dishonest or fraudulent about the president saying Saudi Arabia is going to pay the US for sending troops to protect that country? In and of itself, no. In proper context, hell yeah.

Trump announced that decision after ordering US forces out of Syria, paving the way for Turkey to launch attacks against the Kurds. Put another way: It was OK to betray our allies while turning self-sacrificing servicemen and -women into mercenary units, making the president’s decision a double betrayal. We are now forfeiting a moral claim of being a force for good in the world. New message: American might is for sale.

Is there anything dishonest or fraudulent about the wife of a man charged with a crime in a foreign country asking the president for help? Again, the context is key.

Kallie Hapgood is married to a wealthy Connecticut banker who ended up killing a man in self-defense after the hotel worker threatened his family’s safety while they were at a Caribbean resort. Scott Hapgood now faces manslaughter charges on Anguilla. His wife has no doubt been advised the best way to get Trump’s attention isn’t through normal channels but cable news. On Monday, she went on “Fox & Friends” knowing he’d be watching to plead her husband’s case. Within minutes, Trump tweeted that “something looks and sounds very wrong” in the Hapgood case and that “Anguilla will want to see this case be properly and justly resolved!”

The merits of Hapgood’s case aside (a toxicology report showed the hotel worker had toxic levels of cocaine in his body), Trump corrupted another country’s justice system by expressing an opinion about it. By casting doubt on the known facts of the proceeding, Trump prejudiced potential jurors. Plus, he sent a message to American elites, the same people who convinced everyone over four decades ago that greed is good: if you have the money and the connections, don’t worry about due process and legal liability. With a single tweet, Trump made a mockery of equal justice for all.

I’m under no illusion that the president is reformable. He has lived the life of a crook. He will die a crook. But an apex fraud isn’t the cause of our moral decay. He’s a symptom. The rest of us therefore must do what may seem completely obvious but isn’t. We must say and keep saying that corruption is bad. Don’t bother making an argument. Just say it. People need reminding more than they need instruction.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 779
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I’ve been hearing lots of talk about the president losing support among evangelical Christians, his most loyal supporters. The occasion was his order to pull the US military out of Syria, thus giving way to Turkey, which aims to wipe out the Kurds.

The problem for evangelical Christians, as I understand it, isn’t so much the betrayal of our Middle East allies, the very people who fought and died with American soldiers against the murderous Islamic State (ISIS), but the Christian minorities who would surely be slaughtered without protection from a US-Kurdish military alliance.

Once the Americans depart, the Kurds would abandon all responsibility for overseeing jailed ISIS fighters, and they would realign with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to defend themselves against Recep Erdoğan’s ethnic-cleansing-in-all-but-name. That’s what the experts said would happen. Over the weekend, that’s precisely what happened.

The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias wrote Friday that leading evangelical figures appeared to “break ranks” with the president. Erick Erickson, Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson — all influential voices — have said in one way or another that Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds is appalling, shameful, or “in great danger of losing the mandate of heaven,” as Robertson put it. Without them, many Christian innocents would perish.

But all of this is wrong.

Erickson, Graham, Robertson and others are not breaking ranks. They will never break ranks. Trump is precisely the kind of president they want. He is an authoritarian nihilist through and through. So are they. They will offer prayers for Christian minorities — lots and lots of prayers — but they will not use power to bend Trump’s ear.

They will instead continue to support the president, because he is “fighting for them” against “leftists barbarians,” according to Sahil Kapir’s reporting. If standing idle while fellow Christians are massacred is the price they must pay, so be it. Besides, they were the wrong kind of Christian. They were already destined for Hell anyway.

Too uncharitable? I don’t think so.

In fact, mainstream reporters, in their coverage of Trump’s evangelical Christian base, are far too charitable. They take Erickson and others at their word, accepting uncritically the assertion that they have normal and genuinely held beliefs, like any other American. Getting overlooked is that those values are not like any other American’s beliefs. They are perniciously in keeping with various and sundry forms of fascism. These people are opposed to democracy, which matters only to the extent they can use it to achieve authoritarian goals. I mean, ISIS fighters have “values,” too. Yet ISIS fighters do not get sympathetic play in America’s premiere news outlets.

That’s not the only problem.

Because evangelical Christians are Trump’s most loyal supporters, they get the lion’s share of attention. In doing so, mainstream reporters inadvertently give the impression that these Christians are the only ones that matter. Overlooked is a galaxy of Christian belief entwined with the anti-Trump resistance. This sociopolitical dynamic is such that Trump’s liberal critics end up blasting all of Christianity, alienating allies and undermining a powerful religious argument against fascism.

This is important to point out for two reasons.

One, there’s not enough scrutiny of evangelical Christians as Christians. A closer look suggests they have scandalously strayed from God’s path, permitting the sacrilege of autographing copies of the Bible (yes, Trump did this), and turning the president into a kind of Golden Calf. Peter Wehner was right Sunday in saying Trump voters are impervious to facts. Trump is they and they are Trump, so much so that “now it’s not just a defense of Trump, it’s a defense of their defense of Trump. To indict him is to indict themselves, to indict their own judgment, and that’s hard for any human.”

So they have become idolaters, yet reporters are, even now, looking for reaction among evangelical Christians to someone making a video of Trump shooting reporters in a church. They don’t care about murder in a church. It does not offend them, not enough to “break with Trump.” Evangelicals have their Golden Calf, and they can’t quit him.

The other reason why whitewashing all of Christianity is important is because resistance to fascism can’t be premised on mere politics alone. It must be a majoritarian enterprise. It must make room for a liberal religious argument against Trump. Fascism isn’t just anti-democratic. It’s a deep moral wrong opposing liberty and equality. Trump and his evangelical supporters stand on the outside of what many would call the American creed. You could say (I would) that they oppose God.

But we never talk about it that way.

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: 14 October 2019
Word Count: 761
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