“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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Recently a friend who follows the news a bit less obsessively than I do said, “I thought George W. Bush was bad, but it seems like Donald Trump is even worse. What do you think?”

“Well,” I replied, “in terms of causing death and destruction, I suspect Bush still has the edge.” In fact, the U.S.-led forever wars begun under the Bush administration have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan (almost half a million by one respected estimate). And those are only directly caused, violent deaths. Several times that many have reportedly died from hunger, illness, and infrastructure collapse.

Millions more have become refugees. The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) says that, worldwide, “[t]here are almost 2.5 million registered refugees from Afghanistan. They comprise the largest protracted refugee population in Asia and the second largest refugee population in the world.” The numbers for Iraq are even higher. UNHCR reports that 3.3 million Iraqis were displaced by the various conflicts that followed the U.S. invasion of 2003 (though most of them remain in-country). Eleven million people, a quarter of the population, still need humanitarian aid.

Things are so bad that, since early October, Iraqis in Baghdad and some other cities have united across sectarian lines to risk death and injury in demonstrations demanding changes from the government. As Reuters explains it:

So much for Operation Enduring Freedom. In terms of creating sheer human misery, George W. definitely has The Donald beat for now. But despite Trump’s frequently voiced desire “to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he may yet do more harm than his Republican predecessor.

At the very least, he deserves impeachment as much as Bush did.

ITMFA Back in 2006, when Bush was president, a reader of the gay sex-advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage suggested a campaign to “Impeach the Mother-Fucker Already.” ITMFA was the mock acronym — a play on Savage’s frequent advice to readers in bad relationships that they should DTMFA (the “D” being for “dump”). In response, Savage would have a bunch of ITMFA pins and buttons made and raise about $20,000, which he split between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two Democratic senatorial campaigns.

In 2017, Savage again took stock of the country’s situation. “I didn’t think I’d see a worse president than George W. Bush in my lifetime. But here we are,” he wrote. So he added a new line of T-shirts, hats, and mugs to the ITMFA store, and sales have allowed him to donate more than $250,000 to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Of course, Savage wasn’t the only one already talking about impeachment in 2017. That June, Representatives Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Al Green (D-TX) actually presented an impeachment resolution on the House floor. Its single Article of Impeachment accused President Trump of using the power of his office to “hinder and cause the termination of” the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election by threatening and ultimately firing FBI Director James Comey. It also cited Trump’s efforts to get Comey to “curtail” an investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn who had briefly served as the president’s national security advisor. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about calls he made to Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. soon after Trump’s election victory.

Since October 2017, Representative Green has repeatedly introduced a different set of Articles focused on the president’s obvious and vocal racism:

“In his capacity as President of the United States… Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the society of the United States, brought shame and dishonor to the office of President of the United States, sowing discord among the people of the United States by associating the majesty and dignity of the presidency with causes rooted in white supremacy, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or neo-Nazism on one or more of the following occasions…”

The resolution goes on to list a number of Trump’s racist interventions, including calling some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazi protestors who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (and one of whom murdered counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd), “very fine people”; sharing on social media anti-Muslim videos originally posted by Britain First, a minor English far-right party; attempting to prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. by executive order; attacking professional football players for taking a knee during the national anthem; accusing Puerto Ricans of throwing the U.S. “budget out of whack” in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma; and insulting Representative Frederica Wilson, an African American congresswoman, by calling her “wacky.”

The House has repeatedly rebuffed Green’s efforts, most recently in July 2019, when it voted 332-95 to table the measure, effectively killing it.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

Impeachment fever rising As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, even with a 54% majority in the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership has long resisted calls to impeach the president, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a masterful job restraining the party’s left wing. Whatever I thought of her position on impeachment then, I had to admire her consummate parliamentary skills. She happens to represent my congressional district, so I’ve been a Pelosi-watcher ever since I worked for her opponent in her first congressional primary in 1987.

Impeachment advocates had hoped this would change with the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the report did document numerous presidential efforts to obstruct the inquiry, the special counsel declined to speculate on the question of Trump’s guilt, arguing that Justice Department rulings prohibit the indictment of a sitting president. Nevertheless, in his first public statement, Mueller made it clear that his team’s work did not exonerate the president: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

With their eyes on the 2020 election season, however, Democratic Party centrists continued to argue that, because Trump would inevitably survive a trial in the Republican-dominated Senate, impeachment was a futile exercise. Worse, it might well stir up the president’s base and so improve his chances of reelection.

That all changed this August with a whistleblower’s revelation that the president had used a July 25 telephone call to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. At the time, Trump had, without explanation, also frozen $391 million in U.S. military aid previously appropriated by Congress to help Ukraine resist separatists and their Russian allies fighting on its territory.

Under pressure, the White House released a two-page synopsis of the call, thinking that this would calm things down. It had the opposite effect. In that document, which is not quite a transcript and might not be complete, Zelensky, a comedian elected president after playing that very role in a popular TV series, told Trump that Ukraine was “almost ready to buy more Javelins [U.S. anti-tank missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.”

Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…” (The ellipsis, which may or may not represent missing material, marks the end of his sentence.) Trump was referring to a discredited conspiracy theory in which a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server, hacked by Russia during election 2016 according to the Mueller investigation, ended up in Ukraine. (There is, in fact, no missing server, here or in Ukraine.)

Later, Trump asked Zelensky to look into a previous Ukrainian government’s ousting of prosecutor Viktor Shokin for corruption. Specifically, he wanted his counterpart to check out the theory that then-Vice President Joe Biden engineered Shokin’s dismissal to protect his son, Hunter, who then held a seat on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch that was under investigation. It seems clear that Shokin really was corrupt and that Joe Biden’s role in his ouster was unremarkable. (It seems equally clear, as Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox, that the younger Biden “had no apparent qualifications for the job,” which paid up to $50,000 a month, “except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.”)

Finally, Donald Trump had done something bad enough — strong-arming a foreign leader into digging up dirt on a likely Democratic Party presidential candidate — to convince the House leadership to initiate impeachment proceedings. Trump had already openly called on Russia to release 33,000 supposedly missing Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 election. He had now invited a second country to interfere in U.S. elections and then tripled down by publicly asking China to do the same. All of this should be enough to demonstrate that the president has violated his oath of office on multiple occasions. ITMFA.

High(er) crimes and misdemeanors Extorting political favors is bad enough, but Donald J. Trump has done so much worse, even if his true highest crimes and misdemeanors aren’t ever likely to make it into the Articles of Impeachment finally sent to the Senate. These, to my mind, would include:

• Violating U.S. responsibilities toward refugees under international humanitarian law as defined in treaties and conventions this country long ago signed and ratified: In his behavior towards asylum-seekers and other migrants at our southern border, Trump, who began his 2015 election campaign by denouncing Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” has as president turned his back on decades of international consensus on the rights of refugees. He, of course, oversaw an administration that instituted a cruel policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants, causing thousands of children to be cut off from their parents. He also allowed such children to be held for weeks in stinking, filthy cages near the U.S. border.

More recently, he has pursued “safe third country” deals with the very nations — El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — that people are fleeing, in part, because of drug cartel violence and their governments’ inability, or unwillingness, to stop it. How can Mexico, for example, be a “safe” alternative for Salvadorans fleeing gang violence when its own citizens are seeking asylum in the United States for similar reasons?

He has also slashed to 18,000 the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States annually. (One hundred and ten thousand were accepted in Barack Obama’s final year as president.) He has, in other words, caused the country to turn its back on its international responsibilities, as well as on millions of human beings in desperate need of help around the world.

• Unlike other wealthy people elected president, Donald Trump refused from the outset to put his assets in a blind trust, arguing that “conflicts of interest laws simply do not apply to the president.” The purpose of such a trust is to prevent officials from knowing whether actions they take will result in personal financial benefit. Instead, Trump retained ownership of all his assets through a revocable trust, run for his sole benefit by his own children, and about which he receives regular updates.

The Constitution’s “emoluments” clause prohibits federal office-holders from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Nevertheless, Trump has continued to benefit personally from money spent by foreign governments at his hotels (and golf clubs), especially his still relatively new Trump International Hotel a few blocks from the White House.

And it’s not only foreign diplomats, domestic lobbyists, and the like who have felt obliged to patronize such Trump properties. On a recent visit to Ireland, Vice President Mike Pence chose to stay at the president’s Doonbeg hotel and golf club, a distant 181 miles from Dublin where his meetings were being held. But there was no presidential pressure involved, as Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short assured reporters: “I don’t think it was a request, like a command. I think that it was a suggestion.” (It’s always possible, of course, that a presidential suggestion carries more weight than your average TripAdvisor review.) The New York Times reports that Pence’s Great America Committee PAC has spent more than $225,000 at the Trump International Hotel, among other Trump properties, since 2017.

Not to be outdone by mere elected officials, the U.S. Air Force has acknowledged that it has lodged airplane crews at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland at least 40 times since 2015, most of them since he was elected, at a cost of more than $184,000.

And undoubtedly such examples just scratch the surface of what a president who happens to be an international real-estate developer can rake in when he puts his mind to it.

• He has caused this country to unilaterally violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement that successfully confined Iran’s nuclear development to serving its domestic energy needs: In May 2018, the president rashly pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration had successfully negotiated. This move has not only induced Iran to begin violating the terms of the agreement, but has destabilized the balance of power in the Middle East, leading to tit-for-tat vessel seizures and further inflaming relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in dangerous ways. In September, for example, the Trump administration blamed Iran for a drone and missile attack that seriously damaged two key installations where much of the Saudi’s oil is refined.

• His dishonest, vicious, and racially charged rhetoric has cheapened political discourse in this country and is helping to hollow out our democracy: Free conversation about political issues, including sharp disagreements, is essential to a democratic society. But such conversations are only possible when the people involved can assume that everyone will make a good faith effort to tell the truth as they see it, to argue honestly, and to respect each other’s right to participate in the conversation. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called this approach “discourse ethics” and it should be at the very heart of democratic life.

Trump, of course, is a specialist in telling lies (more than 12,000 of them during his presidency so far, according to the count of the Washington Post). When the head of a democratic nation routinely treats lying as if it were a kind of truth telling in disguise, it changes the rules of political conversation. How can you argue with someone who “trumps” you not with logic, but with “alternative facts”?

Add to that the president’s constant use of insults, especially racially charged ones, to rule some participants out of the conversation altogether. He typically employs adhesive nicknames to “prove” (without evidence) claims about his opponents’ failings (“Crooked Hillary [Clinton],” “Shifty [Adam] Schiff”). Many of his ugliest insults are directed at women of color, calling African American congresswoman Maxine Waters “crazy” with an “extraordinarily low IQ,” for example. Perhaps most famously, he tweeted that four progressive Democrats (and women of color) known as “The Squad” should “go back” to where they came from:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

Of course, the four (New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib) are, in fact, part of “our government.” They are members of Congress. And by “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” Trump must have meant the United States, because that’s where three of them were born. The fourth, Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Remembering Robert Drinan Thinking about Trump’s impending impeachment reminds me of one of my heroes, Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and congressman from Massachusetts in the Nixon years. He was the first in Congress to call for the president’s impeachment — not for the coverup of what the White House called “a third-rate burglary” of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, but for what he considered a much worse crime: the multi-year secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia.

That bombing campaign had begun under President Lyndon Johnson, but it expanded in a staggering way in the Nixon years. According to Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program, the U.S. flew more than 231,000 sorties over 115,000 sites, dumping “half a million or more tons of munitions” on that country. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger memorably relayed President Nixon’s orders on the subject to General Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Drinan asked his colleagues in Congress, “Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?” Their answer was that they could, although Nixon resigned before the House could vote on its articles of impeachment.

I’m reminded of Robert Drinan now, because once again we’re threatening to impeach a president, this time for a third-rate attempt to extort minor political gain from the government of a vulnerable country (without even the decency of a cover-up). But we’re ignoring Trump’s highest crime, worse even than the ones mentioned above.

He has promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, the 2015 international agreement that was meant to begin a serious international response to the climate crisis now heating the planet. Meanwhile, he’s created an administration that is working in every way imaginable to ensure that yet more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. He is, in other words, a threat not just to the American people, or to the rule of law, but to the whole human species.

And for that he richly deserves to be impeached and convicted.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Copyright ©2019 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 October 2019
Word Count: 3,105
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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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We now know the president asked America’s No. 1 geopolitical rival to “investigate” Joe Biden and his family. CNN reported the news on the same day Donald Trump said on the White House lawn in front of TV cameras that China ought to “look into” the Bidens. To me, it seems quite plausible that he knew his June 18 call would leak at some point. So he got out in front of it to make his crimes appear all too normal.

They are not normal, of course. They are crimes whether in diplomacy with President Xi and in nationally broadcast remarks at home. They are crimes whether we see them or not, because it is criminal to harness the government to frame one’s enemies for serial crimes one is committing.  The president is banking on his great gift for limitless lying so we no longer believe the evidence of our eyes. He’s turning “unreality,” to use Jason Stanley’s term,” into reality, turning himself into the only source of truth. He believes he can break the law in front of us, and we won’t notice.

But I think we overlook something if we remain focused on the bits and pieces of criminality that are now coming out. We must try, as much as we can, to compose a larger picture of what’s happening. We must contend with the possibility — actually, the likelihood — that this president has been seeking favors from international friends and adversaries for a lot longer than he’s been president. In the process of putting this picture together, I hope we understand that what we are seeing now illuminates what we could not see in the recent past but that was nevertheless unfolding in plain sight.

Here’s what I mean.

With Ukraine, Australia and now China, the president is colluding (or trying to) with international powers in an effort to defraud the American people. That’s what’s happening. But let’s be honest with ourselves. This is probably not the first time.

We know it isn’t. On July 27, 2016, during a press conference, then candidate Donald Trump said on national television: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” He was referring to the scandal of the time involving Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

That same day Russian agents hacked into email accounts associated with Clinton’s personal office. Ultimately, this was one of many fronts in which the Kremlin prosecuted a secret years-long cyberwar against the US in the run-up to the 2016 election. Along with distributing stolen Democratic National Committee files, defrauding users of Facebook and Twitter, and reaching out to Trump campaign staffers, Vladimir Putin, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, “fulfilled the dream of every Soviet leader — to stick it to the United States.”

It doesn’t take collusion per se to be found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud. It takes merely accepting something you should not accept. In Trump’s case, he welcomed Russian sabotage, as it was, according to the special counsel’s report, entirely bent on undercutting Hillary Clinton’s White House bid. Trump was the sole beneficiary of Putin’s putsch, but he has denied to this day that he’s ever been any such thing.

He has denied it, but he knows it’s true. According to a report last Friday in the Washington Post, the president told Russian emissaries during a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office he was not concerned about the Kremlin’s interference in 2016. Trump said that the US “did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.”

The report goes on to explain the context of his remarks — FBI Director James Comey’s firing, for one thing — as well as Trump’s nihilism. Unsaid, however, is that in saying that all countries meddle, the president acknowledged, tacitly, that the Russians did, too. Knowing the Kremlin helped him defeat Clinton, it seems unlikely that he would not seek aid and assistance from other countries, friend or foe, to win again in 2020.

Put this all together, and you have a picture of a president who cheated to win and is preparing to cheat again, because he must. None of us quite had the courage three years ago to see the evidence of our own eyes. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to believe anyone would ask Russia for help to win. But now, the idea that Trump would cheat isn’t strange. In a sense, it’s normal, something we expect the president to do.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 780
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I have no doubt there are Americans out there thinking that impeachment sounds pretty abnormal. They are, of course, right. It’s out of the ordinary — and should be. Our leaders can’t use the constitution to sabotage the people’s will. They can’t, anyway, without electoral punishment. But I think there’s a better way to think about it.

Impeachment is a constitutional tool designed for times of extraordinary abnormality — say, for instance, when a president presides over an obscenely lawless administration. That’s certainly what we are seeing. Time and again, the House Democrats have issued lawful subpoenas to gain access to people and resources in their constitutional duty of conducting executive oversight. Time and again, they have been blocked by a president refusing to recognize their co-equal authority. If the Congress can’t conduct oversight, the executive functions absent accountability. If the executive functions absent accountability, our belief in equal justice before the law is an empty gesture.

Impeachment is, indeed, highly unusual in and of itself. But it should not be understood outside of its context, which, in our current case, is one of extraordinary presidential lawlessness to the point of collusion with an enemy government seeking to injure our republic. So we should see what the House Democrats are doing for what it is. They are not, as the president alleged last night, fomenting a coup d’etat. They are not meeting abnormal politics with more and greater abnormal politics. The House Democrats are instead seeking a constitutional solution to a constitutional crisis.

They are, in other words, trying to bring politics back to normal.

In slinging the word “coup” around, the president is betting that most Americans don’t know what impeachment is. Given the decline of civics education and ubiquity of indifference to citizen responsibility, that’s a good bet. So it’s crucially important to remember that impeachment does not mean firing Trump. It does not mean voiding an election. It does not mean Hillary Clinton gets to be president. It does not mean any of the conspiracy theories, falsehoods and lies Trump and his defenders are telling in order to discredit and undermine the attempt to bring politics back to normal.

Impeachment is the same thing as indictment, and indictment means nothing other than gathering sufficient, credible and concrete evidence to convince a “grand jury,” in this case the House of Representatives, to send the accused, in this case the president, to “trial.” A “prosecutor,” in this case a House member, then presents the argument to a “trial jury,” in this case 100 Senators. In any case, it takes 67 votes to remove the accused from office, a standard so high that it has never happened to a president in our entire history. And even if that did happen, the man constitutionally positioned to take over is the vice president, who, as you may recall, is Republican Mike Pence.

So … it’s not a coup attempt. Not even close.

And it’s not, as Trump alleged this morning, “winning an election” with impeachment. In the event that the president is indicted, and in the unlikely event that he’s removed, all the Democrats are likely get in the end is what they have — control of the House.

It’s worth noting that the more the Democrats follow the path of bringing politics back to normal, the more this president and his allies follow the path of inflaming politics, which is to say the path of flat-out fascism in some cases. Some of Trump’s authoritarian followers are goading him into declaring some kind of “civil war” if the Democrats press on. It’s worth noting, too, that Trump is in kinship with what was called “brownshirts” in 20th-century parlance but more accurately called “magahats” today. The El Paso massacre clearly illustrated that violence, bloodshed and murder are political options for Americans seeing democracy as a threat to their “way of life.”

The Democrats are not only trying to bring politics back to normal. They are defining what normal is, and what it is not, and in doing so, they are redrawing by way of reaffirming the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy such as America’s. Acceptable behavior does not include stonewalling the Congress in its oversight capacity. It does not include colluding, even tacitly, with foreign entities to win elections. It does not include defrauding the American people. It does not include a range of crimes and outrages we have seen during the Donald Trump presidency.

To be sure, the Democrats risk greater polarization as they attempt to reduce it, but that’s a risk they must take in faith that the rest of the citizenry is behind them.

I think we are. We’d all like to see normalcy return.

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 October 2019
Word Count: 785
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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long way to go, and it’s going to feel longer by the time we get to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soft deadline of year’s end. But last week demonstrated that more Americans are now more aware of Donald Trump’s extraordinary weakness, and that we are approaching a tipping point at which that weakness is going to compound itself exponentially. The weaker this president becomes, the weaker this president will get; the closer we get to the end, whatever and whenever that is, the more Trump’s behavior is going to prove the case against him.

Consider this morning.

Trump accused Adam Schiff of treason on Twitter, even calling for the House Intelligence Committee chairman’s arrest. He also yoked his fate to the threat of a “civil war like fracture,” provoking at least one GOP representative to describe that as “beyond repugnant.” The more Trump demands that Republicans die for his sins, we are going to see, I think, more Republicans say they’d rather not. Don’t get me wrong. Lots and lots of Republicans stand ready to disembowel themselves. But all the republic needs is the right number of Republicans to make the right choice at the right time.

Then there was last week.

A series of public opinion surveys suggested a step-by-step progression of where we are heading. First, it was Democratic voters. After the party unified behind the speaker in moving toward an impeachment inquiry, polls showed approval among Democrats climbing upward. Then it was “independents,” that is, mostly disaffected Republican voters. Polls showed they increasingly approve of impeachment after the White House released a memorandum summarizing the president’s treasonous “shakedown,” as Pelosi calls it, of the new Ukrainian president. Then it was the press.

There are no polls measuring the opinion of members of the Washington press corps, as far as I know, but if press behavior is any indication (and I’m primarily talking here about the cable and broadcast news), the press corps is coming to a conclusion about Trump, perhaps permanently. Chris Wallace at Fox, Scott Pelley at CBS News and even NBC’s Chuck Todd, he of jellied spine, have shown greater intolerance of Republican talking points, propaganda and lies. That’s because the Democrats are united, the citizenry is more focused, and the evidence is immediate, hard and damning. Put all the above factors together, and you have a president who’s acting wildly because he can no longer manipulate the press in ways that mask his extraordinarily weakness.

Again, his weakness was always there.

It was just hard for some to see as long as the press continued to give Trump a never-ending supply of benefit-of-the-doubt. Providing good faith in the face of conspicuous bad faith has resulted, among other things, in ludicrous headlines about his wanting to be impeached in order to turn the tables on the Democrats. This despite that very strategy never—and I mean, not once—working for the president with one major exception: in 2016 when the Russians gave him an assist by sabotaging Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, Trump’s instinct to double down has burned him every single time he’s tangled with Nancy Pelosi. Most of the republic has figured Trump out. In a sense, the coming impeachment inquiry is a kind of waiting for the rest of America to catch up.

Trump’s instinct to double down is hastening the end (whatever and whenever that will be) as well as rendering ridiculous any claim that he’d resign before being removed. Remember Trump’s rationale for voluntarily releasing the smoking gun? It was to “prove” the Democrats had nothing on him. Either a) he didn’t know what was in it, b) he believed he could con you into believing whatever he wanted you to believe, or c) he believed his handpicked goons at the Department of Justice, who told him, yes boss, like you said, nothing in it. As for resigning, that would require immunity of a kind that would confound the Democrats’ case for holding him accountable. In any event, the president, being Donald Trump, is likely to try bringing others down with him.

To be honest, I was wondering if I had things wrong. Until last week, nothing had changed. Trump was weak but it made no difference. Then everything changed.

Now his weakness matters more than ever.

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 September 2019
Word Count: 723
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Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City — one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with four million others across all seven continents. Then I came home and promptly collapsed. Which tells you one thing: I’m not 16 years old like Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who almost singlehandedly roused a sleeping planet and is now described as “the Joan of Arc of climate change.” Nor am I the age of just about any of the demonstrators I stopped to chat with that afternoon, however briefly, while madly scribbling down their inventive protest signs in a little notebook.

But don’t think I was out of place either. After all, the kids had called on adults to turn out that day and offer them some support. They understandably wanted to know that someone — other than themselves (and a bunch of scientists) — was truly paying attention to the global toilet down which their future was headed. I’m 75 and proud to say that I was walking that Friday with three friends, two of whom were older than me, amid vast crowds of enthusiastic, drum-beating, guitar-playing, chanting, shouting, climate-striking kids and their supporters of every age and hue. The streets of downtown Manhattan Island were so packed that sometimes, in the blazing sun of that September afternoon, we were barely inching along.

It was impressive, exuberant, and, yes, let me say it again, exhausting. And that sun, beautiful as it was, didn’t help at all. At one point, I was so warm that I even stripped down to my T-shirt. I have to admit, though, that I felt that orb was shining so brightly at the behest of those young school strikers to make a point about what planet we were now on. It was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit during that march, which fortunately was to a park on the tip of Manhattan, not to somewhere in Jacobabad, Pakistan, now possibly the hottest city on Earth (and growing hotter by the year) with a temperature that only recently hit 124 degrees Fahrenheit.

That night, back in my living room, I slumped on the sofa, pillows packed behind me, and turned on NBC Nightly News to watch anchor Lester Holt report on the breaking stories of that historic day in which climate strikers and their supporters had turned out in staggering numbers from distant Pacific islands to Africa, Europe, the Americas, and — yes — Antarctica. Even — bless them — a small group of young Afghans in that desperately embattled land was somehow still capable of thinking about the future of our planet and risked their lives to demonstrate! “I want to march because if I don’t survive this war,” said Sarah Azizi, one of those Afghans, “at least I would have done something for the next generation that they can survive.” (Where, though, were the Chinese demonstrators in a country that now releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other, though the U.S. remains by far the largest emitter in history?)

Let me add one thing: I’m a religious viewer of Lester Holt or at least what I can take of his show (usually about 15 minutes or so). The reason? Because I feel it gives me a sense of what an aging slice of Americans take in as the “news” daily on our increasingly embattled planet. If you happen to be one of the striking school kids with a certain perspective on the adults who have gotten us into our present global fix, then you won’t be shocked to learn that those “Fridays for Future” global demonstrations proved to be the sixth story of the day on that broadcast. But hey, who can blame Lester Holt & Co? (“Tonight, several breaking headlines as we come on the air!”) After all, not far from Chicago, an SUV (“Breaking news! Shocking video!”) had busted ever so photogenically into a mall and rambled around for a while knocking things over (but hurting no one) before the driver was arrested. No comparison with millions of human beings going on strike over the heating of a planet on which life forms of every sort are in increasing jeopardy.

Then, of course, there was story number two: the “deadly tour bus crash” in Utah (“Also breaking, the highway horror!”) that killed four people near a national park. Hey, no comparison with a planet going down. Then there was the obvious crucial third story of the night, the “surprise move” of football’s New England Patriots to drop Antonio Brown, “the superstar facing sexual misconduct allegations,” from their roster. Fourth came an actual weather emergency, “the growing disaster, a new round of relentless rain on the Texas coast, the catastrophic cutting-off of communities, the death toll rising!” And staggering downpours from Tropical Depression Imelda, 40 inches worth in the Houston area, were indeed news. Of course, Lester offered not the slightest hint, despite the demonstrations that day, that there might be any connection between the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history and climate change. And then, of course, there was Donald Trump. (“Allegations President Trump pressured Ukraine’s leader eight times in a single phone call to investigate the son of rival Joe Biden!”) He’s everywhere and would probably have been bitter, had he noticed, to come in a rare and distant fifth that night. He was expectably shown sitting in his usual lost-boy pose (hands between legs, leaning forward), denying that this latest “whistleblower firestorm” meant anything at all. And finally, sixth and truly last, at least in the introductory line-up of stories to come, was humanity’s “firestorm” and the children who, unlike the grown-ups of NBC Nightly News, actually grasp the importance of what’s happening to this planet and so many of the species on it, themselves included. (“…And walking out of class, millions of students demanding action on climate change…”)

As I’ve written elsewhere, this sort of coverage is beginning to change as, in 2019, the climate crisis enters our world in a far more obvious way.  Still, it’s fairly typical of how the grownups of this planet have acted in these years, typical of what initially upset Greta Thunberg. Admittedly, even that day and the next, there was far better coverage to be found in the mainstream media. The Guardian, for instance, impressively streamed climate-crisis news all day and, that evening, the PBS NewsHour made it at least a decently covered second story of the day (after, well, you-know-who and that secret whistleblower). Meanwhile, a new initiative launched by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation magazine to heighten coverage of the subject has already drawn at least 300 outlets globally as partners. (Even Lester Holt has begun giving it a little more attention.)

And though it may not be timely enough, change is coming in polling, in the media, and elsewhere, and those children I saw marching in such profusion that day will indeed help make it happen. Opinion will continue to change in the heat of the oncoming moment, as in the end will governments, and that will matter, even if not as fast as would be either useful or advisable.

“Don’t be a fossil fool” Let me stop now and look back on that New York demonstration, more than a week gone, where, at one point, people all around me waving hand-made blue signs visibly meant to be ocean waves were chanting, “Sea levels are rising and so are we!”

To understand what’s happening on this planet of ours from the bottom up, what our future might truly hold in a post-Trumpian world (that’s still a world), I wish you could have spent a little time, as I did that day, with those marchers. But I think there’s a way you still can. As I mentioned, I spent those hours, in part, feverishly jotting down what was written on the endless array of protest signs — some held, some pasted onto or slung over shirts, some, in fact, actual T-shirts (“No More B[oil], Leave it in the ground”). Some had clearly been professionally printed up. (Perfect for the age of Trump, for instance: “The universe is made of protons, neutrons, electrons, and morons.”) Many were, as participants told me, not original but slogans found online and turned into personal expressions of feeling, often with plenty of decoration. That would, for instance, include the mock-Trumpian “Make America Greta Again” and “There Is No Plan[et] B. Green New Deal!”).

Many of the signs were, however, clearly original, some done with ultimate care, others scrawled wildly. Some were profane (“Fuck Trump, the Earth is Dying!” from a 14-year-old boy or “Clean the Earth, it’s not Uranus”); some were starkly blunt (“Act now before the show is over”); some politically oriented (“We’re not red or blue, we’re green”); some pop-culturally on target (“Winter is not coming”); some wry (“Don’t be a Fossil Fool”); some politically of the moment (“Real science, Fake president,” “Less AC, More AOC”); some critiques of capitalism (“If we can save the banks, we can save the world,” “We can’t eat money, we can’t drink oil”); some wise (“The climate is changing, why aren’t we?”); some culturally sly (“#MeToo, said Mother Earth”); or clever indeed (“This sign is reusable, STOP AND THINK”).

There were those two kids I ran into. The younger, a girl of 10, was carrying a homemade sign that said, “Dear Donald, Hate to break it to you, but climate change is real. XOXO Love, Earth”; her brother, 14, held up a two-word sign all his own that simply said, “Mulch Trump.” Touché! A college student’s sign read, “I am studying for a future that is being destroyed.” A 20-year-old woman held one that said, pungently enough in our present American universe, “Eco not Ego.”

A boy, 8, was blunt: “Save our future.” An 11-year-old girl no less blunt: “If you won’t act like adults, we will.” A 10-year-old boy had written plaintively: “I’m too old 2 die,” while another, a year older, offered this mordant message: “I don’t want to live on Mars. I want to live in Manhattan 30 years from now.” Many signs were, in their own way, upbeat, but some were deeply dystopian as in one woman’s that said: “Don’t think of this summer as the HOTTEST summer in the last 125 years. Think of it as the coolest summer of the NEXT 125 years.”

There was the woman with a sign that read “Science is not a liberal conspiracy.” When my friend congratulated her on it, she responded, “I wish I hadn’t been wearing this sign for seven years!” There was the woman carrying a sign that proclaimed, “Here for my son’s future.” Mounted on it was a photo of a bright-looking baby boy. When asked, she assured me with a smile that he was indeed her child whom she had given this line: “Mom, why didn’t you do more?”

And if you don’t think this — multiplied by millions across the planet — is hopeful, despite heatmongers like Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro now being in power, think again.

Let me assure you, I know what it feels like when a movement is ending, when you’re watching a nightmare as if in the rearview mirror, when people are ready to turn their backs on some horror and pretend it’s not happening. That was certainly what it felt like as the streets emptied of demonstrators in 2003 — and there had indeed been millions of them across the planet then, too — in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. It will not, however, be as easy to turn away from climate change as it was from the Iraq War and its consequences (if, at least, you didn’t live in the Middle East).

The new climate crisis movement is, I suspect, neither a flash in the pan (since global warming will ensure that our “pan” only gets hotter in the years to come), nor a movement about to die. It’s visibly a movement being born.

“And I mean it!” There was the 63-year-old grandmother carrying a sign that said: “I want my granddaughter to have a future! She’s due on February 1, 2020.” My heart went out to her, because the afternoons I spend with my own grandson are the joys of my life. (He was marching elsewhere that day in a self-decorated T-shirt that said, “Plant more trees.”) Yet there’s seldom one of those afternoons when, at some unexpected moment, my heart doesn’t suddenly sink as I think about the planet I’m leaving him on.

So, even at my age, that march meant something deep and true to me. Just being there with those kids, a generation that will have to grow up amid fossil-fuelized nightmares whose sponsors, ranging from Big Energy companies to figures like Donald Trump, are intent on committing the greatest crime in human history. It’s certainly strange, not to say horrific, to have so many powerful men (and they are men) intent on quite literally heating this planet to the boiling point for their own profit, political and economic, and so obviously ready to say to hell with the rest of you, to hell with the future.

So, yes, there’s always the possibility that civilization as we know it might be in the process of ending on this planet. But there’s another possibility as well, one lodged in the living hopes and dreams of all those kids across a world that is already, in a sense, beginning to burn. It’s the possibility that something else is beginning, too. And it’s never too late for something new. Increasing numbers of the young are now starting to make demands and, in the wake of that march, I have the feeling that the demanding won’t stop until they get at least some of what they want — and the rest of us so desperately need.

In the end, I’m with the eight-year-old boy who had clipped (quite literally) to the back of his T-shirt what may have been my favorite sign of the march. Begun by him but obviously partially written out by an adult at his inspiration (and then decorated by him), it said: “I’m not cleaning up my room until the grownups clean up the planet — and I mean it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

As well he should!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Copyright ©2019 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 September 2019
Word Count: 2,397
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The White House released Wednesday a memo of the July 25 call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That call is at the heart of the whistleblower complaint and the Democrats’ imminent impeachment proceedings. The memo, which is not a transcript, was also expected to be a snow job akin to the US attorney general’s letter to the Congress “summarizing” the Mueller Report.

It was anything but.

In it, the president asks Zelensky to work with William Barr to investigate Joe Biden. Trump said he would meet Zelensky if he promised to launch an inquiry. Trump appears addled by a conspiracy theory, too. The Washington Post: Trump “seems to suggest Hillary Clinton’s private email server is in Ukraine and asserts that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation started with that country. He repeatedly says Zelensky should work with Attorney General William P. Barr or his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Giuliani had separately pressed Ukrainian officials for a Biden inquiry.”

It’s all right there.

Violation of campaign finance law (contributions not limited to money from foreigners). Collusion as well as quid pro quo (I’ll do this if you do that). These two times two (he wants a Biden inquiry but also dirt on the Democrats from Clinton’s server.) Not to mention a suite of moral wrongs, including the violation of his oath to defend and protect the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi was right: “The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

Today’s revelations were so very stunning that at least one prominent commentator who had been convinced that the Senate Republicans would acquit the president no matter what had second thoughts. Michael Cohen is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Today, he said: “I can’t believe I’m going to say this but after reading this transcript I’m not sure how confident anyone should be that Trump would survive a Senate trial.”

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

After all, this is a memo, not a transcript. We also haven’t seen the whistleblower complaint, nor have we heard from the whistleblower (that person is expected to speak soon with lawmakers in the House and Senate). There’s still a lot to sort through. We have not yet seen the right-wing media’s response. And as veteran Washington watchers are wont to say, things are probably going to get much worse. Still, given how bad this one document is, it’s worth asking: what the hell was the president thinking?

What was he thinking when he authorized the release this memo after Pelosi said her caucus would launch an impeachment inquiry? He couldn’t even wait for the speaker finish before tweeting: “You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!”

I have a couple of theories.

One, Trump doesn’t care what the memo actually says, because what it actually says would not stop him from trying to convince you of what he wants you to believe it says. The whole truth, in other words, is not empirically independent of human consciousness. The truth is whatever he says it is. My bet is that Trump believes he can manipulate the press corps into reporting whatever he says the memo says, and, with enough repetition by the Republican Party, he can get his “truth” to stick.

Remember what I told you about the Sharpie? When Trump drew a black semi-circle on a weather map to show Hurricane Dorian’s impact on Alabama? Some said it was a sign of mental illness. No, it was a symbol illustrating everything about Trumpism. I wrote: “Being wrong, or being right for that matter, is immaterial when the authoritarian’s objective is getting you to accept what he says as the only truth. Moreover, the more ridiculous his statements — like using a Sharpie on a weather map to “prove” he was right — the more pleasure he’ll derive from its ultimate acceptance.”

That’s one theory. The other theory as to why Trump released a smoking gun is that he believes the US Department of Justice’s conclusion that there was nothing illegal or improper about asking a foreigner leader to investigate a political rival. Again, the Post: “Career prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department’s criminal division then reviewed the transcript of the call … and determined the facts ‘could not make out and cannot make out’ the appropriate basis for an investigation.” The italics are mine to suggest Barr’s hand in the process of determining that something illegal wasn’t.

Barr, of course, has done just about everything an attorney general can do to shield an executive from constitutional accountability. (He is now entangled legally in much the way Rudy Giuliani now is.) The delicious irony, if my theory is correct, is that in telling Trump there was nothing illegal or improper about asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival, the president ended up releasing the document showing everyone what he’d done. More ironic, again if my theory is correct, is that the man who believes he can create truth by speaking is exposed for believing his own lies.

Which is all the more reason, I think, for the Democrats to proceed with their impeachment inquiry. A liberal democracy should not, indeed cannot, tolerate for long an authoritarian executive who can’t discern fact from fiction in normal times, much less during the perpetration of treason and other high crimes in broad daylight.

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 September 2019
Word Count: 947
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I have spent considerable time and energy defending the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have praised her poise and her shrewd leadership, especially her permitting an impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee to move forward while shielding simultaneously the most vulnerable Democrats. I have even heralded her as the most effective member of the Trump-era resistance. But now?

I’m done.

In the past, I gushed over Nancy Pelosi’s brilliance in playing both sides of the impeachment question. I loved how she said that the House would follow the facts wherever they may lead, even if the facts led to impeachment, while at the same time saying that impeachment was divisive and, therefore, required bipartisan support. I believed her ambivalence was defensible on the grounds that it allowed the Democrats to deliberate without giving away the game. But that ambivalence has resulted in something dangerous and unacceptable: a president with no one holding him back.

Pelosi’s position can no longer be defended.

Moreover, I believe she faces a crisis of confidence if this week she fails to choose wisely. She has been exceedingly concerned about the fears of a minority of Democrats, particularly those who won Republican-leaning districts last year. She has been exceedingly unconcerned about the demands of a growing majority of Democrats who stand appalled at the sight of a president sabotaging the American people.

After Thursday, the House Speaker may end up forfeiting the moral authority she has worked hard to earn. She must understand that inaction equals action, and that if she chooses unwisely, she risks complicity in our slow-motion cataract toward autocracy.

Donald Trump is above the law. This is a fact.

This is a fact that none of us cares for, that none of us condones, and that most of us fear. But it is a fact, nonetheless, because no one with constitutional authority has been willing to check Trump’s lawlessness. He is committing crimes others would be prosecuted for. He is thus beggaring any meaning of equality before the law. He is untouchable. Recall what Stephen Miller said in 2017: “Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Trump was not protecting our country, of course, when he demanded that the new Ukrainian president help him win reelection in 2020 in exchange for millions in US aid. Trump was selling out his country. He was undermining the people’s sovereignty. He was betraying public trust and the common good. He was misusing tax-payer dollars. (His gambit was extortion after all.) He was abusing the powers of his office. And this is only what we know about. Corruption of presidential magnitude tends to be a “vampire squid.” Its tendrils go everywhere sucking the virtue out of everything.

Yet the “most effective member of the resistance” had little new to say Friday except that she hopes to pass future laws authorizing future prosecutors to be able to indict future presidents of alleged future crimes. She did draw a bright line, though.

We must hold her to it.

She said that if the president continues to obstruct the Congress in its investigation of the whistleblower complaint (which is what started all this) he then “will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation” (my italics). The speaker said that she expected the acting National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire to hand over the complaint when he testifies on Thursday.

What happens if he doesn’t?

If she does not escalate the conflict between the branches of government — that is, use the tools available to her, including arresting and detaining uncooperative administration officials — she risks surrendering the moral high ground. If she fails to act, in other words, she cannot continue to speak morally while acting amorally. The speaker cannot keep using, unchallenged, the language of the constitution and democratic norms if she proves unwilling to do everything in her power to stop the president’s lawlessness and to restore equilibrium to the constitutional order.

If she does not take meaningful action after the administration crosses her bright line (assuming that it does), Pelosi will in effect reveal her weakness as a leader as well as her complicity in Trump’s lawlessness. She can be honest, or she can be dishonest. The speaker can say she won’t act out of fear that her party will lose its majority in the House. That would be honest. But she cannot accuse Trump of profaning the rule of law if she won’t defend it. That would be dishonest. Worse, that would be fraudulent.

The Democrats won the midterms on the promise that they would check the president’s power and hold him accountable by way of congressional oversight. If Pelosi does not appropriately counter the president’s blatant disregard for the law and for congressional authority, she may as well admit the midterms were a con, that the Democrats only said all that good stuff to get voters to put them in the majority.

Either she means it when she says the constitution must prevail or doesn’t.

The speaker is facing a crisis of confidence. I hope she chooses wisely.

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: 23 September 2019
Word Count: 884
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