Que trágica ironia o fato de, para combater a esquerda, a extrema-direita brasileira estar imitando os piores métodos já empregados por aqueles que mais repudiam.
O bolsonarismo, encarnado no projeto Escola Sem Partido, repete linhas de ação da Revolução Cultural, movimento chinês igualmente obcecado com o fantasma da doutrinação ideológica e que, por isso, perseguiu professores, intelectuais e jornalistas entre 1966 e 1969.
Estou convencida que, para analisar o bolsonarismo, precisamos olhar não apenas os regimes fascistas do Ocidente, mas igualmente para o autoritarismo da própria esquerda – uma tarefa tão incômoda quanto necessária e que muitos analistas têm evitado de fazer.
A formação de “trabalhador-máquina”, a guerra ao conhecimento e o desprezo pelo fomento de uma massa crítica nada mais são do que uma tática comum – e eficiente no curto prazo, mas catastrófica no longo prazo – de regimes e racionalidades autoritárias à esquerda e à direita, do stalinismo ao neoliberalismo.
A revolução cultural à brasileira está acontecendo com os sentidos invertidos em relação à chinesa.A lógica maniqueísta é simples: nós somos vítimas e estamos do lado do bem; e vocês são os algozes, que comem metafórica ou literalmente criancinhas e, portanto, precisam ser destruídos. Diante de um iminente fracasso político ou econômico, os culpados já estão ali bem definidos, transferindo-lhes a responsabilidade dos erros de gestão e autorizando maior repressão. Combate-se a ideologia do inimigo não por medo dela, mas para gerar distração.
O bolsonarismo tem sido, sobretudo, um movimento obcecado pelo revisionismo que persegue intelectuais e professores como “inimigos” ideológicos e doutrinadores, e que despreza os canais consagrados de comunicação, arte e cultura. Tem incentivado, assim, uma guerra cultural que joga os cânones no lixo, sem oferecer algo para colocar no lugar daquilo que despreza. Existe hoje uma revolta profunda contra a cultura liberal burguesa, entendida como fundamentalmente elitista.
A revolução cultural à brasileira está acontecendo com os sentidos invertidos em relação à chinesa. Alteram-se os significados, mas mantém-se a estrutura: os objetos de discurso, os modos de autoridade e os métodos de intervenção e punição para atingir a unidade nacional. Se trocarmos as cores do inimigo e a palavra direitista por esquerdista, por exemplo, podemos descrever processos muito similares.
Explico:
Refiro-me aos métodos da prática e não aos valores, os quais não são nem comparáveis nem opostos simétricos. O maoísmo, no discurso, travou uma luta contra a opressão e a favor do amor universal, da liberação das mulheres e da igualdade social. O bolsonarismo é o oposto disso tudo: é a tentativa de supressão da autonomia e a valorização do amor particularista.
Morte aos direitistas!Na China, a Revolução Comunista de 1949 tinha o culto à personalidade como um eixo fundamental, valorizando a simplicidade de Mao Zedong. Isso era fundamental para estancar a polarização entre as guardas brancas e vermelhas, que crescia desde a queda da dinastia Qing na virada do século 19. Por décadas, invasões imperialistas e colapsos políticos e econômicos acirraram a divisão nacional. Como já relatei em texto sobre a facada que Bolsonaro levou, lunáticos e salvadores se espalhavam por todos os cantos agindo em nome de seitas ou individualmente em nome de Deus. Quando os chineses “acordaram”, para usar as palavras de Mao sobre o triunfo revolucionário, era preciso estampar a imagem do líder e da bandeira para produzir unidade nacional.
Se o culto à personalidade e nacionalismo são características comuns a muitos regimes autoritários, é no campo da educação que temos visto o Brasil repetir a história chinesa.
Na China, o antielitismo intelectual endureceu nos anos da Revolução Cultural e se tornou um movimento que tinha a educação como alvo principal, estimulando a denúncia dos professores pelos próprios alunos. Produziu-se uma verdadeira caça a mestres e artistas, jornais e universidades. Acusava-se de haver “direitismo” em todas as matérias e tradições. O legado artístico imperial foi questionado e revisado, tendo sua importância reduzida a pó. Escritores, pintores e músicos: todos “direitistas” e ponto final.
As ciências humanas e seus mestres eram um alvo decisivo. A Antropologia foi extinta; a História, revista. Seguindo o modelo soviético, muitas universidades foram fechadas e apenas 1% da população chinesa matriculou-se na universidade nos anos mais duros (lembrando que Bolsonaro disse que cursar universidade era uma “tara” dos brasileiros). Priorizaram-se as ciências naturais ou exatas e os cursos técnicos que pudessem achar soluções econômicas para a nação, contribuir com mão de obra e formar bons trabalhadores.
Livros didáticos e ementas de disciplinas foram todas revisitadas. No total, contabiliza-se que 300 a 700 mil intelectuais foram demitidos por viés ideológico. Os professores tiveram sua imagem pública destruída: eles foram expostos e humilhados.
Muito antes de o Twitter existir, no quesito “incentivar o ataque ao establishment”, Mao foi um precursor da tática de detonar a imprensa, jornalistas e editores com frases de impacto. Dizia que os intelectuais do país eram ignorantes. No lugar do vazio deixado pelo aniquilamento de todos os cânones culturais, que se transformaram em inimigos, doutrinadores e direitistas, restaram apenas palavras de ordem, o discurso de combate à corrupção da burocracia (guanxi) e uma estética artística – balés, óperas, pinturas e poemas – que valorizava símbolos nacionalistas, militarismo e armas apontadas para cima.
O auge da histeria coletiva veio justamente com o estímulo das denúncias entre professores, colegas, amigos e conhecidos. Famílias inteiras e relações de amor foram destroçadas em nome do amor universal da camaradagem. A violência interpessoal só aumentava, levando ao colapso mental e social. A corrupção não diminuiu – ao contrário, ela foi renovada porque tinha que assegurar a produtividade das comunas –, e as pessoas começaram a ficar neuróticas com o terror provocado por um tipo de perseguição molecular que dispensa censores oficiais, pois a denúncia vem do colega ao lado.
A Revolução Cultural foi genocida: assassinou e estuprou em massa, uniformizou as pessoas e aniquilou o “eu” dos sobreviventes. O Partido Comunista Chinês se envergonha até hoje dessa fase de sua história.
LiçõesA Revolução Cultural nasceu para conter as críticas, especialmente após o fracasso do Grande Salto Adiante, a política comunista de aceleração econômica que trouxe resultados catastróficos.
Uma reportagem recente da revista The Economist alertou para a possibilidade de, se o governo do presidente eleito for um fracasso, o bolsonarismo irá caçar culpados para distrair o foco.
Eu aposto todas as minhas fichas que é isso que tende a acontecer no Brasil: conforme o governo desvela sua total debilidade – aumentando, assim, o risco de indignação popular –, vai aumentar a perseguição moral e ideológica para apontar culpados e desviar atenção.
Fiquemos atentos.
O bolsonarismo contra “tudo o que está aí” não tem absolutamente nada para oferecer em troca do que contesta.
O problema não é – e nunca foi – questionar o conhecimento consagrado, seja ele liberal, elitista, burguês ou progressista. O problema tampouco é questionar as universidades, a Folha de S.Paulo, Caetano e Chico. Todos os cânones e todas as instituições podem (e devem) ser revistas.
O problema que aprendemos com a Revolução Cultural é que jogar o bebê com a água no banho leva-nos a um deserto de ideias, de alma e de expressão de vida, restando apenas a violência das palavras de ordem e a reprodução sádica do ódio pelo ódio. O bolsonarismo contra “tudo o que está aí” não tem absolutamente nada para oferecer em troca do que contesta – e uma sociedade que cresce nesse vazio intelectual é, em última instância, uma sociedade miserável.
The post O bolsonarismo repete a Revolução Cultural da China appeared first on The Intercept.
Desde o impeachment de Dilma Rousseff, tornou-se recorrente a menção à Bancada BBB, acrônimo para Bíblia, Boi e Bala, as grandes frentes de interesse no Congresso Nacional. Mas o apelido, surgido em 2015, não expressa fielmente o balanço de poder. Quem manda mesmo no Brasil é a bancada do boi – a bancada ruralista.
Até este ano, os ruralistas dominavam mais da metade da Câmara e um terço do Senado (para comparação, a bancada evangélica tinha 16% da Câmara e a da bala, 7%). Com a renovação trazida pela eleição de outubro, o número de deputados ruralistas caiu para menos da metade (por enquanto, como veremos a seguir). Mas a mudança pouco significa para o jogo de poder na Câmara – decisivos para a eleição de Bolsonaro, os políticos envolvidos com o agronegócio acabam de emplacar sua ministra, a deputada do DEM Tereza Cristina, do Mato Grosso do Sul, hoje presidente da poderosa Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, a FPA, que engloba, principalmente, políticos do MDB, DEM, PP, PR e PSD.
Boa noite! Informo a todos a indicação da senhora Tereza Cristina da Costa Dias, Presidente da Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, ao posto de Ministra da Agricultura.
— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) November 7, 2018
Ainda no primeiro turno, a frente parlamentar endossou seu apoio a Bolsonaro, causando comoção na disputa eleitoral – o apoio dos ruralistas costuma decidir as eleições. Sob a justificativa de atender ao “clamor do setor produtivo nacional”, a aliança foi costurada pessoalmente por Tereza Cristina.
À frente da FPA, ela se consolidou como uma das principais lideranças da bancada ruralista na Câmara. Como deputada, se destacou pela defesa de políticas anti-indígenas. Em agosto, Cristina pediu ao ministro da Justiça, Torquato Jardim, a suspensão da Política Nacional de Desenvolvimento Sustentável dos Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais, que busca destravar processos como a demarcação de terras indígenas e quilombolas. Em 2017, a deputada sul-mato-grossense foi autora de um requerimento convocando audiência pública para discutir a liberação de terras indígenas para empreendimentos agrícolas.
Mas a futura ministra é marcada mesmo por sua ardente defesa dos agrotóxicos. Sua condução na comissão que aprovou o “PL do Veneno”, que flexibiliza o uso de agrotóxicos proibidos no país, lhe valeu o apelido de “Musa do Veneno”. Tereza Cristina figura também entre os parlamentares que mais receberam doações do agronegócio. Em 2018, dos R$ 2,3 milhões arrecadados, R$ 900 mil vieram de empresas do setor – como a Cosan, por exemplo, conglomerado do setor de acúcar e etanol.
A nomeação da ruralista segue o mesmo roteiro dos governos anteriores. Dos últimos cinco ministros da Agricultura, quatro são produtores rurais. Titular do cargo entre 2013 e 2014, Antônio Andrade, do MDB, é dono de fazendas em Minas Gerais. Seu sucessor, Neri Geller, que assume uma vaga na Câmara pelo PP em Mato Grosso, é dono do Grupo Geller e já foi investigado por venda ilegal de lotes destinados à reforma agrária. Em 2017, afirmou que usou milho para pagar uma dívida de campanha. Blairo Maggi, atual ministro de Temer, dispensa apresentações: ele é conhecido como “o rei da soja”.
Arte: Rodrigo Bento/The Intercept Brasil
A Frente Parlamentar de Agricultura tinha, até as eleições, 213 deputados. Mas, dos 189 deputados integrantes da frente que disputavam a reeleição, apenas 96 conseguiram se eleger. No Senado, onde a frente almejava conquistar mais espaço, serão 17 representantes da entidade, dez cadeiras a menos do que eles ocupam hoje.
Mas ela ainda pode crescer. Além de políticos tradicionais que voltam ao Congresso após um período sem exercer mandato, como o ex-ministro da Agricultura Neri Geller, do PP de Mato Grosso, eleito deputado federal, e o ex-governador do Mato Grosso Jayme Campos, do DEM, de volta ao Senado, a FPA mira nos novatos. Na semana passada, na primeira reunião oficial após as eleições, participaram deputados que estreiam na legislatura no ano que vem, como Alexandre Frota, eleito pelo PSL em São Paulo, José Carlos Schiavinato, do PP paranaense e Zé Mário, do DEM em Goiás.
O começo com Bolsonaro não foi exatamente fácil. O primeiro atrito foi no anúncio da fusão dos ministérios da Agricultura e do Meio Ambiente. Tereza Cristina foi uma das que mostrou “preocupação” com a medida, abortada depois da repercussão negativa. Depois, Bolsonaro fez o desastrado anúncio da mudança da embaixada do Brasil em Israel de Tel Aviv para Jerusalém, levantando a preocupação de possíveis retaliações comerciais dos países árabes para a importação de carne brasileira.
Mas os ânimos se acalmaram. Além de já terem o ministério da Agricultura, a FPA já articula o apoio da bancada do PSL para eleger seu vice-presidente, Alceu Moreira, do MDB gaúcho, à presidência da Câmara. Vale lembrar que Onyx Lorenzoni, confirmado como o ministro-chefe da Casa Civil, também é um membro da Frente Parlamentar de Agropecuária.
Nos governos estaduais, dois ruralistas alcançaram uma vitória retumbante já no primeiro turno. Gladson Cameli, do PP, se elegeu no Acre e Ronaldo Caiado, do DEM, em Goiás.
Arte: Rodrigo Bento/The Intercept Brasil
Com poder e penetração em várias partes do governo, os ruralistas são eficientes em emplacar pautas de interesse próprio. No governo atual, por exemplo, eles conseguiram fazer com que o presidente Michel Temer assinasse um decreto permitindo a conversão de multas ambientais em prestação de serviço, dificultaram a divulgação da “lista suja” do trabalho escravo e lotearam cargos na Funai para aliados políticos vinculados ao agronegócio. Agora, querem aproveitar os momentos derradeiros dos deputados não reeleitos para colocar em votação o PL do Veneno, ainda em 2018.
A Frente Parlamentar atua não apenas em pautas que atingem diretamente o agronegócio. Dela saíram, por exemplo, 49,59% dos votos favoráveis ao impeachment da presidente Dilma Rousseff. A frente também foi decisiva na manutenção de Temer no poder. Nas duas votações que rejeitaram as denúncias contra ele, realizadas em agosto e outubro de 2017, mais da metade dos votos saíram da FPA: 50,9% e 55,6%, respectivamente. O preço dessa fidelidade foi o apoio irrestrito do governo às demandas do setor.
Além de ser o mais poderoso bloco de interesses no Congresso, a FPA é também o grupo mais rico. A frente é financiada pelo Instituto Pensar Agro, uma coalizão de 42 entidades de classe que inclui, entre seus membros mais influentes, associações de produtores de soja, milho, algodão, de criadores de gado, a Sociedade Rural Brasileira e a Associação Brasileira do Agronegócio.
As propostas apoiadas pela frente são definidas durante os almoços realizados às terças-feiras em sua sede, em uma mansão no Lago Sul de Brasília. Já tradicionais na agenda política da capital, os almoços recebem representantes de associações, empresários do agronegócio e jornalistas. Neles, os deputados e senadores debatem o “cardápio da semana”: as pautas que entrarão nas comissões e no plenário nos dias seguintes.
Em novembro de 2017, nós fomos expulsos de um dos almoços, aberto à imprensa, sob a alegação de que se tratava de uma propriedade privada.
Arte: Rodrigo Bento/The Intercept Brasil
A bancada ruralista não é um bloco coeso de políticos ligados ao agronegócio. Fazem parte dela vários deputados que nunca atuaram na área. Um exemplo é o Rio de Janeiro: dos 15 deputados federais filiados à FPA, apenas Leonardo Picciani, do MDB, já declarou terras ou empresas agrícolas. Apesar disso, em termos numéricos, o estado era o quinto mais expressivo dentro da Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária até outubro.
Jair Bolsonaro é outro exemplo. Embora não declare bens rurais, o presidente eleito faz uma defesa virulenta do agronegócio e se posiciona contra a demarcação de terras para indígenas e quilombolas: “nem um centímetro a mais”, costuma dizer. Ele e seu filho, Eduardo Bolsonaro, também do PSL, pertencem a outro grupo menos conhecido de lobby: a bancada da cana.
Ela é uma das várias bancadas menores, organizadas, que têm sido bem-sucedidas em emplacar seus interesses, fazer avançar ou obstruir votações e eleger e reeleger políticos. Um olhar atento para cada uma mostra coincidências entre os interesses privados de cada parlamentar e os projetos de lei, supostamente com interesse público, defendidos por eles. Saiba quem são e como atuam seus representantes:
The post Quem é a turma da Tereza Cristina, a nova ministra da Agricultura appeared first on The Intercept.
Amazon’s announcement this week that it will open its new headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia came with the mind-boggling revelation that the corporate giant will rake in $2.1 billion in local government subsidies. But an analysis by the nation’s leading tracker of corporate subsidies finds that the government handouts will actually amount to at least $4.6 billion.
But even that figure, which accounts for state and local perks, doesn’t take into account a gift that Amazon will also enjoy from the federal government, a testament to the old adage that in Washington, bad ideas never die.
The Amazon location in Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens, is situated in a federal opportunity zone, a Jack Kemp-era concept resurrected in the 2017 tax law that, in theory, is supposed to bring money into poverty-stricken areas. The northern Virginia site, in the Arlington neighborhood of Crystal City (which developers and local officials have rebranded as “National Landing”), is not directly in an opportunity zone but is virtually surrounded by other geographic areas that are.
Under the tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump last year, investors in opportunity zones can defer payments of capital gains taxes until 2026, and if they hold them for seven years, they can exclude 15 percent of the gains from taxation. If investors carry the opportunity zone investment for 10 years, they eliminate taxes on future appreciation entirely. Investment managers have been salivating at the chance to take advantage of opportunity zones. Special funds have been built to cater to people holding unrealized capital gains — such as Amazon employees with large holdings of company stock.
Not only could Amazon benefit from the opportunity zone directly in Long Island City, but Virginia employees with unrealized capital gains will have an escape valve next door to an Amazon campus. “People who happen to be sitting around with long-term capital gains may now have vehicles for hiding them,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that scrutinizes economic development incentive deals between cities and companies, and has analyzed the Amazon deal.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the opportunity zone or the Good Jobs First estimate of the subsidies it could receive.
Supporters claim opportunity zones spur renewal and revitalization in impoverished areas. It’s a decades-old bipartisan fantasy that sits uncomfortably at odds with the demonstrated results. Researchers who have studied opportunity zones find that these tax schemes rarely ever help cities, and often financially cripple them.
“At best, they divert investment from one part of the city from another, resulting in no net gain for the city as a whole,” wrote Timothy Weaver, an urban policy and politics professor at the University of Albany, last year. “At worst, they result in tax-giveaways to firms that would have been operating anyway, thereby generating a net loss to city revenues.”
Still, Republicans and Democrats are loathe to give up on what they continually tell themselves can be a win-win for everyone, if we just try really hard. And now a major beneficiary of this federal largesse happens to be one of the world’s richest companies, led by the world’s richest man.
Photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP
According to Good Jobs First’s calculations, Amazon will get $4.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its new headquarters — and that’s not counting the opportunity zone benefit.
Amazon’s press release cited two New York state incentives, a $1.2 billion grant over the next decade from the Excelsior Program and a $325 million, 10-year grant from Empire State Development. But Amazon did not quantify proceeds from two other city incentives, the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program, or ICAP, and the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program, or REAP.
ICAP gives a partial tax abatement for 25 years, and based on the expected $3.6 billion campus in Long Island City, Good Jobs First estimates that value at $386 million. REAP, a per-employee tax credit of $3,000 per year for 12 years, comes out to $897 million if Amazon meets its projection of hiring 25,000 employees.
Those estimates, combined with what Amazon already cited for the Long Island City location, brings the total to $2.808 billion. That results in a cost per job of $112,000, far more than the $48,000 per job Amazon claimed they would get in the Long Island City deal.
LeRoy, of Good Jobs First, noted that ICAP and REAP are available to most businesses relocating into New York, but a single entity’s ability to combine all their benefits distorts the purpose of attracting economic development. “I don’t think the original sponsors ever envisioned individual transactions costing 10 figures,” he said. “There’s a strong argument for capping programs on a per-deal basis.”
LeRoy added that this is not a full accounting of the benefits out of New York. Amazon will benefit from a payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, in which a portion of the company’s property taxes will flow directly into enhancements for the project area. Plus, there’s the federal opportunity zone.
That Long Island City is a designated opportunity zone Amazon might exploit is especially mind-boggling given that the fast-gentrifying area has had no trouble attracting new investment, has a 10 percent poverty rate (half that of New York City), and has a median income of $130,000 per year.
While the overwhelming majority of opportunity zones are defined by having high poverty rates, about 200 of the 8,700 Treasury Department-approved census tracts are like Long Island City, economically prosperous but adjacent to poverty. This includes neighborhoods in well-off cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, and Portland. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that he expects the opportunity zones to attract $100 billion in investments.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Amazon’s estimate for Virginia — $573 million in cash grants — also leaves out a huge benefit for Amazon. “They’re planning a big Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria, adjacent to the site,” LeRoy said. “It’s a public university, the money is coming from taxpayers.” In a press release, Virginia Tech puts the cost of the campus at $1 billion and added that Amazon “credited the Innovation Campus in Alexandria as a key component in its decision to locate in Northern Virginia.”
Good Jobs First added that a redevelopment subsidy known as tax increment financing for on-site infrastructure and green space in the area could also benefit Amazon at the northern Virginia site. There was no cost estimate provided for this, though the Amazon press release mentions $195 million in commonwealth-funded infrastructure projects in the neighborhood, and another $28 million in funding from the city of Arlington.
The total amount of subsidies in northern Virginia, according to Good Jobs First, is at least $1.8 billion, almost as much as Amazon said it would be reaping in government subsidies overall.
Previously, Amazon has reaped $1.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its warehouses and data centers elsewhere across the country. On the same day as the New York and Virginia announcements, Amazon also announced a new “Operations Center of Excellence” in Nashville, Tennessee, a 5,000-worker facility for which the city gave Amazon $102 million in subsidies. Nashville was one of the top 20 finalists for the HQ2 auction, and parts of the city are also opportunity zones.
The cash handouts also do not take into account regulatory leniency and accelerated permitting that characterizes the Amazon projects. “There is a strain of thought that says if you give a company prompt variances, because time is money, companies would value that more than property tax abatement,” said LeRoy. In this case, the cities are offering both!”
The deals do not appear to include guard rails for what is expected to be rapid gentrification in the locations. Condo sellers in Crystal City took note of overnight price hikes of as much as $20,000 the day after the announcement. As gentrification likely pushes out residents in the opportunity zones surrounding the northern Virginia site, Amazon employees who buy real estate could not only find a place to live, but also avoid unrealized capital gains taxes.
Progressive politicians like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and conservative commentators have joined forces to question the deal. Community organizations held a rally in New York on Wednesday, urging a re-channeling of the taxpayer subsidies. Following Amazon’s announcement, Ron Kim, a Queens assembly member, introduced new legislation to redirect taxpayer funds designated for corporate subsidies to canceling or buying student debt. Virginia delegate Lee Carter, a democratic socialist, also criticized the deal for its exorbitant tax giveaways and the lack of transparency under which the terms were negotiated, calling it “comic book villain stuff.”
If Amazon fails to live up to their end of the agreement, they can just cancel it with 5 days notice, and keep the money.
If Virginia's elected government fails to live up to its end of the agreement at any time between now and 2043, no cancelation and AMZN still keeps the money pic.twitter.com/kyCH6FEXkI
— Lee J. Carter (@carterforva) November 13, 2018
Here we have language that mandates the next 6 governors to deliver LEGISLATIVE action, or else Amazon is released from their end of the contract. But they could still sue us for the rest of the payments even after they're released.
One of the worst contracts I've ever read. pic.twitter.com/hm2tG6MmVh
— Lee J. Carter (@carterforva) November 13, 2018
Carter will have the opportunity to weigh in on the deal. According to the contract language, the grant payments to Amazon are subject to appropriations by the Virginia General Assembly, though the governor is obligated to put the payments in the draft budget request.
The post Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More Than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows appeared first on The Intercept.
In a century that produced its share of ghastly war criminals, Ratko Mladic stands alongside the worst. As military commander of the Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, Mladic helped orchestrate the largest mass killings in Europe since the Holocaust, including a notorious massacre of 8,000 men and boys in the eastern town of Srebrenica. In 2017, Mladic was sentenced to life in prison on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — a rare case of a high-ranking war criminal being made to face justice in a court of law.
Though reviled internationally, for some in his own country Mladic remains a symbol of repressed nationalist dreams. Passing through the dreary suburb of Lukavica, located in the hills directly south of Sarajevo — the capital city that Mladic’s forces terrorized for nearly four years — I recently saw posters and graffiti lionizing the general plastered on the walls of many buildings. At a traffic on-ramp, an image of Mladic was depicted in blood-red spray paint, giving a military salute under the letters “VRS,” the acronym for the Bosnian Serb military forces. Like statues honoring Confederate generals in the United States, many of which were actually built long after America’s Civil War, a monument to Mladic was recently erected in his hometown, an homage to a man that many still consider a hero.
The forces of politically driven hatred that tore Bosnia apart two decades ago were never dismantled as much as held dormant by the 1995 peace deal brokered by the United States in talks at a military base in Dayton, Ohio. Today, pressures that threaten to unravel the tenuous peace are once again rising. The Dayton accords divided Bosnia between a Muslim-Croat federation and an autonomous Bosnian-Serb territory known as Republika Srpska. Though criticized by some for effectively rewarding the wartime ethnic cleansing carried out by Bosnian Serb leaders, this ethnic division of the country has nonetheless helped keep a measure of peace over the past two decades. In recent months, however, the leaders of Republika Srpska have raised the specter of declaring independence from the rest of Bosnia, a move that would rip apart the fragile postwar order. Ongoing talks about a possible land swap between Serbia and Kosovo have been invoked by a new generation of Bosnian Serb extremists as a precedent for redrawing their borders, too — a move that would almost guarantee a return to conflict.
Bosnian militiamen and civilians carry a victim of a mortar attack in Sarajevo on Aug. 21, 1992. Three mortar shells slammed into Sarajevo’s main boulevard as residents emerged after a night of shelling to search for bread and water.
Photo: Rikard Larma/AP
“A multicultural Bosnia was a compromise that Republika Srpska’s leaders had been forced to accept by international pressure, at a time when they had been openly pursuing genocide and ethnic cleansing. In truth, they’ve never really accepted it,” Emir Suljagic, a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre who later served as deputy defense minister of Bosnia, told me recently at a cafe in Sarajevo. “In the Balkans, any call for redrawing borders or declaring statehood is a signal for violence, and everyone knows it. Ordinary people may not be ready for war, but their leaders are banging the drums nonetheless.”
Indeed, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism in Europe has turned Bosnia’s war into an object of lurid nostalgia — a model for the future, even.
“The Serbian nationalist cause in the 1990s was a hobby horse for the far right in Europe. In their view, Bosnia was an avatar for the types of political developments that they wanted to see happening in the continent,” said Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist focused on the region who wrote the recent book “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans.” “After the Cold War, the next great ideological struggle for the far right was going to be about the question of the nation and identity. The idea of having a genocidal ethnic war like that which occurred in Bosnia — to use their own language, a ‘race war’ — was the whole point. As a result, they continue to sympathize with the people who advocated, perpetrated, and continue to defend that genocide.”
Photo: Amel Emric/AP
Today much of that sympathy lies with the figure of Milorad Dodik, the demagogic politician elected this October as the Bosnian Serb representative on the country’s tripartite presidency. Once seen in the West as a relative moderate, in recent years Dodik has emerged as a fiery ethnonationalist, secessionist, and genocide denier. Among other provocations in a country still struggling to heal from the wounds of a war that killed over 100,000 people, Dodik has disputed that a genocide of Bosnian Muslims took place in Srebrenica, claiming many of the victims of the massacre were “still alive.” Dodik has also publicly honored individuals convicted by The Hague for their roles in war crimes, including Mladic and former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic.
Outside of the country, the war remains a potent symbol for those on the right-wing terrorist fringe, many of whom who have lionized wartime Bosnian Serb leaders for pursuing the politics of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In his notorious political manifesto, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik revealed himself to be obsessed with the wars in the Balkans. Breivik heaped praises on Karadzic and openly defended the genocide, depicting it as model for a future race war in Europe. In the clandestine right-wing circles in which he traveled, Breivik also proudly claimed to have met individuals living in hiding who had committed atrocities against Muslims during the war.
Photo: Mikhael Klimentyev/Sputnik/AP
Last year the United States placed sanctions on Dodik for his role in obstructing the terms of the Dayton accords that ended the conflict. But those sanctions have not stopped individuals tied to the emerging international far right — including people associated with President Donald Trump’s administration and European ethnonationalist parties — from treating Dodik’s party as an ally in their envisioned global right-wing alliance. This summer, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon hosted the president of Republika Srpska, Zeljka Cvijanovic, at his Washington, D.C., home, while other Trump campaign associates have surfaced as lobbyists for Dodik’s government.
As part of a broader program of support for illiberal forces in Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin has also emerged as a patron of Dodik. With Russian assistance, the police forces of Republika Srpska have undertaken an ominous program of militarization, with weapons and training provided by Russian advisers. Russian-owned state media outlets have also been accused of spreading sectarian propaganda in the country, adding to a febrile climate of ethnic tension and atrocity denial that Dodik has been glad to capitalize on.
“It has been a huge achievement of Bosnian society that since the end of the war, there have been almost no reprisal attacks or incidents of ethnic violence in the country, even in localities where people have returned to live near those who had been involved in killing their own family members,” says Adnan Cerimagic, an analyst at the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank. “As such, it’s very irresponsible for political figures or state media outlets to create nationalist myths around people who have been indicted for war crimes by The Hague or by Bosnian courts, or to deny well-documented atrocities. It’s dangerous for the future of Bosnian society and undermines efforts to build an open and liberal society here, in which past actions are put into their proper context.”
Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images
In any country, let alone one still recovering from a hideous war that saw concentration camps and genocide return to the heart of Europe, the consequences of deliberately fomenting ethnic hate can be devastating. In his book on the postwar hunt for Balkan war criminals, “The Butcher’s Trail,” journalist Julian Borger noted that the violence that tore apart Yugoslavia during the 1990s was never the result of atavistic ancient hatreds supposedly nursed by Serbs, Croats, or Muslims. Instead, the poison had been purposely spread by political leaders, some radical and some merely opportunistic, who had egged their people on toward conflict.
“The fact that the killing came to a halt so abruptly, as if a switch had been flicked, also demonstrates the decisive role of political leadership in creating the conditions for the mass murders of the 1990s,” wrote Borger. “The nationalist leaders who assumed power at the breakup of Yugoslavia were not struggling to contain the murderous impulses of their people. On the contrary, they created circumstances for psychopaths and sadists to kill with impunity.”
While the full implications of a rising nationalist far right may still be unclear to some Americans and western Europeans, in Bosnia there is no such ambiguity. Any breakdown in the consensus that has kept the peace over the past few decades would risk taking Bosnians back down the nightmare road of violence that they traveled during the 1990s. In a country where many buildings are still pockmarked by artillery shells and in which parks and neighborhoods are dotted with memorials to the victims of mass killings, the consequences of resurgent fascism need no elaboration.
Important as it is for the millions living there, the survival of Bosnia as a multicultural state might also be a bellwether for the type of world that Europeans, Americans, and others can hope to inhabit in the 21st century. On Sarajevo’s streets, a scarred yet beautiful mixture of Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Communist-era architecture — the terrible consequence of failing to confront ethnic chauvinism in its early stages — is still on display.
“The international community needs to wake up to what is happening in Bosnia,” Suljagic said. “This country is the legacy of a democratic post-Cold War foreign policy. But the stage is being potentially set now for a real tragedy.”
The post Rise of Europe’s Far Right Emboldens Serb Extremists and Threatens a Fragile Peace in Bosnia appeared first on The Intercept.
At the beginning of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.
The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent. Should Amazon’s patent become a reality, or if accent detection is already possible, it would introduce questions of surveillance and privacy violations, as well as possible discriminatory advertising, experts said.
The civil rights issues raised by the patent are similar to those around facial recognition, another technology Amazon has used as an anchor of its artificial intelligence strategy, and one that it controversially marketed to law enforcement. Like facial recognition, voice analysis underlines how existing laws and privacy safeguards simply aren’t capable of protecting users from new categories of data collection — or government spying, for that matter. Unlike facial recognition, voice analysis relies not on cameras in public spaces, but microphones inside smart speakers in our homes. It also raises its own thorny issues around advertising that targets or excludes certain groups of people based on derived characteristics like nationality, native language, and so on (the sort of controversy that Facebook has stumbled into again and again).
From Amazon’s patent, an illustration of a process for determining physical and emotional characteristics from someone’s voice, resulting in tailored audio content like ads.
Document: United States Patent and Trademark Office
If voice-based accent detection can determine a person’s ethnic background, it opens up a new category of information that is incredibly interesting to the government, said Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
“If you’re a company and you’re creating new classifications of data, and the government is interested in them, you’d be naive to think that law enforcement isn’t going to come after it,” she said.
She described a scenario in which knowing a user’s purchase history, existing demographic data, and whether they speak Arabic or Arabic-accented English, Amazon could identify the user as belonging to a religious or ethnic group. King said it’s plausible that the FBI would compel the production of such data from Amazon if it could help determine a user’s membership to a terrorist group. Data demands focused on terrorism are tougher for companies to fight, she said, as opposed to those that are vague or otherwise overbroad, which they have pushed back on.
Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, makes it possible for the government to covertly demand such data. FISA governs electronic spying conducted to acquire information on foreign powers, allowing such monitoring without a warrant in some circumstances and in others under warrants issued by a court closed to the public, with only the government represented. The communications of U.S. citizens and residents are routinely acquired under the law, in many cases incidentally, but even incidentally collected communications may later be used against Americans in FBI investigations. Under FISA, the government could “get information in secret more easily, and there are mass or bulk surveillance capabilities that don’t exist in domestic law,” said Crocker. “Certainly it could be done in secret with less court oversight.”
“You’d be naive to think that law enforcement isn’t going to come after it.”Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, suggested that Amazon’s accent data could also provide the government with information for the purpose of immigration control.
“Let’s say you have ICE go to one of these providers and say, ‘Give us all the subscription information of people who have Spanish accents’ … in order to identify people of a particular race or who theoretically might have relatives who are undocumented,” she said. “So you can see that this type information can definitely be abused.”
Though King said she hasn’t seen evidence of these types of government requests, she has witnessed “parallel things happen in other contexts.” It’s also possible that if Amazon was sent a National Security Letter by the FBI, a gag order would prevent the company from disclosing much, including the exact number of letters it received. National Security Letters compel the disclosure of certain types of information from communications firms, like a subpoena would, but often in secret. The letters require the companies to hand over select data, like the name of an account owner and the age of an account, but the FBI has routinely asked for more, including email headers and internet browsing history.
Compared to some other tech giants, however, Amazon is less detailed in its disclosures about National Security Letters it receives and about data requests in general. For example, in its information request reports, it does not disclose how many NSLs it has received or how many accounts are affected by national security requests, as Apple and Google do. These more specific disclosures from other companies show a trend: From mid-2016 to the first half of 2017, national security requests sent to Apple, Facebook, and Google increased significantly.
But even if the government hasn’t yet made such requests of Amazon, we know that it has been paying attention to voice and speech technology for some time. In January, The Intercept reported that the National Security Agency had developed technology not just to record and transcribe private conversations, but also to automatically identify speakers. An individual’s “voiceprint” was created, which could be cross-referenced with millions of intercepted and recorded telephone, video, and internet calls.
To create an American citizen’s “voiceprint,” which government documents don’t explicitly indicate has been done, experts said the NSA would need only to tap into Amazon or Google’s existing voice data.
Over the past year, Amazon’s relationship with the government has become increasingly cozy. BuzzFeed recently revealed details about how the Orlando Police Department was piloting Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition technology, to identify “persons of interest.” A few months earlier, Amazon was outed by the ACLU for “marketing Rekognition for government surveillance.” Meanwhile, in June, the company was busy pitching Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on its technology.
Though these revelations have set off alarm bells, even for Amazon employees, experts said that speech recognition presents similar concerns that are equally if not more pressing. Amazon’s voice processing patent dates to March of last year. The company, in response to questions from The Intercept, described the patent as exploratory and pledged to abide by its privacy policy when collecting and using data.
Privacy Law Lags Behind TechnologyWeak privacy laws in the U.S. are one reason consumers are vulnerable when tech companies start gathering new types of data about them. There is nothing in the law that protects data collected about a person’s mood or accent, said Granick.
In the absence of strong legal protections, consumers are forced to make their own decisions about trade-offs between their privacy and the convenience of virtual assistants. “Being able to use really robust voice control would be great if it meant you weren’t just being put into a giant AI algorithm and being used to improve your pitchability for new products, especially when you’re paying for these systems,” said King.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, first passed in 1986, was a major step forward in privacy protection at the time. But now, over 30 years later, it has yet to catch up with the pace of technological innovation. Generally, under ECPA, government agencies need a subpoena, court order, or search warrant to compel companies to disclose protected user information. Unlike court orders and search warrants, subpoenas don’t necessarily require judicial review.
Amazon’s most recent information request report, which covers the first half of this year, reveals that the company received 1,736 subpoenas during that time, 1,283 of which it turned over some or all of the information requested. Since Amazon began publishing these reports three years ago, the number of data requests it receives has steadily increased, with a huge jump between 2015 and 2016. Echo, its Alexa-enabled speaker for use at home, was released in 2015, and Amazon has not said whether the increase is related to the growing popularity of its speaker.
While ECPA protects the data associated with our digital conversations, Granick said its application to information collected by providers like Amazon is “anemic.” “The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think is Chinese, Latino’ and the provider has to argue why they shouldn’t. That kind of conclusory data isn’t protected by ECPA, and it means the government can compel its disclosure with a subpoena,” she said.
“The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think is Chinese, Latino.’”Since ECPA is not explicit, there’s a legal question of whether Amazon could voluntarily turn over the conversations its users have with Alexa. Granick said Amazon could argue that such data is a protected electronic communication under ECPA — and require that the government get a warrant to access it — but as a party to the communication, Amazon also has the right to divulge it. There have been no court cases addressing the issue so far, she said.
Crocker, of the EFF, argued that communications with Alexa — voice searches and commands, for example — are protected by ECPA, but agreed that the government could obtain the data through a warrant or other legal process.
He added that the way Amazon stores accent information could impact the government’s ability to access it. If Amazon keeps it stored long term in customer profiles in the cloud, those profiles are easier to obtain than real-time voice communications, the interception of which invokes protections under the Wiretap Act, a federal law governing the interception and disclosure of communications. (ECPA amended the Wiretap Act to include electronic communications.) And if it’s stored in metadata associated with Alexa voice searches, the government has obtained those in past cases and could get to it that way.
In 2016, a hot tub murder in Arkansas put in the spotlight the defendant’s Echo. Police seized the device and tried to obtain its recordings, prompting Amazon to argue that any communications with Alexa, and its responses, were protected as a form of free speech under the First Amendment. Amazon eventually turned over the records after the defendant gave his permission to do so. Last week, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over Echo recordings in a new murder case, again hoping it could provide criminal evidence.
Dynamic, Targeted, and Discriminatory AdsBeyond government surveillance, experts also expressed concern that Amazon’s new classification of data increases the likelihood of discriminatory advertising. When demographic profiling — the basis of traditional advertising — is layered with additional, algorithmically assessed information from Alexa, ads can quickly become invasive or offensive.
Granick said that if Amazon “gave one set of [housing] ads to people who had Chinese accents and a different set of ads to people who have a Finnish accent … highlighting primarily Chinese neighborhoods for one and European neighbors for another,” it would be discriminating on the basis of national origin or race.
King said Amazon also opens itself to charges of price discrimination, and even racism, if it allows advertisers to show and hide ads from certain ethnic or gender groups. “If you live in the O.C. and you have a Chinese accent and are upper middle-class, it could show you things that are higher price. [Alexa] might say, ‘I’m gonna send you Louis Vuitton bags based on those things,’” she said.
Selling products based on emotions also offers opportunities for advertisers to manipulate consumers. “If you’re a woman in a certain demographic and you’re depressed, and we know that binge shopping is something you do … knowing that you’re in kind of a vulnerable state, there’s no regulation preventing them from doing something like this,” King said.
An example from the patent envisions marketing to Chinese speakers, albeit in a more innocuous context, describing how ads might be targeted to “middle-aged users who speak Mandarin or have a Chinese accent and live in the United States.” If the user asks, “Alexa, what’s the news today?” Alexa might reply, “Before your news brief, you might be interested in the Xiaomi TV box, which allows you to watch over 1,000 real-time Chinese TV channels for just $49.99. Do you want to buy it?”
According to the patent, the ads may be presented in response to user voice input, but could also be “presented at any time.” They could even be injected into existing audio streams, such as a news briefing or playback of tracks from a music playlist.
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, lawmakers have grown increasingly wary of tech companies and their privacy practices. In late September, the Senate Commerce Committee held a fresh round of hearings with tech executives on the issue — also giving them an opportunity to explain how they’re addressing the new, stringent data privacy laws in the European Union and California.
California’s regulation, which passed in June and goes into effect in 2020, sets a new precedent for consumer privacy law in the country. It expands the definition of personal information and gives state residents greater control over the sharing and sale of their data to third parties.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon and other big tech companies pushed back forcefully on the new reforms, citing excessive penalties, compliance costs, and data collection restrictions — and each spent nearly $200,000 to defeat it. During the Senate hearing, Amazon Vice President and Associate General Counsel Andrew DeVore asked the committee to consider the “unintended consequences” of California’s law, which he called “confusing and difficult to comply with.”
Now that the midterm elections have passed, privacy advocates hope that congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into legislative action; thus far, it has not. The Federal Trade Commission is also considering updates to its consumer protection enforcement priorities. In September, it kicked off a series of hearings examining the impact of “new technologies” and other economic changes.
Advocates hope congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into legislative action; thus far, it has not.Granick said that as states move to protect consumers where the federal government has not, California could serve as a model for the rest of the country. In August, California also became the first state to pass an internet of things cybersecurity law, requiring that manufacturers add a “reasonable security feature” to protect the information it collects from unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure.
In 2008, Illinois became the first state to pass a law regulating biometric data, placing restrictions on the collection and storing of iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, hand scan, and face geometry data. (Granick says it’s unclear if accent data is covered under the law.) Being the first state to pass landmark legislation, Illinois presents a cautionary tale for California. Though its bill was once considered a model law, only two other states — Texas and Washington — have passed biometric privacy laws over the past 10 years. Similar efforts elsewhere were largely killed by corporate lobbying.
A Growing and Global ProblemActivists have looked to other countries as examples of what could go wrong if tech companies and government agencies become too friendly, and voice accent data gets misused.
Human Rights Watch reported last year that the Chinese government was creating a national voice biometric database using data from Chinese tech company iFlyTek, which provides its consumer voice recognition apps for free and claims its system can support 22 Chinese dialects. On its English website, iFlyTek said that its technology has been “inspected and praised” by “many party and state leaders,” including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
The company is also the supplier of voice pattern collection systems used by regional police bureaus and runs a lab that develops voice surveillance technology for the Ministry of Public Security. Its technology has “helped solve cases” for law enforcement in Anhui, Gansu, Tibet, and Xinjiang, according to a state press report cited by Human Rights Watch. Activists warn that one possible use of the government’s voice database, which could contain dialect and accent-rich voice data from minority groups, is the surveillance of Tibetans and Uighurs.
Last year, Die Welt reported that the German government was testing voice analysis software to help verify where its refugees are coming from. They hoped it would determine the dialects of people seeking asylum in Germany, which migration officers would use as one of several “indicators” when reviewing applications. The test was met with skepticism, as speech experts questioned the ability of software to make such a complex determination.
The amount of information people voluntarily give tech companies through smart speakers is growing, along with the purchases users are allowed to make. A Gallup survey conducted last year found that 22 percent of Americans currently use smart home personal assistants like Echo — placing them in living rooms, kitchens, and other intimate spaces. And 44 percent of U.S. adult internet users are planning to buy one, according to a Consumer Technology Association study.
Amazon’s move into the home with more sophisticated voice abilities for Alexa has been a long time coming. In 2016, it was already discussing emotion detection as a way to stay ahead of competitors Google and Apple. Also that year, it filed a patent application for a real-time language accent translator — a blend of accent detection and translation technologies. When its emotion and accent patent was issued last month, Alexa’s potential ability to read emotions and detect if customers are sick was called out as creepy.
Amazon Grapples With an “Accent Gap”Amazon’s current accent handling capabilities are lackluster. In July, the Washington Post charged that Amazon and Google had created an “accent gap,” leaving non-native English speakers behind in the voice-activated technology revolution. Both Alexa and Google Assistant had the most difficulty understanding Chinese- and Spanish-accented English.
Since the advent of speech recognition technology, picking up on dialects, speech impediments, and accents has been a persistent challenge. If the technology in Amazon’s patent was available today, natural language processing experts said that the accent and emotion detection would not be able to draw precise conclusions. The training data that teaches artificial intelligence lacks diversity in the first place, and because language itself is constantly changing, any AI would have a hard time keeping up.
Though Amazon’s new patent is a sign that it’s paying attention to the “accent gap,” it may be doing so for the wrong reasons. Improved language accent detection makes voice technology more equitable and accessible, but it comes at a cost.
Regarding PatentsPatents are not a surefire sign of what tech companies have built, or what is even possible for them to build. Tech companies in particular submit a dizzying number of patent applications.
In an emailed statement, Amazon said that it filed “a number of forward-looking patent applications that explore the full possibilities of new technology. Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect current developments to products and services.” The company also said that it “will only collect and use data in accordance with our privacy policy,” and did not elaborate on other uses of its technology or data.
But King, who has also reviewed numerous Facebook patents, said that they can be used to infer the direction a company is headed.
“You’re seeing a future where the interactions with people and their interior spaces is getting a lot more aggressive,” she said. “That’s the next frontier for companies. Not just tracking your behavior, where you’ve gone, what they think you might buy. Now it’s what you’re thinking, feeling, and that is what makes people deeply uncomfortable.”
For now, people who want to hold onto their privacy and minimize surveillance risk shouldn’t buy a speaker at all, recommended Granick. “You’re basically installing a microphone for the government to listen in to you in your home,” she said.
The post Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From appeared first on The Intercept.
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Impeaching President Donald Trump is a pipe dream, many say. Nancy Pelosi, who’s expected to be the new House speaker, isn’t keen on going for impeachment, nor is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — and a lot of people aren’t either because they’ve been misinformed and misled. Contrary to common perception, the president does not need to commit a crime in order to be impeached. Allegations of collusion aside, Trump is guilty of impeachable crimes and misdemeanors, such as the violating the emoluments clause and tax fraud. Just last week, right after the midterms, he fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and replaced him — perhaps unconstitutionally — with a crony. He denied White House access to a reporter he doesn’t like and tried to undermine the vote recounts in Florida and Georgia with false and unfounded claims about election fraud. The Democrats need to start making a public case for impeachment and preparing the ground for a trial in the Senate, even if it ends up being a trial they don’t or can’t win. Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and author of the new book, “The Case For Impeaching Trump,” joins Mehdi Hasan this week to discuss the case for impeaching Donald Trump. She played a key role in the impeachment of Richard Nixon and believes that Donald Trump’s actions are “exactly the kind” that were declared impermissible in Nixon’s articles of impeachment.
Elizabeth Holtzman: I served on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. That process was not started by a special prosecutor who had political ambitions. It was started when the American people rose up and said enough is enough.
[music]
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan.
Today on the show: impeaching Donald Trump. I know, I know, it’s too soon. There’s not enough evidence. There aren’t enough votes. It would be overreach by the new House Democratic majority. Yes, yes, I know all the liberal objections. But I’m gonna do some impeachment myth-busting today, and I’m also going to talk to the author of a new book on the case for impeaching Trump, an author who just happens to have also been a key player in the impeachment process against Richard Nixon.
EH: You would think that once the country had gone through Watergate, the president would learn the lesson but apparently not.
MH: That was former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman who voted on the Articles of Impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee back in 1974, and who’s the author of a new book which came out on Monday called “The Case for Impeaching Trump.”
So this week on Deconstructed, let’s talk impeachment.
Marie Harf: The Blue Wave is looking much bluer than I think the conventional wisdom held on Tuesday night.
Chris Matthews: It’s been three days since Tuesday’s referendum on the president and the Blue Wave keeps growing.
Van Jones: This Blue Wave was actually bigger and bluer than it actually looked like at first.
MH: Guess what? It was a Blue Wave not a blue trickle as some pundits wrongly suggested last week. Post the midterms, the Democrats now control the House of Representatives with a healthy majority and also picked up some red state Senate seats too. Hello, Arizona. So, what do they do now with their newfound power and influence on Capitol Hill?
Host: To impeach or not to impeach. That’s Nancy Pelosi’s new dilemma.
Host: Should house Democrats file articles of impeachment or is that premature?
Nancy Pelosi: I don’t think we should impeach a president for political reasons.
MH: Nancy Pelosi who is expected to be the new House Speaker isn’t keen on going for impeachment nor is Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer. But I am and I think people aren’t keen on impeaching Trump because they’ve been a little misinformed and may be misled. In fact, there are two main myths that are often put about when anyone raises the issue of impeaching this President and I want to thoroughly debunk both before we get to our very interesting and unique guest today.
The first myth is that the president of the United States has to have broken the law in order to impeached. Nope, not true. Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution says the president “Shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” That famous phrase “High crimes and misdemeanors,” doesn’t refer to a criminal offense, to a felony. It refers to abuse of public office. It’s a political offense.
The whole impeachment process is inherently political not criminal. And you don’t have to take my word for it Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Number 65 defined impeachable offenses as, “Those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. Abuse or violation of public trust, misconduct, injuries to society.”
I think that sounds pretty Trumpian to me. Listen also to Gerald Ford, the Republican vice president who took over when Republican President Richard Nixon quit in 1974 to avoid impeachment. Ford said early on in his career when he was trying to impeach Supreme Court Justice “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
Got it? Whatever the majority in the House considers it to be, not what’s defined by a federal criminal statute. So, when you hear Republican apologists for this President, like Rudy Giuliani, now loudly moving the goal posts and saying –
Rudy Giuliani: Collusion is not a crime.
MH: – The only response to that has to be, “Well, who cares if colluding with Russia isn’t a crime, the point is that it could and should be considered a high crime and misdemeanor under Article 2 Section 4 of The Constitution.” It’s impeachable.
But this leads me to the second myth that poisons every debate on impeachment and Trump these days and that really annoys me. And it’s to do with the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller. The idea that you can’t begin the process of impeaching Trump until you’ve got the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller and that report has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump personally colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. But that’s mad. We don’t need to wait for evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors when Trump has been committing high crimes and misdemeanors from the moment he took office on January 20th, 2017.
Take the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution which is supposed to prevent the president from taking gifts, from getting money, from foreign governments.
CNN Commentator: There is a lot of scrutiny over the fact that Saudi lobbyists spent $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
MH: You want evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors? Go to Mar-a-Lago, go to the Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House. Check out those gifts. How about obstruction of justice? Remember when Trump fired the head of the FBI who was overseeing an investigation into his campaign’s ties to the Russian government and then told an NBC interviewer straight up why he did it.
Donald Trump: When I decided to just do what I said to myself I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
MH: How about using the power of the federal government to settle personal scores and to put pressure on the private business of one of your critics. Isn’t that impeachable?
Chris Hayes: The president has reportedly been working hard behind closed doors to punish Jeff Bezos financially, pushing the post office to double Amazon’s shipping charges.
MH: How about tax fraud? Is that an impeachable offense?
Ari Melber: Donald Trump’s tax records reveal fraud and schemes to duck taxes on a massive long-term scale.
MH: How about the President telling his personal lawyer in the run-up to the presidential election to pay hush money to a woman he had an affair with, which that lawyer then admitted to doing at the president’s direction in open court?
Nermeen Shaikh: Michael Cohen directly implicated Trump in committing a federal crime.
MH: Does that count as a high crimes and misdemeanors? I mean, seriously forget Russia for a moment. Even without allegations of collusion, which by the way, I happen to think are serious and very credible allegations, even without Russia and Mueller, it’s crystal clear that this president is a collection of impeachable offenses made human.
Trump walks and talks high crimes and misdemeanors on a near-daily basis. Just last week after the midterms, he fired his Attorney General replacing him perhaps unconstitutionally with a crony, denied White House access to a reporter he doesn’t like, and then tried to undermine the recounts in Florida and Georgia with false and unfounded claims about election fraud.
Now, look I get it impeachment isn’t easy. The House votes on impeachment, but the Senate does the convicting. You need a whopping two-thirds majority in the Senate to get that conviction and the Democrats don’t even have a simple majority in the Senate, let alone 67 votes. So impeaching Trump, no matter how much he deserves to be impeached – and let’s be honest, if Trump is never impeached, we should probably issue a collective apology to the family of Richard Nixon. Impeaching Trump many say is a pipe dream.
Well, that’s not the view of my guest today and she knows a thing or two about impeaching presidents.
[patriotic music]
ABC Anchor: ABC News presents complete nationwide coverage of tonight’s election ’72.
MH: Elizabeth Holtzman was elected to the House of Representatives from New York in 1972 at the age of 31 which made her at the time the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress. It turned out to be a fateful moment to join that august body.
NBC Anchor: The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. The president has fired the special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. Because of the President’s action, the Attorney General has resigned.
MH: As the Watergate scandal deepened, Holtzman as a member of the House Judiciary Committee found herself at the very center of the action.
Man: All those in favor, please signify by saying “Aye.” Miss Holtzman?
EH: Aye.
Man: Mr. Owens?
Owens: Aye.
Anchor: And so, it happened for the first time in 107 years, a committee of the House had recommended the impeachment and removal from office by the Senate of a president.
Anchor: President Nixon reportedly will announce his resignation tonight.
Richard Nixon: I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
MH: The impeachment process worked. Nixon of course jumped before being pushed and this week, 44 years after Elizabeth Holtzman played a part in bringing down the 37th president, she has a new book out on why we should impeach number 45. In “The Case for Impeaching Trump,” Holtzman describes the current occupant of the Oval Office as “A clear and present danger to our democracy. President Trump’s actions,” she writes, “are indicative of a president who has established a different standard of justice for himself. Exactly the kind that we declared impermissible in Nixon’s articles of impeachment. He has done so at the expense of democracy and he’s done so at his own peril.”
[musical interlude]
Elizabeth Holtzman, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed. You’ve written this new book “The Case for Impeaching Trump” which came out on Monday. Give us your basic summary, your main argument as to why you believe there is a case for impeaching Trump even before Robert Mueller produces his final report on Trump and Russia.
EH: There’s enough information in the public arena to start an inquiry into whether Donald Trump should be impeached. I don’t know that we’re ready for an impeachment vote at the moment because we need to inform the public, and mobilize the public with regard to the evidence that we have. No one’s really put out a blueprint of how impeachment could happen. And that’s what this book tries to do.
MH: And I’m glad you’ve written and I’m glad you mentioned the public because impeachment doesn’t come falling out of the sky. You have to make the case for it like anything else in a democracy.
EH: Correct. And that’s what happened during Watergate. I served on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. That process was not started by a “gotcha” movement in the House of Representatives or the Senate. It was started – and it wasn’t started by a special prosecutor who had political ambitions. It was started when the American people rose up and said enough is enough.
And what triggered that was when Richard Nixon, the president the United States, ordered that the special prosecutor investigating him over the Watergate break-in should be fired. The American people said “No, a president can’t pick his own prosecutor. The president can’t decide who is going to investigate him and how that investigation’s going to take place.”
MH: And you mention firing special prosecutors and not picking who gets to investigate you. Of course, we have a president right now who fired the FBI Chief, fired the Attorney General, wants to fire the special counsel, we know tried in the past. We hear a lot about Nixon when we talk about Trump. You of course, were actually there during the Nixon impeachment crisis on the House Judiciary Committee. How much of a parallel is there in your view between Trump’s behavior now and Nixon’s behavior then?
EH: Well, the parallels are very disturbing, even shocking. You would think that once the country had gone through Watergate, the president would learn the lesson but apparently not. I mean we have too many similarities. As you mentioned, the firing of the FBI director who is conducting an investigation into the Trump campaign and its collusion with Russia, the talk about firing Mueller, the attacks on the Mueller investigation, the firing of Sessions, and most recently the appointment of someone who is obviously unfit to be Attorney General as acting Attorney General.
It may even be unconstitutional to – yeah, may even be unconstitutional to appoint him, but Whitaker has already expressed extreme hostility to this investigation.
MH: And you voted “Yes” on the articles of impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee back in the 70s. And then you saw Nixon resign to avoid being impeached. Did you ever think at the time four decades from now we’ll be replaying a lot of this, and we won’t have learned the lessons from this period?
EH: No, I never thought that. And by the way, there’s some other things that are similar. For example during the impeachment, one of the grounds for the impeachment of Richard Nixon was the dangling of pardons, presidential pardons to the Watergate burglars to hush them up. We’ve had constant talk about whether presidential pardons were for example, dangled here in front of various people associated with the investigation.
MH: Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, even Michael Cohen, at one stage there was talk of pardoning all these people. You’re right there.
EH: Correct.
MH: Do you believe Donald Trump is a bigger crook or could turn out to be a bigger crook than tricky-dicky Nixon?
EH: Well, we didn’t have too much evidence about Nixon’s personal finances, although there was a substantial amount of evidence –
MH: Well, he released his tax returns.
EH: – Well, yeah, there was hanky-panky in those taxes. He took a $450,000 deduction for a donation of his papers that was found to be improper.
MH: At least he showed us his tax returns.
EH: He did release his tax returns, but the committee decided that that action, reprehensible though it was, was not a ground for impeachment because the committee had enormously more serious ground of impeachment that not only affected the president’s, just action and lawfulness, but first ground for impeachment was his obstruction of justice. In essence, his effort to impede the investigation into the Watergate break-in and he used the whole apparatus of the presidency to try to stop it.
But then there were the other things that he did, that was in second article of impeachment, that had to do with illegal wiretap that he ordered, the enemies list against political opponents, ordering audits, IRS audits of people who opposed the war. Then you had his acquiescence in, ratification of the breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to find evidence to smear him.
And then of course, you had all the misuse of power that took place in connection with the obstruction of justice. So, those were very serious –
MH: Indeed.
EH: – misdeeds.
MH: Very serious and it’s so interesting, and so fascinating to hear you speak about them because obviously you speak about not just as a historian of that period, but as someone who lived through it, worked through it. You’re not just a former congresswoman who was involved in the Nixon impeachment process, but you’re also a Harvard Law grad. To be clear, you don’t believe, do you, that the high crimes and misdemeanors that the constitution says justifies impeaching and removing a present from office have to necessarily be criminal offenses, do they? They don’t have to be criminal offenses?
EH: No, not at all. In fact, as I mentioned before, when we first started the impeachment process on the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon, I don’t think many people understood the grounds in the Constitution for impeachment. They are: treason, which is defined in the Constitution, bribery, which is a pretty well understood term, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. The fact of the matter is a high crime and misdemeanor is not an ordinary crime that a normal person can commit. It’s a crime that involves the misuse of the powers of office. That’s why it’s high because it’s committed by a high official.
MH: You say in your new book that, “for some impeachment is something toxic to be avoided at all costs,” but you see impeachment “as the grand and solemn tool designed to protect our democracy and to preserve the rule of law.” Why do you think it is that so many people do see it as something bad to be avoided at all costs?
EH: Well, I think that we’ve had three presidential impeachment efforts and two were toxic and wrong. The first against Andrew Johnson has been condemned by historians as completely partisan. The one against Bill Clinton – I lived through that and that was also highly partisan and really a gotcha effort. It never had any public support and the president never used the powers of his office to engage in the acts, as reprehensible as they were.
This was not a threat to the democracy in the way that Richard Nixon’s actions were. He used the powers of his office, of the presidency for example, to tell the CIA to stop an FBI investigation. That was a high crime and misdemeanor. You and I couldn’t commit that crime. We’re not President. We could never tell the CIA to stop an FBI investigation, but a president who did that in order to stop an investigation into his campaign, his aides, and himself. That’s a high crime and misdemeanor.
MH: I mean, as you say in the book, a lot of people still don’t want to, you know, use this tool.
EH: Right and because they saw the Clinton impeachment which they felt was an abuse of power and unwarranted. They don’t want to see impeachment again, but what they don’t remember, Watergate is very far away in history now, even though I lived through it. What they don’t remember is that actually the impeachment effort brought the country together. It didn’t divide us. Everybody said when we were starting the impeachment effort, “Oh impeachment is terrible. It’ll never work. It’ll be partisan. The country won’t support it. It’ll tear us apart.” All these terrible things. None of those things happened –
MH: But hold on, Elizabeth. Isn’t the problem that the 70s now look like a more innocent time even, dare I say? I saw Carl Bernstein, one of the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, being interviewed not so long ago and he was suggesting that if he broke Watergate today, it wouldn’t topple Richard Nixon because you’d have Fox News pushing out disinformation on his behalf. You’d have Nixon saying it’s all fake news. And now, unlike then the Republicans aren’t willing to put country over party and vote against their own president, are they?
EH: Yes, but what happened in Watergate is, I’m not sure that there was a – there definitely was not a nose count. And when we started, we didn’t actually even know that there was going to be evidence to warrant an impeachment.
Now you have to remember one thing that is very different from 1973 and 4 to today. Richard Nixon was elected in one of the largest landslides in American history, which meant for the public to support the impeachment effort millions of Americans had to change their mind.
MH: But it was easier to change minds back then. You didn’t have this kind of state propaganda channel in the form of Fox News or social media. You had a Republican party full of semi-reasonable people that were willing to tell Nixon “You gotta go otherwise we’ll impeach you.” It’s hard to imagine a Mitch McConnell, or a Chuck Grassley, or a Lindsey Graham, the great sycophant-in-chief these days say anything similar to Donald Trump. Or Trump even listening to them, even if they did.
EH: They may not, but their colleagues might and if you had overwhelming evidence as we had during Watergate, and if you spelled out the grounds for impeachment, you would begin to get the kind of public support that allowed the House Judiciary Committee to go forward. Now, we don’t, we have no confidence in the process. We want to have the result. We want to know that we’ve got two thirds of the Senate and a majority in the House of Representatives before we start. Even before we set out the case, even before anybody does any research, even before –
MH: But given right now, given right now, the Democrats don’t have a two-thirds majority, they don’t have any majority in the Senate.
EH: – Correct.
MH: And given how partisan politics is and how loyal the Republicans have proved to be to this, you know, almost lawless president in many ways, what is your actual plan? If Nancy Pelosi were to ring you up tomorrow, she says “Elizabeth. I’ve read your book, what should we do next? What’s the plan for me and Chuck Schumer in the Senate?” What would you say is the plan?
EH: The real plan in the Senate, I think, they’ve tried to be somewhat bipartisan in at least, the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation. But they haven’t been thorough. The first thing that has to be done: the work of investigating what President Trump did and how he did it has not been finished.
Go back to Watergate. The Senate Watergate hearings had public hearings with public figures. John Dean testified in public. Ehrlichman and Haldeman testified in public. The American people a chance to see them. The top people here never testified in public: Steve Bannon. Jared Kushner.
MH: They’re all on NDA’s or members of his family.
EH: Well, the fact of the matter is the public hasn’t seen this testimony and aside from that many of these people refused to answer questions. The committee’s refused to subpoena documents. The committee’s refused to do a thorough investigation.
MH: No, there’s a lot there definitely and I agree with you. They should try and make an effort and I’m completely with you on the opening inquiry. I think the Democrats need to take a much tougher line on impeachment. A couple of things I worry about that I wanted to run past you. The first is that the partisan nature of this. The way it will be framed. You of course, yourself voted in favor of impeaching Nixon. You wrote a book making the case for impeaching George W. Bush, and you’ve now written this new book “The Case for Impeaching Trump,” and yet in 1996, you testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee that Bill Clinton shouldn’t be impeached. Do you understand why a lot of Republicans will say “typical Democrats, you just want to use impeachment to get rid of only Republican presidents that you don’t like.” They might come into office and say you know, “you’ve impeached ours, we’re going to impeach yours. We’re going to impeach President Bernie or Warren.”
EH: Right. I mean people can always make those charges. I reject them. I’m very concerned about making sure that presidents of the United States obey the law and don’t create a kind of new monarchy where they put themselves above the law, commit crimes, or commit egregious acts that harm our democracy without accountability.
MH: So the other concern I have is, okay, in the 70s you got the evidence. You did the process. You got the votes and Nixon left of his own accord before being impeached. He would have been impeached. You had the votes. You had the public support. My worry is this time as much as I support impeaching Donald Trump. I do recognize the fact that Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon ,and even if you were to get the votes, which is very hard to get, and impeach him and convict him in the Senate, you still have to get him to leave. What if he refuses to leave? What if he says this is a deep state coup? What if his supporters who we know are kind of cultish take to the streets? That’s a real risk, isn’t it in 2018, 2019, 2020?
EH: Well, everything is a risk, but I think you have to hope that the Democratic impulse of Americans and the commitment to democracy is going to work. I don’t, I mean in the end we thought there was a lot of concern that Richard Nixon might stir up a war with Russia. There was a high alert that was called.
MH: And Trump could stir up a war with Iran or he could just flat-out refuse to go. This is a man who said he wouldn’t respect the result of the 2016 election if it had gone against him. This is the man who’s claiming the recounts in Florida and Georgia are somehow illegitimate. Will he accept impeachment?
EH: Yeah, we’ll figure that out if we come to that point.
[crosstalk]
MH: I wish I had your optimism. I mean, I hope you’re right. But I do worry about it. You say in your piece for The Intercept this week that Donald Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy,” which is something else I completely agree with you on. We’ve discussed it on the show before but do you think the leaders of the democratic party in Congress, specifically Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi probably soon to be Speaker of the House, do they recognize how serious, how almost existential that threat is from Trump? Since last week, since the midterms, they’ve both been talking up the idea of finding common ground with him, doing deals with him on infrastructure and the rest, and playing down the need for impeachment, which seems mad to me. And I wrote about that for The Intercept on Monday, the idea that they’re not taking the threat from him seriously enough. Do you agree?
EH: Well, you know, they, look, this is not very different from what happened during Watergate. The house leadership was not in favor of impeachment. They were adamantly opposed to impeachment. Here you had a Senate Watergate Committee that had heard from John Dean, had heard from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Had heard from a lot of people involved with the Watergate break-in. The Senate Watergate committee uncovered the tapes and nobody in the House of Representatives would allow an impeachment process to take place. They didn’t want it. And that’s when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, and we had a Republican president and they refused to act.
Okay, what happened? The American people rose up after the Saturday Night Massacre and said Congress, get off your rear end and do something to hold this President accountable. And that’s when the effort started and it was bipartisan from the get-go. The Democrats picked a Republican as their general counsel, the Republicans, of course, picked a Republican as a general counsel.
MH: But in the 70s, Elizabeth, that stuff worked. Now you have Jim Comey, lifelong Republican, Robert Mueller lifelong Republican—doesn’t endear them to the Republicans at all. This is a Republican party that just doesn’t care.
EH: Well they may not care, but the American people will care. We saw the American people give a pretty resounding rebuff this in the midterm elections to Donald Trump. So I don’t think that you can just sit here and say “Well it’s different now and no, we don’t have the votes in the Senate and no — you know, that’s the exact kind of thing that went on during Watergate, except they never even tried to take the votes in the Senate before they started the process in the House because they understand –
MH: Don’t get me wrong, Elizabeth, I’m with you. I’m with you. I’m glad you’re writing this stuff. I just, I’m slightly more pessimistic about though, I admire your optimism. So let me ask you this: prediction time, do you think he will be impeached?
EH: I think it depends on the quality of evidence that we can find. I think that that’s really key. For example, in Watergate, we were fortunate enough to find a taping system. That came out because of the Senate’s careful, thorough, methodical bipartisan inquiry.
MH: Okay. I’m going to re-ask the question. Do you think it’s more likely or less likely that he will be impeached, if you had to just make a bet?
EH: I’m not a betting person, but I would like to see a real process.
MH: (laughs) Well it was worth a try, I just thought I’d ask the author of the book “The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump.” Is it going to happen? Because there may be a case for it, but will it actually happen before 2020?
EH: If we sit back and do nothing, it’ll never happen. We have to just reach out and try, find the facts, find the law, educate the American people, and then trust that they will work, and speak out to preserve democracy. If the American people don’t want democracy, we’re not going to get it. No matter what we do.
MH: My worry is a lot of American people don’t want democracy these days. Just on the on the issue of “child separations,” I hate using that phrase because it was more like child theft, you wrote about what happened at the border in your book and in your article for The Intercept. You say “It’s not an impeachable offense, but it reflects on what kind of President the United States has –”
EH: No, I do think that’s an impeachable offense.
MH: – Oh, you do? Oh wow.
EH: Yes, I do think that that kind of lawlessness can amount to an impeachable offense. We saw – first of all, there’s no law that allowed President Trump to do what he did in terms of ordering the separation. This is an egregious offense in my opinion. Egregious misuse of the power of his office to deprive people of their due process rights. Because if our president could do it to those children, what children are safe?
MH: Elizabeth Holtzman, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.
EH: Thank you.
[musical interlude]
MH: That was Elizabeth Holtzman, former member of Congress, author of the new book “The Case for Impeaching Trump.”
You can read her op-ed at thentercept.com making that case in detail. And maybe you share some of our optimism. I hope it’s infectious because I think she makes a key point in that interview, which is that impeachment being a political process requires public support. And rather than being negative, or pessimistic, or defeatist, rather than saying let’s wait for the evidence when a lot of the evidence is staring us in the face, the Democrats need to start making a public case for impeachment, for the merits of impeachment, for the need for impeachment. They need to start preparing the ground for a trial in the Senate. Even if it ends up being a trial they don’t or can’t win.
I happen to think Fox News makes it much harder to impeach Trump than it was to impeach Nixon, no matter the evidence. But having said that, I also happen to believe Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy and to not use a constitutionally provided tool to try and stop him, to try and prevent him from undermining democracy and the Constitution is just political malpractice.
That’s our show…Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept and is distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review – it helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!
See you next time.
The post Why the Democrats Can (and Should) Impeach Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
When Donald Trump’s presidential election victory was announced in the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, like many Americans, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief and dismay. Two questions raced through my mind:
What had become of America that a man so unfit, so small-minded, so mean-spirited could be elected? A man whose ethnic and racial bigotry had set the stage for his presidential run when he called Mexicans rapists and made racist birther attacks on President Barack Obama. Whose vulgarity and misogyny were laid bare in the Access Hollywood tape when he bragged about forcibly grabbing women by their genitals. Whose performance at presidential debates showed him not only flagrantly ill-informed, but manifestly unwilling to get informed.
My second question was how much harm this man would do to America as its 45th president.
I have my answer now to the latter, less than two years after the election. President Trump has damaged American democracy far more than I would have guessed. He has relentlessly attacked the administration of justice, in particular the investigation into a possible conspiracy with Russia regarding the 2016 presidential election, putting himself above the rule of law; he has failed to separate his personal business from the country’s, flouting the Constitution’s requirements; he has violated the constitutional rights of the people in separating children from parents at the Southwest border without due process of law; and he has refused to acknowledge Russia’s central role in interfering in our 2016 elections and to publicly lead a full-scale effort to protect against further interference. To cover up these misdeeds, moreover, he has flagrantly lied and assailed the press as an enemy of the people. These are “great and dangerous offenses” that the framers of our Constitution wanted to counteract and thwart. They provided a powerful remedy. Impeachment.
Many tremble at the word, fearing how Trump’s supporters will react to an impeachment inquiry, worrying that it will only further polarize an already deeply divided nation or that there will not be enough votes in the Republican-controlled Senate to convict him even if the newly empowered Democratic majority in the House of Representatives votes to impeach. Just calling for an inquiry will be viewed as a Democratic Party attack on the head of another party, a kind of coup d’état. It’s easy to find reasons to be anxious.
I’m not afraid. As a junior congresswoman, the youngest ever elected at that time, I served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Richard Nixon for the high crimes and misdemeanors he committed in connection with the Watergate cover-up and other matters. Thorough, fair, and above all bipartisan, the committee acted on solid evidence presented in televised hearings that riveted the nation, handing us the blueprint for how impeachment can be successfully pursued today. In our 225 years of constitutional democracy, the Nixon impeachment process has proven to be the only presidential effort that worked. Though Nixon resigned — the only president ever to do so — two weeks after the committee’s impeachment vote, he did so to avoid the certainty of being impeached and removed from office. We became a better nation for having held the president accountable.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
This means we have to focus sharply on his potentially impeachable offenses. In so doing, we will find it useful to compare them, when possible, to similar offenses by Nixon found to be impeachable by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. Here is a list of some of Trump’s potentially impeachable offenses developed as of this writing:
A possible interference with or obstruction of the administration of justice and an abuse of power. On May 9, 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating both his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign in connection with influencing the 2016 presidential election. Two days later, Trump admitted to NBC’s Lester Holt that Comey’s firing had to do with “the Russia thing” — in other words, Trump acknowledged that he was trying to shut down the FBI investigation into his possible conspiracy with Russia. (Flynn has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.)
The Comey firing uncannily echoes Nixon’s firing of the special Watergate prosecutor for seeking highly damaging information about the president — a brazen defiance of the rule of law that triggered the start of impeachment proceedings against Nixon.
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP
A failure to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, as required by the Constitution. To try to deflect public concern about his possible role in conspiring with Russia about the 2016 election and to undermine the legitimacy of the investigation into that matter, Trump has persistently attacked the Russia investigation as a witch hunt and a hoax, even though 34 people either pleaded guilty or were indicted as a result of that investigation. The indictments included Russian agents who allegedly interfered with the 2016 election by manipulating social media, hacking into computers of the Democratic National Committee, targeting election machinery in various states, and using other methods.
Similar behavior by Nixon became one of the grounds of the first article of impeachment against him. As part of the Watergate cover-up, Nixon was charged with making “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.” This included Nixon’s claim that White House investigations had cleared everyone of any involvement with the break-in, for example, and that his aide H. R. Haldeman, who had perjured himself before the Senate Watergate Committee, had testified accurately.
A second failure to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, as required by the Constitution. Trump has failed to undertake his constitutionally mandated leadership role to protect our elections from further interference by the Russian government, including his continued refusal to acknowledge unequivocally Russia’s interference in 2016, despite the paramount importance of ensuring honest elections in our democracy. For example, cyber countermeasures were apparently undertaken starting in the summer of 2018, but without the president’s involvement. His continued hands-off approach has left too many Americans doubting the existence of Russian interference and failing to insist on robust government protective measures. In the absence of that protection, the Russians may renew the cyberattacks and other interference previously used against us.
An abuse of power. He has used the power of his office to remove or threaten to remove the security clearances of people who criticized him or who he believed were associated with the Russia investigation or could be possible witnesses against him. A historical equivalent is Nixon’s creation of an “Enemies List” of anti-Vietnam War activists, whom he directed to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service in retaliation for their political positions — actions that formed part of an article of impeachment.
A second abuse of power. He approved a lawless, ethnically based, and infinitely cruel policy of separating children from parents at the Southwest border, depriving both children and parents of their constitutional rights and subjecting them to horrific mental anguish that may result in long-term psychological damage, a policy that the courts struck down.
An assault on our democratic values. He has systematically lied to the American people about government policies and actions, crippling their ability to make sound judgments about the direction of their government.
A violation of a specific constitutional prohibition. He has refused to separate himself from his business interests, which have received things of value from foreign and U.S. governments, ranging from Chinese trademarks to payments for the use of his Washington hotel, suggesting that the presidency is open for business and that his personal business interests may influence his governmental decisions — all apparent violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution and possibly the ban on bribery as well. Though the House Judiciary Committee voted against an article of impeachment involving Nixon’s receipt of emoluments from the federal government, notably in the form of improvements to his California and Florida properties, Trump’s business interests are far greater than Nixon’s, and Trump could have tried to cure the problem of foreign emoluments by getting congressional approval, which he has steadfastly refused to do.
An effort to undermine a core democratic institution. He has repeatedly attacked the media as the enemy of the people (a term used in the Stalinist purges against untold thousands of innocent people ultimately killed by the Soviet regime), encouraging Americans to disregard what they see and hear in the press as “fake news.” Seriously undermining the free press hampers the public’s right to know, which in itself hurts a democracy.
Nixon also attacked the press. He illegally ordered the wiretapping of journalists and placed a number of them on his Enemies List, targeting them for harassing IRS audits. Both actions formed a basis for Nixon’s impeachment.
Photo: Ray Stubblebine/AP
Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy. Whether it is his effort to impede and obstruct the investigations into Russian interference, his declining to protect our election system from Russian manipulation, his open hand to payments his businesses receive from foreign governments and domestically, or his assault on the rights of thousands of children at the border, the president’s misdeeds cast a wide net. They are ongoing, with no end in sight. And he continues to spin a web of incessant and brazen falsehoods, deceptions, and lies to disguise and conceal the misdeeds.
In 1973, the country also faced a president run amok. Richard Nixon, whose campaign minions broke into the Watergate complex, orchestrated a vast, multipronged effort to stymie investigations into the burglary. Nixon engaged in other nefarious activities and abuses of power: He violated the rights of Americans though illegal wiretaps of journalists, an illegal break-in into a psychiatrist’s office for damaging information, an order for IRS audits of political opponents — the Enemies List — to name a few.
Nixon’s cover-up was effective: It got him re-elected with one of the largest electoral margins in American history. Then, it began to unravel. Evidence harmful to him came to light, and, in a grandiose move of maximum presidential authority, he ordered the special prosecutor investigating him to be fired. That’s where the American people drew the line. They demanded that Congress take action, and it did. It started an inquiry, which resulted in a bipartisan vote for articles of impeachment, forcing Nixon to resign.
It was in response to obstruction that the articles of impeachment against Nixon were adopted. Their message? Presidents cannot block, tamper with, and destroy the machinery of justice that is aimed at them. If they do, it is at their peril. They face impeachment, removal from office, even imprisonment. But if we allow presidents to block, tamper with, and destroy the machinery of justice that is aimed at them, we do so at our peril. The rule of law will go up in smoke. We will enshrine two standards of justice, one for the powerful and one for everyone else. We will find ourselves on the road to tyranny.
It is a road that we’re dangerously close to traveling today.
Nixon worked mightily to stop the institutions of justice from closing in on him and his associates. So has Trump. Not every aspect of Nixon’s impeachable offenses is replicated in Trump’s behavior. Still, there are astonishing and troublesome parallels, particularly in the Russia investigation, including Trump’s firing the FBI director (Nixon had the special Watergate prosecutor fired); Trump’s demanding that the recused attorney general resign and replacing him with an acting attorney general who is outspokenly hostile to the investigation and who has suggested ways of terminating it by such means as defunding it (Nixon tried to fire the special Watergate prosecutor, a more direct way of ending the investigation into himself); dangling pardon possibilities to those under investigation (Nixon did the same); making relentless and false attacks on the investigation and those conducting it (Nixon called for an end to the investigations and engaged in other attacks); and deceiving the public and Congress constantly and systematically (Nixon did that, too).
Watergate started with burglars who used burglars’ tools to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C. They were interfering in the 1972 presidential election. The investigation of Donald Trump started with the Russians’ using cyber tools to break into the DNC computer servers and interfere in the 2016 presidential election. We don’t know what the Watergate burglars were looking for. We don’t know what the Russians’ real objective was, or even the full impact of their interference. It may even have vaulted Donald Trump into the White House.
But we do know that on July 27, 2016, Trump publicly called for Russian help in winning the election — and later repeatedly applauded WikiLeaks’ release of illegally hacked Clinton campaign emails. And we know that Russia gave him help — targeting, for example, Hillary Clinton’s personal office for the first time the day after Trump’s request and targeting 76 of her staffers as well.
Was the help coordinated with the Trump campaign or just coincidental? If coordinated, then Trump has committed a high crime and misdemeanor of the gravest kind — working with a foreign power in violation of our campaign finance and other laws to get elected. It is imperative for Congress to ascertain the facts, and not leave us to speculate or with a secretly beholden president.
Trump’s effort to block the investigation into his possible collusion with the Russians over the 2016 election on the face of it warrants an impeachment inquiry. It may well be that a full examination of his behavior will exonerate him, but, given the record of his tweets and his public statements, not to mention his firing of James Comey, it is more likely that his actions have been prompted by the impermissible and impeachable objective of stopping the investigations before they find him out.
Trump’s misconduct does not stop with his repeated attempts to impede the Russia investigations. He has steadfastly refused to accept that Russia seriously interfered in our 2016 elections and to take a public role in developing and announcing plans to protect against further Russian attacks, failing to fulfill his central obligation as president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. This failure, too, is related to his effort to impede the Russia investigation. If the American people, including his “base,” fully understood the seriousness and scope of the Russian attacks, they would demand effective measures from the president to stop them, but they also might question why Trump is calling the investigation a hoax when the Russians really attacked us, as our intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, grand juries, and private social media companies have found.
The president has also defied and flouted the Constitution’s ban on emoluments on a very large scale, creating the appearance, if not the reality, of influence-peddling at the highest level of our government. This is another assault on our democracy.
Finally, Trump’s heartless separation of thousands of children from parents on the Southwest border is an action that violates our Constitution’s deepest promises of due process and equal protection. The willingness to assault the Constitution by harming so many threatens all of us.
Photo: David J. Phillip/AP
There is a remedy — and I participated in it and lived through it and saw it work. The solution is what Congress, the courts, and the press used in dealing with Nixon in Watergate. It means imposing accountability and holding the president to the rule of law, as we did then.
In Watergate, there was a criminal investigation and there were congressional inquiries, including an impeachment process. All were thorough and fair; all won the respect of the public. And together they re-established the public’s faith in the viability of our democracy and the Constitution.
No one, not even a president, is above the law. That is the lesson of Watergate, and it must continue to be the lesson today.
Today we have the advantage of knowing what to do, of having the model for action — full-throated congressional inquiries, a bipartisan impeachment inquiry, and an investigation by Robert Mueller that proceeds without interference until it is properly concluded. These are simple, realizable objectives.
The American people can force action on this agenda as they did in response to presidential misconduct in Watergate. We have the power. We are still a democracy.
This article is adapted from the book “The Case for Impeaching Trump” by Elizabeth Holtzman.
The post The Watergate Blueprint for Impeaching Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Mid-Midterms: The U.S. midterm elections are still ongoing—multiple House races have yet to be called, though in the week since November 6, several more Democratic candidates have been swept into office, many in Republican-leaning districts. Turns out, writes Ronald Brownstein, that the GOP strategy of aligning itself closely with Donald Trump is very limiting: Here’s the electoral evidence.
Fall From Grace: Remember earlier years, when technology giants like Facebook or Google were scrappy, ambitious darlings, born in Silicon Valley and set to change the world? As recent reports unfold of just how poorly Facebook executives mishandled the company’s many scandals of the past two years, Alexis Madrigal asks, “What if the news stays bad, but the people using their products can’t extract themselves from the platforms tech has built?”
Short-Term Memory: Bad news gets overshadowed by more bad news, and on no subject is that punishing pattern clearer than when the news is about mass shootings. How long do such stories dominate headlines? That time span has stayed remarkably consistent over the past few decades.
Snapshot
We know the danger of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. But aggressive use of antifungal chemicals in agriculture can lead to deadly, resistant superfungi—and pose a profound threat to humans. Read this Maryn McKenna story on how a lovely garden flower like the tulip became deadly. (Rachel Suggs)Evening ReadNobody loves being stuck in traffic, and the Los Angeles gridlock is severe. So Elon Musk’s Boring Company started digging a 14-foot-wide, mile-long tunnel under parts of the city to accommodate a futuristic transit system. But did anyone bother to ask the people living in these neighborhoods? Alana Semuels writes:
I talked to a dozen people who live along the tunnel’s route, and most said they hadn’t witnessed any extra noise or traffic. But none had been informed ahead of time that a private company would be digging a tunnel beneath the street. Some only learned about the tunnel in mid-2018—not when the digging started, in 2017—because the company purchased a dilapidated house on 119th Place for nearly $500,000 in cash. (Other homes in the neighborhood are assessed at between $200,000 and $500,000.) The company plans to install an elevator in the garage of the house to practice raising cars from the tunnel to ground level. It says it will rent the rest of the house to SpaceX employees.
The company sent letters to some neighbors about the project and held public meetings to discuss it with residents in July 2018. But when those public meetings occurred, the tunnel was nearly complete.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. The Leave-ers are leaving: This secretary of state for Brexit submitted his resignation Thursday morning, followed swiftly by several other cabinet members.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. President Trump’s nonappearance at this famed World War I cemetery in northern France over the weekend contributed to a broader worry among European leaders that Europe is increasingly being hung out to dry by the U.S.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. The Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing has cast Turkey, which under this man’s rule has stifled dissent, in a more unusual role as a defender of human rights and a free press.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Dominic Raab / Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial / Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Jessica Lee Martin shares today’s top stories:
What’s your local Target or Walmart worth? Whatever its property-tax bill says, right? In suburban communities around the U.S., big-box retailers are slashing their property taxes through a legal loophole known as “dark-store theory.” For the cities that rely on that revenue, this could spell disaster.
Is Amazon’s HQ2 a done deal for New York and Virginia? Sarah Holder takes us inside the local movement to derail or amend Amazon’s incentives—or at least stop the next bidding war from mirroring this one.
As cities wake up to their housing crises, they’ll realize they have to confront the problem of single-family residential zoning. Booming, expensive cities need to build more affordable housing, but neighborhoods filled with single-family homes remain virtually untouched by new development. Can that be changed?
For more updates like these from the urban world, subscribe to CityLab’s Daily newsletter.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Atlantic Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey), Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal), and Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)
Today in 5 LinesA federal judge in Florida ordered the state’s deadline to validate votes be extended until Saturday. Senate candidate Rick Scott’s campaign, whose race is in a recount, said it would appeal the decision.
Democrat Jared Golden beat Republican Representative Bruce Poliquin in Maine’s 2nd District, flipping the seat and bringing the number of Democratic House pickups to 33, with seven races still undecided.
The Trump administration has reportedly been looking for a way to remove a Turkish exile living in the United States in an effort to persuade Turkish President Recep Erdogan to ease pressure on the Saudi government, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Facebook is scrambling to respond to Monday’s New York Times report that top Facebook executives had worked to minimize and “deflect blame” over the numerous scandals, including Russian election interference, that have plagued the company over the last two years.
Hundreds of Central Americans traveling in a migrant caravan, many of whom are seeking asylum in the United States, have started to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Today on The AtlanticAn Oral History: Twenty years ago, the House impeached Bill Clinton. This is the story of what went down, from the very people involved. (David A. Graham and Cullen Murphy)
Lessons Learned: Republicans should take away one thing from the midterm elections, writes Ronald Brownstein: As long as they stay loyal to Trump, their electoral prospects will be restricted.
A Wave of Support: After last month’s massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, hundreds of thousands of non-Jews turned out for Shabbat services worldwide. (Haley Weiss)
Never Forget?: Over the past two decades, the media’s attention span for mass shootings has remained roughly the same—about one week. (Adam Harris)
Snapshot
Representatives-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and IIhan Omar walk and talk as they head to member-elect briefings on Capitol Hill. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)What We’re ReadingBlue Wave Women: Only Democrats benefited from a so-called Year of the Woman. The number of Republican congresswomen actually dropped. (Susan Chira, The New York Times)
Trump the Younger: Here’s how Donald Trump Jr. became his father’s top surrogate. (David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell, The Washington Post)
Failure to Comply: After a federal judge’s ruling sent it back to the drawing board, the controversial Keystone XL pipeline could be doomed. (Jonathan Thompson, High Country News)
Cold Cases: Some U.S. police departments are classifying rape cases in way that makes them look like they’re solved, when in reality they are just closed, a new investigation finds. (Newsy, ProPublica, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting)
VisualizedAge Gap: See how generational differences between the incoming class of House members and their older counterparts are shaping the Democratic leadership fight. (Kevin Schaul and Kevin Uhrmacher, The Washington Post)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
Think back a few years, before the Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, before Susan Fowler’s viral blog post, before the #MeToo movement, before the 2016 election. Across the nation, Silicon Valley was the crown jewel of the economy. The companies were youthful and ambitious. The culture was loose and exciting. The capabilities they put into the world’s pockets were astonishing: talk to anyone, know everything, buy anything, all with a few little taps on glass. Yes, this had unleashed unprecedented surveillance possibilities, as Edward Snowden revealed, but these were still the most beloved companies in the country. Their founders were legends.
The past several weeks have been like the past two years in miniature. First, The New York Times released a blockbuster article about Google’s sexual-harassment problems that placed the blame both on the institution itself and on the co-founder and current CEO, Larry Page. Then, Amazon selected its new headquarters, releasing a torrent of criticism of the deals: Why were municipalities subsidizing the richest man in the world in their race to the bottom? And finally, yesterday, the Times put out a 50-source story about Facebook’s obliviousness to its own platform’s darker possibilities. (In a statement today, Facebook’s board of directors called the story “grossly unfair.”)
At home in Northern California, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a tax designed to extract money from tech companies to help ease homelessness in the city. Across the Bay, Oakland voters passed a progressive property-transfer tax, which was another way of taxing the enormous wealth that’s poured into the Bay Area.
Locally and nationally, the tech industry has gone from bright young star to death star. Not only have Silicon Valley companies turned out to be roughly as dirty in their corporate maneuvering as any old oil company or military contractor, but because of the Valley’s founder worship, they’ve been almost uniquely controlled by a tiny number of people.
[Read: Were we destined to live in Facebook’s world?]
And as in most things, Facebook distills, or at least embodies, these industry-wide practices. After a brutal two years that started with the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg responded by placing loyalists in charge of all Facebook Inc. properties. The company’s lobbyists pushed a line that its opponents were linked to George Soros, while reporting other enemies to the Anti-Defamation League.
Where does this almost unbelievably bad news cycle end for these companies? And what if the news stays bad, but the people using their products can’t extract themselves from the platforms tech has built?
A historical analog for this fall from grace does exist. There was a time when Americans loved and talked about the transcontinental railroads the way we loved and talked about the internet. The steel lines spanning the nation were, as the Stanford historian Richard White put it, “the epitome of modernity.” “[Americans] were in love with railroads because railroads defined the age. The claims made for railroads by men who wrote about them were always extravagant,” White wrote in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. “The kind of hyperbole recently lavished on the Internet was once the mark of railroad talk.”
Then the public turned on the transcontinental railroads. “The innovations entrepreneurs brought to the railroads—financial mechanisms, pricing innovations, and political techniques—were as harmful to the public, to the republic, and even to the corporation as they were profitable to many of the innovators,” White continued.
[Read: Tech was supposed to be society’s great equalizer. What happened?]
The railroads became some of the most despised institutions in the country and a core reason why monopoly became such a terrible word. When the railroad mythology collapsed, it helped create an entire political ideology: the progressivism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That Americans fell out of love with those railroads, and the Gilded Age they helped usher in; that the railroads became corrupt monopolies that built the first powerful lobbying organizations; that the transcontinental railroads ended up failing businesses that still generated some of the richest people in the country: This story is often told separately from the one about the supposedly glorious creation and operation of the network itself. The men—among them Leland Stanford, the founder of the university that educated so many of today’s disruptors— were still revered, subject only to what White calls “say what you will” criticisms.
The people who founded the great internet companies of today—Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin—are experiencing a fast-motion version of the transcontinental story. Having built Facebook, Amazon, and Google, rewiring the experience of being alive, these men have seen their companies experience a mighty backlash. But the men themselves have continued to grow their legends, rooted in the raw power of their personal fortunes and the gravitas of their philanthropic endeavors. Zuckerberg is worth $53.7 billion. Page is worth $51.8. Bezos is worth $133.8 billion, a number that ticked up even as activists and pundits criticized the HQ2 decision. Say what you will, they’ve built world-historic empires—no matter what ultimately becomes of them.
President Trump commits outrage after outrage that no previous U.S. president has done before. But, at the same time, he also omits to do things that every previous president has done or would do.
America’s close friend, Great Britain, has thrust itself into desperate trouble. In a tight referendum marred by aggressive disinformation and violations of campaign-finance law, the United Kingdom voted in summer 2016 to exit the European Union.
That vote triggered a negotiating process that yesterday reached its perverse but inevitable outcome. The U.K. and the EU have committed to negotiate a new trade accord. Pending that treaty—which could take many years—Britain will remain within many EU structures, subject to EU rules but lacking any voice in the making of those rules. Meanwhile, in order to avoid redrawing a hard boundary across the island of Ireland, the Northern Irish part of the United Kingdom will face different rules from the rest of the United Kingdom. In other words, a vote to affirm the sovereignty of the British state has instead dissolved the unity of the British state.
[Read: Brexit crisis. Theresa May in trouble. Rinse. Repeat.]
Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled the agreement Wednesday. Since then:
The British cabinet secretary in charge of the Brexit negotiations has resigned to protest the deal he was supposedly responsible for—the second resignation from that office this year. Three more junior cabinet officers have resigned as well. The value of the pound lurched and heaved, dropping 1.7 percent against the dollar at one point after the Brexit secretary’s resignation. The S&P 500 dropped 0.5 percent when trading opened in New York City on Thursday. The EU president, the former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, has described Brexit as a “lose-lose” proposition: bad for Britain, bad for Europe.For support, May’s communications team rounded up tepid endorsements from business groups. Here’s the U.K. Federation of Small Businesses: “A deal is now on the table and it is important that the UK government and the EU press ahead as this is the best chance of avoiding a catastrophic cliff edge ….”
Yet there is another loser too, one not being mentioned nearly often enough: the United States of America.
American presidents have historically had their own view of the U.K.-EU relationship: They wanted Britain in Europe, both to expedite trade and commerce across the Channel—and because they counted on Britain to veto anti-American actions by other European countries, especially France.
[Richard Fontaine: Trump gets NATO backwards.]
British governments tended to agree with the United States that the defense of Europe was a job for the U.S.-led NATO alliance—not for some autonomous European defense force. British governments usually opposed state ownership, efforts to build protectionist barriers around Europe, and other dirigiste industrial policies that ran counter to U.S. economic interests.
President Obama expressed America's longstanding preference for U.K.-in-EU during an April 2016 visit to Britain, both at a joint press conference with then-Prime Minister David Cameron and in an op-ed in the Euroskeptical conservative newspaper, The Telegraph: “The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe ensures that Europe takes a strong stance in the world, and keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies on the other side of the Atlantic. So the U.S. and the world need your outsized influence to continue—including within Europe.”
But by the spring of 2016, the U.S. presidential election was vigorously underway. The Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage dismissed Obama’s warnings of difficulties ahead as concealed anti-British animosity from a president more Kenyan than American. “Look, I know his family’s background,” he said. “Kenya. Colonialism. There is clearly something going on there. It’s just that you know people emerge from colonialism with different views of the British. Some thought that they were really rather benign and rather good, and others saw them as foreign invaders. Obama’s family come from that second school of thought and it hasn’t quite left him yet.” Then-London Mayor Boris Johnson concurred: Obama’s part-Kenyan heritage had biased him toward an “ancestral dislike of the British empire.”
[Eliot Cohen: Trump fails his rendezvous in France]
The Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, expressed strongly pro-Brexit views. Many in Britain counted on Trump, should he win, to fast-track a U.S.-UK free-trade agreement that would more than compensate for any economic shocks of EU exit. Some are still counting on it, long after they should have known better. Instead, Trump hit Britain as well as other trade partners with steel and aluminum tariffs in the summer of 2018—and then threatened a follow-on strike against autos, an important British export to the U.S.
Now the British are well and truly stuck. Under present EU rules, they cannot simply give up Brexit after having formally initiated the departure process. They would now legally have to apply for readmission to the European Union—and as a newly admitted state, they would theoretically be obliged to submit to the Euro currency and to the Schengen rules on free movement of labor. The pre-Brexit U.K. had been exempt from those rules.
But it’s not just Britain that is the loser. Brexit, along with Trump’s trade war, is jolting the world economy, frightening financial markets, and edging us all closer to the next global recession. Trump’s big deficit-financed tax cuts have pushed the U.S. into deficits as deep as those incurred to fight the Iraq war. The most powerful anti-recession stimulus available is freer trade.
A responsible American president would pull America’s friends back from this brink. For all the anguish, Brexit still has not happened yet. Britain has filed formal notice of its intention to leap off the precipice, but its feet as yet still touch the ground. The EU authorities have accepted the notice, but paperwork does sometimes get postponed, revised, lost, or forgotten. By now, the U.K. and EU alike would likely welcome a face-saving compromise—one that spares the U.K. the humiliation of asking to be released from the exit process it triggered, one that protects the EU from the disruption of losing its most economically dynamic and militarily capable member state. The EU's own rules offer no obvious off-ramp from the looming crunch—but American help and American pressure might possibly construct such an off-ramp just in time.
Maybe the solution is postponement followed by a second British referendum on the choice between the new renegotiated deal and the pre-2016 EU status quo.
To date, though, America has played no role, raised no voice. Trump has repeatedly welcomed Brexit. His national-security adviser has long advocated it. The rest of the administration is too paralyzed and dysfunctional to remonstrate against the president's malign indifference, much less reverse it.
Why is America AWOL when Britain and Europe need America more badly than perhaps at any time since 1989? Who abdicated American leadership in a way that damages every U.S. strategic and economic interest, while also staining America’s long-standing image as a faithful and helpful ally? How did “America First” become code for “U.S. Friends Abandoned; U.S. Interests Betrayed”?
You know the answer—and it’s an answer that underscores that as lazy, inept, and frivolous as this administration appears from day-to-day, from year-to-year it is inflicting deeply serious harms that may never be healed.
Isabel Allende doesn’t take anything for granted. The celebrated author grew up moving from place to place as the child of a diplomat; as an adult, she was forced out of her native Chile by political upheaval. On Wednesday night, Allende was honored by the National Book Foundation for her distinguished contribution to American letters—the first such award given to a Spanish-language writer. In her stirring acceptance speech, she described how the condition of being “chronically uprooted” has fed her creativity—not only in the themes of “nostalgia, loss, and separation” that haunt her books, but also in terms of process:
As a stranger … I observe and listen carefully. I ask questions, and I question everything. For my writing, I don’t need to invent much; I look around and take notes. I’m a collector of experiences.
It’s a notably scientific approach to a craft that, in the popular imagination, often seems suffused with magic. Where, exactly, does inspiration come from? How can you translate your dreamed-up ideas into actual sentences? The prospect of shaping a jumble of half-imagined scenes into compelling fiction can be paralyzing, and the inevitable, overarching chaos of real life makes it that much harder.
Allende’s story is quintessentially American: She came to the U.S. for a new start after living for more than a decade as a political refugee in Venezuela. By that time, Allende had already gained international renown for The House of the Spirits, a novel inspired by her family history and by Chilean life under the Pinochet dictatorship. The impetus for writing Spirits—and other works, such as her memoir Paula—illustrates how personal and political turmoil has figured prominently into her creative method. Most of her writing, Allende explained, stems from the “incurable desire to belong to a place,” and her speech, detailing her experience-collecting method, functions almost as a step-by-step guide for responding to such existential uncertainties. Surrounded by people with infinitely varied lives, writers, she advised, need not feel the pressure of making up stories from scratch. Confronted with problems in their plots or psyches, they can use their skills of observation to gain understanding. After all, Allende asks, “What is writing … but an attempt to sort out the confusion of life?”
At a time of deep division and confusion for the nation and the world at large, that message sounds like a lifeline. In her talk, Allende alluded to the ravages of the Syrian civil war, and to racism and violence in the United States. She described a fragile national identity, noting that this is “a time where the values and principles that sustain our civilization are under siege.” And she spoke to the looming anxieties of “war in many places, and potential war everywhere.”
So how do writers make sense of it all? Observe. Take notes. Question your own assumptions. Recognize the struggles of people around you, acknowledge your struggles, and be generous to both. In Allende’s words, “If we listen to another person’s story, if we tell our own story ... we realize that the similarities that bring us together are many more than the differences that separate us.”
All of this is hardly new advice, but it’s advice that bears repeating—and, perhaps, listening to more carefully than ever. Because in this way, Allende suggests, writers (and readers, and everyone else) can make meaning out of uncertainty, and turn tentative, tenuous connections to people and places into strong and secure ones. “This national award … means that maybe I’m not an alien after all,” she concluded on Wednesday night. “Maybe I have found a place where I can belong. Maybe I’m not going anywhere anymore.”
With his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team this week, and with his son, Donald Trump Jr., speculating that he himself will soon be indicted, President Donald Trump apparently couldn’t contain himself anymore.
“The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess,” he tweeted on Thursday morning. “They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts.” He added, without providing evidence, that Mueller’s team was “screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want,” and called the investigators “thugs,” “a disgrace to our Nation,” and “highly conflicted.”
It isn’t clear what prompted Trump’s early-morning tirade. After all, the outburst was not exactly out of character: Trump has attacked Mueller and the Russia investigation on Twitter nearly 50 times this year alone. But it could be a sign that he received negative news from his legal team or that new indictments against his family or associates are coming down the pike.
[Benjamin Wittes: It’s probably too late to stop Mueller]
Whereas Trump typically attacks Mueller’s investigation with the same perfunctory language—calling it a “witch hunt” and “rigged”—he was unusually specific in his accusation that Mueller’s investigators were “threatening” people “to come up with the answers they want.” He made a similar charge in August, claiming that Cohen, who is now cooperating with prosecutors in a separate investigation, “made up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’”
Trump’s outburst “could just be another rant,” said Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who handled organized-crime cases. But on the other hand, it could signal action on the part of prosecutors that Trump registers as a threat. Honig explained that prosecutors sometimes get fed up with people they know are not being honest and threaten to bring charges against them. They may also threaten a person’s status as a potential cooperator, which typically comes with reduced charges. “My hunch is that prosecutors had some sort of ‘Time to get real’ conversation with someone implicated in the investigation, which was then relayed to Trump by defense attorneys,” Honig said.
The collective hunch in Washington that Mueller is due for his next big move could also be adding to Trump’s anxiety. The special counsel’s last major indictment came in July, when he brought charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and a top Hillary Clinton campaign official in 2016. The four-month delay since the last indictment, combined with Mueller’s intensified interest in the Trump campaign’s relationship with WikiLeaks and Roger Stone, has left some observers with the sense that the investigation, tightly bottled up before the midterms, is ready to explode.
Like Honig, the former federal prosecutor Dan Goldman suggested that if Trump has learned anything about Mueller’s recent moves, it’d likely be from defense lawyers whose clients have been ensnared in the investigation. Goldman, who worked on mob-related cases in the Southern District of New York, speculated that the president may know in advance that “indictments are coming, probably tomorrow.” The special counsel’s office has a pattern of releasing indictments on Fridays.
[Read: Trump repeatedly threatens retaliation against Russian investigators ]
The recent rumors about forthcoming indictments have not been baseless. Donald Trump Jr. has reportedly been telling friends that he expects to be indicted as early as this month, though it’s still unknown what he would be charged with. Roger Stone has also said he is “prepared” to be indicted “for some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election.” (Stone’s shifting story to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with WikiLeaks in 2016 may have left him exposed legally.)
And a Stone associate, the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, said earlier this week on a live-streamed video that he’d been informed by the special counsel that he will be indicted for lying to investigators. Prosecutors apparently confronted him with phone and email records that contradicted his testimony. After repeated interrogations, “my mind was mush,” he told NBC News.
Whatever set Trump off this morning, he does still appear to be cooperating with Mueller’s inquiry. Trump’s legal team is reportedly close to finishing its answers to written questions Mueller sent its way. Most, if not all, of those queries apparently have to do with the question of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, rather than obstruction of justice. Mueller has been examining the latter issue since Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had previously led the investigation into Trump’s campaign team.
But written answers crafted carefully with the help of Trump’s attorneys may not be enough to shield the president from further scrutiny. Mueller could still try to subpoena Trump to testify before a grand jury without his lawyers present, though Matthew Whitaker, who Trump selected last week to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions, could hypothetically intervene. With Mueller’s investigation potentially continuing well into 2019, however, and with so many questions still unanswered, Trump’s most recent outburst about the probe likely won’t be his last.
When NASA launched Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968, the manned spaceflight mission had one objective: “To go around the moon and get back alive,” remembers the astronaut Bill Anders in a new short documentary, Earthrise, directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. “There was essentially zero interest in images of the Earth from space. It was just one more thing to divert the crew from actually completing the mission.”
Carl Sagan’s journey this was not.
Everything changed, however, when the astronauts first glimpsed the blue planet from space. “It looked like the only thing in the entire universe,” Frank Borman, another astronaut on the crew, says in the film. “All this inky black void, and Earth was there with this beautiful blue hue to it—the blue marble.”
Later in the mission, as the spacecraft settled into lunar orbit, Earth appeared to rise over the moon’s stark, colorless horizon. Anders snapped a 70 mm photograph, which was later called Earthrise.
The first color photograph of Earth “captured a perspective of our planet never seen before and led to a collective shift in consciousness—one that saw the Earth as part of an interconnected whole,” Vaughan-Lee told The Atlantic. “I wanted to know the story behind the photograph … to know what it was like for the first human beings to see and experience Earth from space. The photograph holds the astronauts’ experience within it.”
The documentary features interviews with Anders, Borman, and Jim Lovell—now in their late 80s and early 90s—in which the Apollo 8 astronauts recall the sheer awe they experienced after leaving Earth for the first time. Their voices are heard over images and footage rarely before seen.
“[The astronauts] were incredibly honest and open with me,” said Vaughan-Lee. “They remembered everything so clearly, and the way they described the events and their experience made you feel as if you were on the journey with them. You could feel in their words the profound impact it had had on their lives, and how this experience had made a deep imprint on not just their memories, but their souls.”
This film originally appeared in the New York Times Op-Docs series.
Recently on Instagram, the former Bachelor contestant Lauren Bushnell had an important message for her 1.1 million followers. Perched on her bed in loungewear, she grasped a new pair of glasses. In the caption, she warned of what might happen to her—and to you—without them: headaches, blurred vision, fatigue, and long-term retinal damage.
The glasses are from Diff Eyewear, a brand that had made only fashion sunglasses until it recently joined a rapidly growing market for glasses whose lenses are intended only to block blue light. Along with other up-and-coming eyewear lines like Quay Australia and Tijn Eyewear, Diff’s new frames are meant to be worn indoors, and they don’t promise vision correction. Instead, they claim to protect your eyes from what these brands say are the damaging effects of your digital life.
In recent months, these brands have tapped an ever-larger stable of lifestyle bloggers and former reality TV stars to get out the word about their glasses (and provide some discount codes as an incentive) through sponsored Instagram posts like Bushnell’s. The only problem is that there’s no science linking blue-light exposure to digital eye strain or retinal damage. For the most part, these glasses are the latest in a long line of fashion products masquerading as health aids in the anxiety economy of social media. For 50 or 60 bucks, which is what most blue-light-blocking glasses cost, you get a pair of frames that looks cute in a selfie and that might help you fall asleep if worn before bed, and not much else.
The claims associated with blue-light glasses are simple enough for an Instagram caption, and the angst they address is common enough to stick with people through the infinite scroll. According to the American Optometric Association, more than half of Americans report experiencing digital eye strain, which manifests in dry, tired eyes, usually at the end of the day. At its worst, it can give people headaches and temporarily blurred vision, which are symptoms that can feel very serious. It’s easy to assume they might be indicative of larger problems or long-term damage, and that maybe you should be safeguarding yourself.
[Read: Does every person see their own rainbow?]
Despite the Instagram fad, “blue light” glasses have been around nearly as long as computers have been a part of regular life. “This first became a thing back in the late ’80s or early ’90s,” says Scott Brodie, an ophthalmologist at New York University Langone Health. The novelty of computers and the unknown repercussions of their daily use initially caused doctors and labor advocates to lobby for increased health protections for workers, he explains—concerns that mirror contemporary fears over the evolving technology of our everyday lives.
Those concerns also turned out to be unfounded. “It was a tempest in a teapot. There was no excess of any eye problem in those patients. It all blew over. As far as I know, nothing of any seriousness has turned up since,” says Brodie. He points out that although these anxieties may feel recent, many people have been using computers all day for decades, and medical professionals would by now be aware of any serious eye damage caused by their use.
The makers of blue-light-blocking glasses tend to skirt around this fact in their marketing by implying a causal relationship between two things that are actually unrelated: the light emitted by digital screens and the strain we feel from looking at any one thing for too long. “Eye strain is about the disparity between the things you want to look at and the natural focusing of your eyes, and how long you do it,” says Adam Gordon, a clinical associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Optometry. A person could just as easily experience the symptoms of digital eye strain from reading a book for eight hours with limited breaks, but many fewer jobs require it, Gordon notes.
This neat obfuscation is made easier by the fact that few consumers know what blue light actually is or where it comes from, except that it’s associated with digital screens. But as Gordon points out, screens are far from the only source. “There are studies that have shown that sunlight, just standing outdoors in the daytime, is like 200 times more intense an exposure to blue light than any screen for eight or ten hours a day,” he says. If blue light was the cause of eye strain, it would be far worse in those who work outdoors than in office dwellers or heavy smartphone users.
Blue light is just a frequency, and it’s always been an essential part of the human visual experience. In fact, it has health benefits. According to Raj K. Maturi, a professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, exposure to blue light via the sun helps prevent nearsightedness, especially in kids. Blue frequencies also help regulate humans’ daily wake-sleep cycles by preventing our bodies from producing melatonin during the daytime, which is a hormone that makes people sleepy at night.
Because blue light blocks melatonin production, Maturi did see one potentially smart use for the new crop of fashion glasses proliferating on Instagram: to block blue light in the evening hours, when exposure to it might make it harder for your body to fall asleep. “If you’re looking at your screens late at night, there’s a lot of blue in there, and then your body doesn’t adequately produce melatonin,” he says. Still, Maturi could find no justification for wearing the glasses during daytime, and the problem of melatonin production can also be addressed via devices’ built-in night modes.
Nevertheless, some consumers swear by their new glasses, even if they don’t do anything to directly affect how their eyes and devices interact. The writer Gina Tomaine wore a pair for a week to document her experience for Good Housekeeping, and although she recommends the glasses, she admits that they functioned mainly as an awareness tool. “Since the glasses made me more aware of blue light, I tried remedying the issue further with small fixes,” she wrote. Those small fixes included avoiding excess screen time and changing the contrast on her devices to be more sleep-friendly before bed.
Those changes were what probably made a difference in how Tomaine’s eyes felt, not the glasses—the extra steps she took are what all of the medical professionals I spoke with recommended for consumers whose eyes feel tired, no new products required. Maturi also mentioned a piece of advice that eye doctors commonly give to patients: the 20/20/20 method. To do it, all you have to do is look up from what you’re doing every 20 minutes and switch your focus to something 20 feet away, for 20 seconds. That lets the muscles in and around your eye relax, and it costs nothing.
[Read: How to keep computer screens from destroying your eyes]
If you follow lifestyle bloggers on Instagram, you know that a largely unspoken part of their job is to look like they’ve defeated the vague anxieties of modern life, and many make a living by selling you products and experiences that promise to draw you closer to that ideal. Some of those products, like swan-shaped pool floats or artisanal home textiles, are harmless and fun. Others, like flat-tummy laxative teas and junk-science juice trends, can exploit the difficult and sometimes dark relationships many young people have with their bodies and the realities of modern American culture. Blue-blockers provide a quick, fashionable fix to a looming anxiety, and they hit a gap in pop-cultural medical knowledge where people might be inclined to take brands or influencers at their word.
On top of the dubious health claims, there’s the question of whether these glasses even do the most basic form of what the claim: block blue light. The experts I spoke with didn’t know of any professional standards board that would verify those claims, and the glasses aren’t classified as medical devices under the Food and Drug Administration. (Diff Eyewear, Tijn Eyewear, and other manufacturers of blue-light-blocking glasses did not return requests for comment.)
It’s hard not to take a cynical view of these glasses’ sudden popularity among brands who had previously been concerned primarily with fashion. Brodie was similarly skeptical. “People spend so much time on their phones that I’m sure the chance to raise some hell by suggesting a hazard is hard to resist, but there’s no hazard,” he says.
In recent years, Chinese developers have opened a series of new tourist attractions in some very lofty places. Glass-bottomed bridges span deep canyons, narrow walkways cling to sheer cliffs, observation decks and “skywalks” top skyscrapers, and massive platforms cantilever out into thin air—all designed to entice the slightly adventurous traveler. Collected below, images of a few of these mountainside and urban destinations. A warning to any readers with a fear of heights: Some of these photos are a bit dizzying.
Saudi authorities said Thursday that they charged 11 people in connection with the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Five of the 11 were charged with murder. Turkey’s response? It’s not enough.
The journalist’s killing has cast Turkey, which under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stifled dissent, in an unusual role—that of a defender of human rights and a free press. So what does Turkey hope to get out of this? Two main things: the undermining of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and an end to the Riyadh-led blockade of Qatar.
Since Khashoggi disappeared last month, Erdoğan has put on a masterful performance: He has ensured that the specter of culpability for the killing looms over MbS; maintained deference toward Saudi King Salman, MbS’s father; and reset relations with President Donald Trump through the release of a jailed American pastor.
The Saudi prosecutors’ narrative could diminish some of Turkey’s pressure on the crown prince. According to the version of events they laid out on Thursday, a 15-man team sent to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul had orders to return Khashoggi to the kingdom. But he resisted, resulting in his murder and dismemberment, the prosecutors said. This action, they said, was not authorized by top Saudi officials. The version of events contradicts almost every previous account offered by the Saudis, who had said the death was accidental. But it is also at odds with the Turkish narrative that Khashoggi’s killing on October 2 was premeditated.
[Read: The irony of Turkey’s crusade for a missing journalist]
“We find all those steps positive, but insufficient,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Thursday following the Saudi announcement. That pronouncement is hardly shocking, but there is irony in Turkey assuming the role of champion of press freedom and human rights. This week, a Turkish court dismissed the case against Ayla Albayrak, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had previously been found guilty of promoting terrorist propaganda. Albayrak was one of more than two dozen journalists jailed by the Turkish government.
Under Erdoğan, the government has crushed dissent and dismantled the free press. Yet on the Khashoggi case, it has emerged as the clearest voice for justice—clearer even than the West, which traditionally has championed such causes but in this case is standing by its ally MbS. The Trump administration announced economic sanctions on 17 Saudis with alleged links to the killing shortly after the Saudi announcement. A French foreign-ministry spokeswoman called the Saudi announcement a step “in the right direction.”
Following Thursday’s charges, Erdoğan’s primary goal of sidelining MbS appears to have stalled. “I think he overplayed his hand aiming to undermine MbS,” Soner Cagaptay, who studies Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said.
Still, the Turkish president has cards left to play: Saudi Arabia’s Western allies are so keen on the Khashoggi story going away that they are likely to offer Ankara incentives to stop pointing the finger at MbS and accept the results of the Saudi inquiry. (Turkey itself has called for an international investigation into the incident.)
Ankara can also extract major political concessions from the Arabs. Erdoğan, who has portrayed himself as a leader of the Muslim world, has another goal: that of Islamic unity. “If he gets this as part of the bargain with MbS, he might let him walk away,” Cagaptay, the author of The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey, said.
[Read: Erdo]ğan’s big reveal that wasn’t
One way to achieve that unity is through an end to the Saudi-led Arab blockade of Qatar. Turkey, along with Iran, has supported Doha during the more-than-year-long embargo imposed on Qatar by its fellow Arab states for, among other things, its alleged support of Islamist groups. Many of those groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which most Arab states regard as a terrorist organization, but which Erdoğan openly supports because of its espousal of political Islam. Qatar, which remains one of Turkey’s major financial benefactors, says it supports all groups in the region because it takes into account political realities on the ground.
Foreign Minister Çavuşoğlu’s remarks that the Saudi prosecutor’s actions were “positive, but insufficient” leaves the door open for a compromise—one that ends the blockade of Qatar and includes a tacit understanding from Arab states that Ankara will continue to support groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. Any such agreement would almost certainly boost Erdoğan’s standing in the region. For a country that is struggling economically and, until recently, was feuding with all its major allies, this is no small thing.
Acting, Sandy Kominsky (Michael Douglas) tells his students in the second episode of The Kominsky Method, is how we explore what it means to be human. “Experience the feelings that come up, no matter how painful,” he urges them, “because that grief, that unrelenting sorrow—that’s the raw material. That’s the gold an actor mines to create great performances.”
It’s a persuasive speech, and it’s completely unheeded by The Kominsky Method itself, in which Douglas ambles through his scenes with the amiable laziness of an aging Labrador. There’s no urgency in his performance, no desire to do anything but please. And it’s not entirely his fault. Chuck Lorre, the sitcom impresario who’s created series both great (Cybill, Mom) and impossibly popular (The Big Bang Theory), has produced something distinctly strange with The Kominsky Method. It’s neither a sitcom nor a sadcom, but it gestures vaguely in the direction of both, treating, say, opioid addiction with the breeziness of an SNL skit while finding heartfelt (and seemingly endless) tragedy in the indignities of the aging prostate.
To be fair, this is new territory for Lorre, whose previous Netflix show, the Kathy Bates stoner comedy Disjointed, stayed within the familiar realm of the multi-camera, laugh-track sitcom, albeit with an edgier setup and more adult vocabulary to nod to its streaming-service home. The Kominsky Method, though, feels like more of an attempt to emulate the more critically acclaimed comedies of recent years, with their bleaker storylines and profound commentary on the human condition. To whit: It’s about getting old. Or more specifically, getting old as a man, since even the character presented as an age-appropriate love interest for Sandy, Nancy Travis’s Lisa, is played by an actress almost two decades younger than Douglas.
What this means is a series that spends more time in the bathroom with Sandy than it does the studio, since The Kominsky Method is primarily preoccupied with urination and its impediments. Norman (Alan Arkin), an agent who’s Sandy’s best friend, states early on that he pees “in Morse Code, dots and dashes,” which is a theme that continues throughout all eight episodes. Sandy is forced to relieve himself in a bush outside Lisa’s house; Sandy grimly warns a stranger in a urinal to “enjoy it while it lasts”; Sandy visits a urologist, played by Danny DeVito, who checks his prostate in a scene that features disturbingly realistic (and squelchy) sound effects.
It’s not that the pee talk isn’t entertaining, per se. It’s that the series tends to mistake it for the kind of ongoing plotting and narrative fodder that can sustain eight episodes. That it’s called The Kominsky Method seems to imply that the show will find some meaning in Sandy’s twilight years as an acting coach who’s a masterful teacher and a failed performer. But his students exist only as stereotypes for Sandy and Norman to crab about. They’re dopey, they’re improper, they’re way too easily offended. After the actors erupt at each other over issues of cultural appropriation, Sandy rants that none of it matters because they’re all the same inside, and if they really want to be offended, “try cancerous glands in your asshole.”
It’s an outburst that’s more telling than it seems. The Kominsky Method insists that viewers empathize with Sandy and Norman and their various laments (and with Norman, whose wife dies of cancer early in the series, it finds its most powerful and moving scenes). But Lorre doesn’t seem to have empathy to give for anyone else. Not for Sandy’s students, who are glibly written and ditzy at best. Not for Norman’s daughter, Phoebe (Lisa Edelstein), an opioid addict, who’s treated as comic relief when she shows up high for her mother’s funeral and dispatched to rehab as an excuse to get Norman and Sandy on a road trip. Not for Mindy (Sarah Baker), Sandy’s daughter, who fills the customary sitcom role of the nagging wife. And not for Lisa, a divorcée whose characterization (despite Travis’s welcome presence and irrepressible charisma) amounts to a failed marriage and a sociopathic son.
In glimpses, The Kominsky Method shows what it could have been, given a more generous spirit and a willingness to dig deeper. Arkin is superb as Norman, a man felled by grief but still possessing an impulse to crack exceedingly maudlin jokes (“You talk to one ghost and suddenly you’re in a Yiddish version of Macbeth”). His chemistry with Douglas is truly endearing, and the setup for the show demands a reckoning of some sort between the successful and surprisingly powerful Norman and the less prosperous Sandy. But Lorre seems stuck in sitcom mode: He’s happiest when the pair are cheerfully expressing their fish-out-of-water befuddlement about chip-and-pin readers and bitcoin and being “trendy” on Twitter.
This isn’t to say the show can’t realize its potential as a modern continuation of Grumpy Old Men (whose director, Donald Petrie, helmed a handful of episodes), relocated to the age-obsessed locale of Los Angeles, and given extra potency by the power dynamics of Sandy’s profession. It’s just that as The Kominsky Method functions now, it’s less a layered comedy about the inevitable frailty of the human condition than a one-joke setup: old men shouting not at clouds, but at the pusillanimity of their prostates.
The man law enforcement believes briefly terrorized the country with a series of mail bombs appeared in court on Thursday, pleading not guilty to a 30-count indictment including charges of mailing weapons of mass destruction. What he’s accused of was perhaps the largest attempted mass political assassination through the mail since anarchists mailed more than 30 bombs to public figures in 1919.
What it wasn’t, however, was sophisticated. None of the bombs actually went off; more than one were incorrectly addressed; the packages were nearly identical, with the word “Florida” conspicuously misspelled as “Florids” on all of them. The Justice Department alleges that Cesar Sayoc’s fingerprints were on two of the envelopes. Within five days, he was in custody.
It was remarkably quick work for a sprawling investigation involving 16 suspicious packages mailed to four states—especially in comparison to the hunt for the United States’ most famous serial mail bomber. By the time Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, was convicted in 1998, his package explosives had injured 23 people and killed three over nearly two decades. But Sayoc’s capture is more the rule, and the long hunt for Kaczynski the exception.
[Read: 98 years of mail fraud]
The Sayoc case doesn’t just highlight the difficulty of sending explosives through the mail without getting caught. It also shows the range of tools, from the basic to the technologically advanced, available to law enforcement in chasing a suspect like him. Some of those methods have improved significantly since the Kaczynski era. But Kaczynski himself was unusually sophisticated in concealing his tracks.
“We’ve been fortunate that mail bombs and mail packages involving these kinds of crimes are one of the easiest to solve,” said Terry Turchie, who headed the FBI task force that finally caught Kaczynski. Most such cases are minor, he said, and involve threats or devices, like Sayoc’s, that don’t work.
Even when they do work, Turchie said, mail bombs distribute pieces of forensic evidence, sometimes buried under charred furniture and piles of paper. Nails, pieces of pipe, glue residue, explosive material, batteries, maybe a detonator—all offer clues. Often, these clues can open a trail back to stores where the components were purchased—for instance, a specific batch of batteries being carried at a specific store—and from there to clerks who may recall details about who made similar purchases.
Then there’s the setup of the postal service itself, which has a limited number of distribution centers in each major metropolitan area, as well as its own inspection service, which investigates possible crimes using the mail system. Several of the bombs Sayoc allegedly sent, according to the criminal complaint, were processed through a single distribution center in Opa-Locka, Florida, which helped investigators narrow the search for a suspect to the southern part of the state.
There’s also the progress of investigative technology, including the proliferation of security cameras and the increasing sophistication of DNA analysis since the Kaczynski bombings. During the Unabomber investigation, Turchie said, there were not typically cameras outside of post offices, and certainly not ones that could run for 24 hours at a time.
It was the presence of such security cameras that helped solve another recent serial-bombing case, in Austin, Texas, this year, when cameras captured the suspect’s car leaving a FedEx outlet after a suspicious package had been dropped off there.
[Read: What makes a serial bomber tick?]
Kaczynski may have benefited from the fact that there were fewer tools available to law enforcement in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was conducting his attacks. But he was also nefariously adept at thwarting the forensic analysts on his trail. In order to remove his fingerprints, he carefully polished his bombs and sanded the wooden boxes he placed them in. He was known among some investigators as the “junkyard bomber” for his habit of fashioning bombs out of parts found in landfills rather than purchasing them in stores, the better to avoid leaving clues. Turchie recalled that more than one of Kaczynski’s bombs had avocado-colored nails—leftovers from the interior-decorating “avocado craze” of the 1960s and 1970s.
He also employed misdirection, wearing different disguises and dropping off his packages in varying locations. The one sketch of him, based on an eyewitness sighting of a man planting a device in a parking lot that later exploded, depicts a man in a hoodie and aviator glasses that obscure much of his face.
At one point, according to Steve Lapham, who was one of three prosecutors on Kaczynski’s case, the Unabomber planted someone else’s hair on one of his bombs to throw off the FBI’s then-primitive DNA analysis. He had found it, Lapham said, in a bathroom in Missoula, Montana, roughly 80 miles from the cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, where he was eventually caught.
But even Kaczynski, who became a media celebrity known as the “mad genius” for his high IQ and mathematics Ph.D., slipped up eventually.
What helped sink him was in fact his obsessive precision—specifically, his usage of the phrase “eat your cake and have it, too.”
The idiom about trade-offs is better known in reverse: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” But the original formulation puts the eating first, which makes more logical sense. You retain the option to eat the cake if you have it; the option to have the cake disappears once you eat it.
Kaczynski, unusually, stuck with the original. When it appeared in a 35,000-word manifesto he had insisted, on pain of further bombings, be published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, it was as if he had left a fingerprint. Along with other clues of philosophy and syntax in the anti-technology manifesto, the phrase helped persuade his brother David to contact the FBI in February of 1996. By April, Ted was in custody.
[Read: If the pipe-bomb mailings aren’t terrorism, what is?]
As for the pipe bombs sent to major political figures this fall, it was alarming that purported package bombs could be shipped to so many places with such seeming ease. Even though none of the bombs succeeded in hurting or killing anyone, they did sow widespread fear and anxiety. Assembling explosives like those doesn’t require a mad genius hiding in the woods; it’s allegedly within the capabilities of a man like Sayoc, who lived out of his van and tweeted conspiracy theories about George Soros. Instructions are freely available on the internet, and component parts can be found in stores.
But it has also grown easier over time to apprehend the people who seek to wield these weapons. Two decades after the Unabomber case, the complex systems that connect the United States remain vulnerable. The lesson of the Sayoc case, though, is less about a severe threat than about a system that worked.
Less than 24 hours after U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet backed the text of her provisional Brexit deal, the walkouts began. On Thursday morning, Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab submitted his resignation, noting he could not “in good conscience” support the government’s Brexit deal. Through the course of the day, six others followed.
The string of departures from May’s cabinet reaffirm what is already widely known: Her negotiated deal is deeply unpopular among lawmakers both within and outside her ruling Conservative party. Even with her cabinet’s approval, the likelihood of the agreement gaining enough support in Parliament seemed uncertain. Now, it seems almost certain that it won’t.
[Read: Britain is rushing to seal a Brexit deal few support]
Still, May’s insistence to carry on and defend her deal demonstrates something that is also widely known: The prime minister is profoundly weak, yet surprisingly stable. Though this latest political crisis marks the greatest challenge to her premiership yet, factors that have helped her weather past crises could very well protect her now.
The Successor
May has been under pressure to change course on Brexit before, though then even her fiercest opponents within her party had stopped short of calling for her ouster. But as more and more Conservative lawmakers submit letters of no confidence in the prime minister, that calculus has changed.
Under Conservative party rules, at least 48 Tory lawmakers must submit such letters for a leadership contest to be triggered. If a vote occurs and May loses, a new leader—and therefore prime minister—must be selected. If May wins, however, the rules state there can be no further challenge to her leadership for another year.
Even if there were enough letters to trigger a contest, there isn’t yet a clear and viable replacement. Though some names—including former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, former Brexit Secretary David Davis, and current Environment Secretary Michael Gove—have been tipped as possible contenders, none have stepped up to challenge May themselves. The lack of a clear successor has protected May in the past, and unless the Conservatives can find someone willing to take the lead at this fractious time, it could protect her again.
The Timing
Beyond there being no clear successor, there’s also no indication that the majority of Conservative lawmakers have an appetite for a new leader—especially at this late stage of the Brexit negotiations. (Britain is set to leave the European Union at the end of March, and time is running out.)
“A number of Tories are of the opinion that if they launched a leadership campaign now, it just won’t be a very good look in the middle of the crisis that is Brexit,” Anand Menon, the director of the London-based U.K. in a Changing Europe think tank, told me.
The Deal
Another factor that May has going for her is, paradoxically, her greatest weakness at present: the negotiated deal. Unlike past political crises, May is armed not only with a deal she knows the EU can accept, but with a negotiating timeline that is shrinking by the day.
In a statement Thursday, European Council President Donald Tusk announced that barring “extraordinary” occurrences, a summit to finalize the deal will take place at the end of the month.* And though a change in Tory leadership would certainly constitute an “extraordinary” shift that could compel both sides to return to the negotiating table, it won’t necessary prompt the EU to offer fundamental changes. Indeed, the bloc has already suggested that the deal on the table is “the best we can do.”
[Read: The incredible staying power of Theresa May]
But perhaps the greatest factor keeping May in Number 10 for now is that she simply refuses to quit. Following an address to the House of Commons on Thursday, May defended her deal for three hours against criticisms from across the chamber, insisting that she believes the deal offers the best path forward for delivering a Brexit that is in the country’s national interest.
“There are people who might step down under the sort of pressure she’s under, but I think that’s very unlikely in her case,” Menon said. “The word ‘quit’ isn’t in her vocabulary. She will be dogged, she will fight this out.”
* This piece originally stated that Tusk was president of the European Commission. We regret the error.
Every year for the past five or so, the Emily Post Institute—long considered the leading authority on matters of manners and courtesy—fields at least one or two etiquette questions about “Friendsgiving.” Usually they come from people in their 20s and 30s, says Lizzie Post, the co-president of the institute and the eponymous etiquette authority’s great-great-granddaughter. The advice seekers are often anxious about exactly how to host a Friendsgiving party, a Thanksgiving-themed meal for their close friends.
When, for example, is a Friendsgiving supposed to take place? (The weekend before Thanksgiving or the weekend prior, usually.) Is it an imposition to ask everyone to gather for a Thanksgiving meal a week or so before they’ll have another? (Not necessarily, but Post recommends deviating a little from the traditional Thanksgiving menu to avoid stealing the real Thanksgiving’s thunder.) And what’s the most polite and egalitarian way to organize a Friendsgiving? (Hands down, potluck-style, with dishes and supplies assigned via a Google spreadsheet. “From everything from organizing parties to lending out camping equipment, shared spreadsheets are amazing,” Post says.)
The Google Trends graph of the word Friendsgiving—indicating how often people have Googled the term over the past nearly six years—looks like a row of increasingly menacing icicles flipped upside down: From 2004 to 2012, virtually nobody was scouring the internet for the term, but a tiny nub of search interest in November 2013 gave way to a small spike in November 2014, followed by exponentially intensifying spikes the next three Novembers. Food publications such as Chowhound and Taste of Home have recently released Friendsgiving host guides; almost 960,000 posts pop up when you search Instagram for the hashtag #friendsgiving. At press time, some 3,000 of those had been added in the past 24 hours.
Google TrendsPost and others I spoke to for this story agree that Friendsgiving seems to have evolved in recent years from a sort of ad hoc Thanksgiving replacement (implemented when people found themselves far away from family on the holiday but near friends) to a common in-addition-to-Thanksgiving event, one that’s exclusively for friends. In other words, Friendsgiving has become a widely celebrated American holiday in its own right—and while it’s hard to know in real time what cultural shifts or forces have led to the rise of Friendsgiving, there are a few compelling theories as to why you may be seeing the term pop up again and again in Venmo transactions this week.
It is, of course, distinctly possible that the surging popularity of Friendsgiving is directly tied to the power of portmanteaus. Slapping a catchy name onto an existing concept can, after all, make it seem trendy or suddenly ubiquitous, even if the thing itself has been around for decades (see: bromance or jorts). But one way to understand Friendsgiving’s recent popularity is as the expansion of the Thanksgiving holiday into something more like a Thanksgiving season.
As Matthew Dennis, a University of Oregon professor emeritus who’s studied the nearly 400-year history of Thanksgiving, points out, holiday celebrations are always evolving. For example, “Halloween has really transformed a lot in the last generation or two. It’s completely different from what it used to be,” he says. Ever since the late 1980s or 1990s, “it’s almost as much an adult holiday as it is a kids’ holiday.” Plus, it’s not unheard of for certain holiday celebrations to sprawl into the surrounding days and weeks: Lots of friend groups have Christmas or winter holiday parties in the lead-up to whatever they might have planned with their families on the actual holidays. So do offices—which have also lately become common sites for Friendsgivings.
Natalie Sportelli, a 25-year-old content and brand manager in New York, has participated in weekday work-lunch Friendsgivings at both her current job and her last job. “Q4 is really stressful. Heading into Thanksgiving and then the rush to the end of the year, it’s a really nice stress reliever,” she says. “And it’s like a teaser for the main event.” (To emphasize that the office Friendsgiving is about relieving stress and not adding to it, this year she and her colleagues ordered a turkey for delivery to the office pantry rather than assigning someone the task of roasting one.)
The “friends” part of Friendsgiving, however, is a somewhat novel element added to the Thanksgiving tradition, Dennis says. For almost as long as Thanksgiving has existed, it’s been considered a holiday to spend with family—or, at the very least, its strong ties to family developed long before it became a federal holiday in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation that made Thanksgiving a national holiday at the urging of the writer and magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale. But even before then, Dennis says, “people who were spread all over the country were encouraged to come home for Thanksgiving. ‘Home for Thanksgiving’ became a mantra.” Lithographs from around that time, he points out, often depict people traveling home for Thanksgiving. “Given that the United States was a mobile society and people were moving and spreading out everywhere, Thanksgiving was a moment when people wished to reconstitute their families.”
So another reason Thanksgiving celebrations have changed may be that families themselves have changed—and nonrelatives have become more likely to take on family-like roles in people’s lives. Given what we know about the Millennial generation’s habit of delaying marriage and parenthood into later stages of life compared with prior generations, it makes sense to Dennis that, especially for those who remain unmarried and/or childless well into their adult years, the most important people in their lives might be friends.
When childless or unmarried adults consider themselves to be in a temporary, transitional phase, with marriage and kids and traditional adulthood hallmarks such as homeownership just around the corner, they may not place as much emphasis on friends or Friendsgiving, Dennis theorizes. But if they believe they’ll remain childless or unmarried for a long time, “maybe there’s more of a motivation to do this kind of self-constituting of family and community.”
[Read: Dear Therapist, I don’t want my nightmare brother at Thanksgiving].
It’s also possible, he notes, that young adults with the space and equipment to host a dinner party might find themselves eager to host a grown-up Thanksgiving meal but not in a position within their own families to host the “official” event.
Malcolm Harris, meanwhile—the author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials—sees something darker at work in the “Friendsgiving” phenomenon. Harris thinks affixing the “cutesy” label of Friendsgiving onto a scraped-together, potluck-style event popular with Millennials that will never actually rival the lavish spreads of real Thanksgiving implies approval by the powers that be of Millennial adults’ lower income and lower living standards compared with those of prior generations. “Friendsgiving,” he says, “is a propaganda weapon used by the ruling class to further their plans for wage stagnation.”
But for some, Friendsgiving is a pricey event unto itself. The preholiday holiday has become such a staple of some people’s lives that it’s become—much like family Thanksgiving—an event to travel to from out of town. For example, 26-year-old Roshawna “Ro” Myers of Virginia Beach, Virginia, will drive four hours this weekend to make it to her best friend’s Friendsgiving in Washington, D.C. It’s their friend group’s third year celebrating together, and she’s “already counting down.”
Now that all her friends are adults and have moved to different places for work and school, “we’re not always able to see each other. Even if I see my best friend one weekend, I’m not able to see everyone together,” Myers says. “So Friendsgiving is when everybody’s like, ‘Okay, we’re all gonna be here this weekend to see each other.’ If you miss somebody and you want to see them and catch up, that’s the time.” This year—she checks her group text thread to get the exact head count—14 people will be in attendance.
Danielle Ireland, 39, was an early adopter of the Friendsgiving tradition; her annual gathering started out simply as a helpful “practice run” for her pub-trivia team in Milwaukee to try its Thanksgiving dishes before the big day. But in the “sevenish” years since that inaugural event, it’s become a raucous, boozy (and kid-free) annual reunion—and she’s moved away to Virginia. This year, flights were too expensive for Ireland to attend the event, but she usually makes the trip out to Milwaukee. “This is my ‘framily,’” she says, smushing together friends and family. “The family I picked. I love my biological family, but there is something magical about this group of people.” Plus, the cooking is always an adventure: One guest insists on bringing a “vintage dish” (usually involving a Jell-O mold) every year, and “there is nothing more exciting,” she says, “than watching your friends almost set the house on fire.”
The institution of Friendsgiving may, to some, feel like Thanksgiving overkill. But Dennis, the Oregon professor emeritus, who was unfamiliar with the growing Friendsgiving tradition until I interviewed him for this story, finds a pre-Thanksgiving Friendsgiving to be a perfectly acceptable extension of the holiday. “In some ways, the thing that’s distinctive about Thanksgiving is that it’s not Christmas. It’s not about gift-giving, it’s not about spending a lot of money. A lot of it should be homemade and improvisational. Whereas Christmas is, well, you know, this bonanza of commerce,” he says. Thanksgiving has managed to hang on to its original ideals: hospitality, generosity, inclusion. What’s more inclusive than expanding the holiday to include friends as well as family?
And perhaps if you really think about it, Dennis says, you could conceive of Friendsgiving as a way of bringing Thanksgiving back to its roots. “The first Thanksgiving, in the fall of 1621, was made up of the white English settlers of Plymouth Colony and their native neighbors, who outnumbered them by a lot. The idea was to have a Thanksgiving to create friends,” he says. “It was, aspirationally, a Friendsgiving, in a way.”
Widows is all about theft. That might seem like a trite thing to say about a heist film bookended by two armed-robbery sequences that might be the best action set pieces of 2018. But Steve McQueen’s follow-up to 12 Years a Slave isn’t only concerned with stealing money. It’s an astounding crime epic that digs through every layer of its cops-and-robbers narrative, from the personal to the municipal. Widows is a blockbuster that feels utterly of a piece with McQueen’s earlier, artsier oeuvre (including Hunger and Shame); it’s powered by an ensemble of big names and new faces and headed by a typically steely Viola Davis.
In adapting Lynda La Plante’s acclaimed British 1983 miniseries of the same name, McQueen and his co-writer Gillian Flynn have transplanted the action to Chicago to tell a very American story of disintegration. The plot sees Veronica (Davis), the grieving wife of expert thief Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson), assemble a team from the widows of his deceased crew to try and pull off their last job successfully. Widows also follows a local alderman election playing out between a monied legacy candidate (Colin Farrell) and a crime boss (Brian Tyree Henry). Which is to say the story is just as preoccupied with entrenched corruption—the film unfolds in the middle of the 2008 recession that saw Chicago’s infrastructure begin to decay.
McQueen has made a big, pulpy crowd-pleaser, but he uses it to tell a story with real meaning. Widows is methodical in its imagery and gracefully written; it’s also a suspenseful blast, best seen with the biggest, most animated audience possible. As Hollywood continues to ponder its growing divide between prestige award movies and more commercially friendly fare, it’s heartening to see McQueen make a film that doesn’t ask viewers to choose.
Widows begins with a heist arranged by Harry and his co-conspirators that goes spectacularly wrong and ends in the crew’s fiery deaths. Veronica is left with a crisp modern apartment and a perfectly manicured Westie puppy, but McQueen emphasizes the absence of her husband in each frame, surrounding her with negative space and aggressively sterile furniture. Soon enough, Veronica is being leaned on by Jamal Manning (Henry) and his menacing brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), who are demanding the return of the $2 million that Harry stole from them (and which burned up in the robbery).
With few options left, Veronica calls together the other grieving wives—Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), and Amanda (Carrie Coon)—convincing the first two that the only way to survive the fallout of their husbands’ bad deeds is to attempt another daring job Harry had in the works. Linda’s babysitter Belle (Cynthia Erivo), a beautician who can seemingly run a four-minute mile, is quickly enlisted as the fourth partner. From there the plot largely hews to the arc of La Plante’s original show, and is dense enough to require a lot of immediate buy-in from the audience. Debicki and Erivo do incredible work selling their characters’ dramatic transformations in just a few scenes. The plot compression demanded by squeezing a TV show into a two-hour screenplay might have otherwise doomed Widows to ludicrousness.
[The trenchant powers of ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ and ‘Widows’]
The target of the women’s plans, local politician Jack Mulligan (Farrell), is a pointed creation specific to the movie: He’s a businessman looking to occupy the South Side alderman seat held by his wizened, openly racist father Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall) for generations. Farrell’s performance is a masterclass in 21st-century smarm: Even as the neighborhood’s demographics, and needs, have shifted wildly away from the constituency the Mulligans represent, Jack thinks of the territory as his own. But he’s just self-aware enough to adapt his public image and collect the right community endorsements for the coming election against Jamal.
In a bravura, unbroken shot not long into the film, McQueen mounts a camera on top of Jack’s car as it drives from a campaign event to his walled, fortified compound (just within the district’s limits). The audience hears Jack ranting from the back seat, but the visuals foreground the naked segregation on display, and the way the neighborhood shifts from empty storefronts to million-dollar mansions within a few blocks. No one in Widows is entirely innocent, but McQueen insists on contextualizing everything as happening within a crumbling, violent system of legalized theft.
Veronica and her makeshift crew aren’t just taking money for their own survival. There’s a palpable sense of them taking back what their own partners had quietly robbed them of for years. Linda is fighting to keep her business open after learning that her husband had borrowed against it without telling her. Alice, a trophy wife whose husband would regularly beat her, is looking to avoid being forced to become a high-end escort to make ends meet. Veronica isn’t just mourning Harry, but also a son they lost together not long before. The couple’s backstory is especially laden with twists, each of which McQueen pulls off with devastating panache (though there’s one plot element, introduced late in the film, that needed more time devoted to it).
Everyone in the cast gets multiple moments to shine, with Kaluuya playing a particularly frightening sort of terminator, and Debicki dazzling as a woman who’s impossible to judge at face value. But Davis’s superstar performance drives the film—she can silence a room just by entering it, docile Westie in tow. Because Veronica is a walking steel trap of a person, every emotion she lets slip hits all the harder, and the stakes for the final showdown feel all the more intense. After winning an Oscar in 2014 for 12 Years a Slave, McQueen could’ve done anything with his considerable talents; in Widows, he’s created a perfect model of a forward-thinking popcorn movie.
The British chemist Leslie Orgel reputedly once said that “evolution is cleverer than you are.” This maxim, now known as Orgel’s Second Rule, isn’t meant to imply that evolution is intelligent or conscious, but simply that it’s inventive beyond the scope of human imagination. That’s something that people who fight infectious diseases have been forced to learn again and again.
For the past 90 years, scientists have discovered hundreds of antibiotics—microbe-killing drugs that have brought many pernicious diseases to heel. But every time researchers identify a new drug, bacteria inevitably evolve to resist it within a matter of years. We thrust; they parry. Now, with the flow of new antibiotics having dried up for decades, our stalemated duel with infectious bacteria threatens to end in outright defeat. Superbugs are ascendant around the world, including those that resist all commonly used drugs.
Houra Merrikh from the University of Washington thinks she has found a way of improving our odds. She and her team have identified a bacterial “evolvability factor”—a molecule that these microbes need to rapidly evolve into drug-resistant strains. If she can find a way to block this molecule, she could pave the way for a new kind of drug: an anti-evolution drug that doesn’t kill microbes, but stops them from powering up into superbugs (or, at least, delays the process). “They have this way of turning evolution on,” says Merrikh. “And if they can turn it on, we can turn it off.”
Merrikh didn’t set out to beat antibiotic resistance. Originally, she didn’t even know she would be a scientist. She and her family fled from Iran when she was 3, avoiding the war with Iraq to settle in Turkey. At 16, at her parents’ insistence, she moved to Texas to find an education. Stuck in an unfamiliar country with neither family nor money, she worked several poorly paid jobs to pay her way into college. Once there, she found her calling in biochemistry. Within 16 years, she was running her own lab.
At first, she studied the inner lives of bacteria, and the ways in which they copy their DNA and switch on their genes. That work bore unexpected fruit in 2015 when her team showed that a bacterial protein called Mfd can increase the rate at which genes mutate—that is, change their DNA. It was an unusual discovery. Other researchers had billed Mfd as a DNA-repairing protein, which would prevent mutations rather than promote them. But the more Merrikh studied Mfd, the less sense that made. For example, when her colleague Mark Ragheb removed it from bacteria, the microbes’ mutation rates fell by 50 to 80 percent.
That’s a big deal. Mutations are the fuel for evolution. If enough bacteria accumulate enough changes to enough genes, chances are that one of them will randomly acquire the ability to shrug off an antibiotic. So, in theory, if you can reduce mutation rates, you should also delay the rise of resistance. The team proved this by exposing strains of Salmonella, with and without Mfd, to a battery of common antibiotics. After several generations, they found that strains that still had Mfd were between 6 and 21 times more resistant to the drugs than those without the protein.
The team repeated the experiment with other species of bacteria, and got results that were either similar or even more striking. For example, when they tested the bacterium behind tuberculosis, they found that Mfd-carrying strains became up to 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics than the Mfd-less ones. “It applied to every bug we looked at and every antibiotic we tested,” says Merrikh. “The global nature of the effect is the most striking thing.”
That the loss of Mfd should be so universally debilitating makes sense, because the protein itself is almost identical in a wide range of microbes, even distantly related ones. Usually, different bacteria will have their own takes on commonly shared proteins, like people speaking distinct dialects of a common language. But when it comes to Mfd, all bacteria essentially speak in the same accent. “Clearly this thing has a really important role.”
Tami Lieberman from MIT says that this approach has uses beyond stymieing superbugs. Many scientists are trying to genetically modify bacteria for industrial purposes, to pump out medicines or fuels. But those engineered microbes can evolve into obsolescence, by picking up mutations that inactivate the foreign genes within them. “A synthetic biologist might consider deleting Mfd in their engineered strains to prolong their utility,” says Lieberman.
Merrikh, meanwhile, is focused on the antibiotic problem. “If you look at the history of antibiotics, in every single case, as soon as the drug hits the market, resistance arises. So the strategy of making new drugs isn’t ever going to work,” she says. “Our idea is that before the next drug hits the market, let’s have an anti-evolution drug to give alongside it, to at least delay the development of resistance.”
“All steps forward are good, and I think this is a great one,” says Michael Johnson from the University of Arizona. The challenge, he says, is to find a fast and efficient way of screening libraries of chemicals for drugs that can actually disable Mfd in the body of a human patient. Merrikh’s team is already on the case.
But wouldn’t bacteria eventually evolve resistance to the anti-Mfd drugs? “The chances are very low,” says Merrikh. “You’re turning off the mechanism that would do that in the first place.”
“I’m skeptical,” says Tara Smith from Kent State University. She has heard claims about evolution-proof drugs before, and they almost always fizzle out. Some scientists argued that bacteria were unlikely to evolve resistance to small molecules called antimicrobial peptides because they were so diverse. One even put a bet on it—and lost. Others suggested that bacteria were unlikely to evolve resistance to viruses called phages, and were repeatedly proven wrong.
[Read: Stopping the rise of superbugs by making them fight for food]
Still, Smith says that Merrikh’s claims are “much more measured” than those from other researchers who have forgotten Orgel’s Second Rule. And “it’s one of those outside-the-box ideas that we need because, clearly, the usual model of antibiotic discovery, approval, use, and resistance isn’t working,” she says.
Many other scientists are also trying to find anti-evolution drugs. For example, Rahul Kohli from the University of Pennsylvania, is trying to disable the appropriately named “SOS response”—a system that bacteria use to cope with stress, and that also increases their mutation rates. His team have already identified drugs that can block that system.
The problem with disabling the SOS system, Merrikh says, is that bacteria become “very, very sick,” even in the absence of antibiotics. That creates an enormous incentive to evolve some kind of countermeasure. And that’s not the case with Mfd. When her team deleted it, their bacteria were nigh-indistinguishable from normal cells. That should reduce the impetus for bacteria to evolve their way around the hypothetical anti-evolution drug.
It might also be difficult to convince agencies like the FDA to approve anti-evolution drugs. It’s easy enough to prove that a drug can kill bacteria in a clinical trial, “but if you have a drug that prevents the development of resistance, going through clinical trials is going to be harder,” says Merrikh. “The effect is only going to be apparent in a population over many years. How to get a drug like that into the market is a big challenge.”
A gunman walked into a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, and opened fire last Wednesday night. By the time the gunfire had stopped, 13 people, including the shooter, were dead. It was one tragedy among many in recent weeks, including a shooting at a yoga studio and a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Media coverage of these events tends to follow a familiar script. “You do the day story, and then you do the victim stories, and then you profile the shooter,” Erica Goode, a visiting professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, told me.
By the next week, in most cases, the news cycle has moved on. A review of dozens of New York Times front pages in the days immediately after 10 of the deadliest mass shootings since Columbine found that the script is remarkably consistent. Most of the shootings carried the front page for six days, including the Sunday edition. Cable-news coverage—which tends to cycle through news even faster—charts a similar course, according to a report from Media Matters for America. The report found that after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, in Las Vegas, major news coverage of the attack lasted a week.
[Read: College is different for the school-shooting generation]
That consistency is a reflection of a dense news environment, with more major stories nearly every day than can possibly fit on a front page. The extent of coverage is not solely determined by the number of fatalities. The Thousand Oaks shooting, for example, was only on the front page of the Times for one day, as it was pushed off by the deadliest fires in California history, some of which, it so happened, were also in Thousand Oaks.
And there are outliers at the other end of the spectrum, as well. After a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, stories about the shooting were on the front page of the Times for 16 consecutive days. That is in large part due to the student-led activism that emerged in the wake of the shooting, calling for stronger gun-control laws. As Michelle Cottle put it, “Possessed of that blend of innocence and savvy peculiar to teenagers, the Stoneman Douglas survivors indeed have emerged as a rare, perhaps even unique, voice in the gun debate. They are old enough to advocate for themselves, yet young enough to still embody a certain innocence, to retain a certain idealism about how the world should be.”
Goode, too, noted the difference in Parkland—but she also noticed something else: The media had, by and large, started to change how it covered the shootings. Goode worked as a reporter and editor at the Times for 18 years, and covered several mass shootings herself. After Parkland, she observed that one of the regular story genres—the shooter profile—had gotten shorter, and in some outlets, it wasn’t there at all. “What we told people,” Goode says of reporters covering mass shootings, “was that [shooter profiles] would help people understand what causes this, and who these people are.” However, she said she later decided “that’s bullshit.” Far from introducing anything particularly revelatory about the shooters, these stories brand the perpetrators as mysterious lone wolves, something that carries a whiff of coolness or allure. “A profile of the shooter is not going to help anybody understand who these people are,” she says. Instead, it’s going to draw attention to shooters from people who are fascinated by reading about them—“It’s going to make them famous, basically.”
Those stories have been replaced, at least in print, by stories—both local and national—on gun-law reforms and more stories about the victims. Of course, Goode says, it is news organizations’ duty, by definition, to cover the news—and the identity of the shooter is news. But, she said, it is also imperative to cover the news responsibly. By giving less of a platform to shooters, and focusing more on the victims of the shooting and on solutions to potentially preventing the next one from happening, media organizations might beat back some of the likelihood of another shooting, she believes.
The phenomenon Goode’s talking about is known colloquially as a copycat effect, and by researchers who study it as “contagion”: the idea that more media coverage of mass shootings might lead those inclined to commit atrocities to do so. Researchers at Arizona State University led by Sherry Towers, a research professor at the institution, set out to uncover whether or not such an effect existed. For Towers, it was a personal endeavor.
[Read: Mass shootings in America are spreading like a disease]
In 2014, Towers was headed to Purdue University in Indiana to meet with her collaborators on a research project, when suddenly the meeting was canceled. A teaching assistant at Purdue had walked into a classroom and killed another teaching assistant. “It occurred to me that day that that was the third school shooting I’d heard about in a 10-day period,” Towers, who has a background in modeling contagious processes, specifically diseases, told me. “And it made me wonder if perhaps there was a contagion effect maybe playing a role.”
Ultimately, researchers found that in high-profile mass shootings, there was a statistically significant contagion effect. “We hypothesize that perhaps widespread media attention plays a role in actually basically informing people who might be at risk of committing one of these acts,” Towers says.
Lately there has been a refrain that the increasing pace of the news cycle—and the frequency of mass shootings—means that tragedies aren’t covered as vigorously as they once were. In some cases, as with Thousand Oaks, the pace of the news cycle does push the stories off the front page, but in most cases, they are covered as they always have been: for a week. What has changed isn’t the length of the coverage, but the substance—and for the better.
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countries’ military protection,” he wrote on Twitter, and “it is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves.” Trump’s criticisms are, of course, nothing new—since the 2016 campaign he has routinely highlighted the ways in which free-riding allies purportedly take advantage of American largesse.
But underlying the president’s position lies an assumption that is now worthy of close consideration: that the United States defends Europe, and stations troops on the continent, based on an impulse that is either fundamentally charitable, anachronistic, or both. As a result, it follows that we’ve been played by allies enriching themselves under our protection. Trump seems to believe that such altruism merits gratitude; the French, he observed, were “starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along.”
The truth, however, is that the U.S. helps Europe because in so doing it helps itself. Twice in the first half of the 20th century, the United States went to Europe to end wars that had engulfed the world. These were not acts of charity, but of national self-interest. Following the second world war, American leaders resolved not to permit such catastrophes to reoccur. Their solution was to remain in Europe, commit to its defense, and deploy troops there as a way to keep the peace. The bargain has been straightforward: America gets bases and a guarantee that we won’t have to fight alone; European allies get protection from the world’s foremost military. All get stability and peace on the continent.
[Eliot Cohen: Trump fails his rendezvous in France]
The hardheaded interests at stake in European peace informed the moves even of the great presidential idealist, Woodrow Wilson. He famously called for the world to “be made safe for democracy,” not only in light of democracy’s inherent value, but because “such a concert of free peoples” would “bring peace and safety to all nations,” including our own. “No peace can last,” Wilson said, “or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Peace-seeking Americans, wishing to be free of German submarine warfare, seeking to enjoy the benefits of free travel and open commerce, had to fight for democracy.
Some 40 million casualties later, including 116,000 Americans killed, the United States lost its patience. It was done defending European friends, unwilling to serve as the peacekeeper of last resort. America withdrew from the continent, demobilized its forces, and isolated itself. That seemed the safest course for America; in retrospect at least, it obviously was not.
By 1940—a year before Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States—Franklin Roosevelt was sounding the alarm about a possible British defeat in Europe and its implications for Americans. Should the British fall, he said, “the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere … All of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun—a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.”
[Read: Trump’s bromance with Macron fizzles spectacularly]
Another world war fought and won, American leaders resolved not to replay the catastrophic half-century of European history. There would be no withdrawal this time, and no demobilization, especially in light of Moscow’s drive for domination. Nor would the United States go it alone.
Washington led the establishment of NATO to keep, in the words of Lord Ismay “the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” And so it has. Moscow never went to war in NATO territory; Europe emerged as America’s chief trading, diplomatic, and military partner; Germany evolved into a benign power unrecognizable to Bismarck or the Kaiser or the Third Reich. And America stayed.
Such are the reasons why the United States has defended Europe for seven decades, and fundamentally why it should continue to do so today.
Yes, it can be maddening when our European allies let their militaries atrophy and devote insufficient sums to defense spending. The United States has global interests and global security commitments; it defines not just Europe but the Middle East and Asia as strategically important. A militarily successful and politically sustainable NATO alliance depends on European allies bearing a fair share of the burden. In response to Trump’s criticisms, our allies have in fact moved their defense budgets in the right direction.
Yet low spending levels also represent a remarkable commentary on how unthinkable major war in Europe has become, after two millennia of nearly uninterrupted military competition and conflict. The problem surely would have been a surprise to the leaders who ended the Great War a century ago. Indeed, what the president sees as failure can also be construed as a kind of success: worrying about European pacifism rather than European militarism is a luxury we are lucky to indulge. War is unthinkable in Europe? Let’s keep it that way.
Times change. Perhaps, some argue, the continued American presence in Europe is unnecessary in light of diminished threats, or it is desirable but too expensive, or maybe the continent is best left to fend for itself. It could even be the case that war on the continent wouldn’t overly damage fundamental U.S. interests, given our diversified economy, powerful military, protective oceans and friendly neighbors.
And yet such notions have been popular before, with catastrophic consequences. Better to maintain an insurance policy among allies against threats that may or may not ever materialize. Better to build on historic success than inject greater geopolitical uncertainty at an unusually unsettled time in international politics. Better to do these things than not, because the defense of Europe serves the interests of the American people.
Trump traveled to Paris to honor those who understood this, who saw in their fight the enlightened self-interest that has served America so well for so long. We abandon Europe at its peril, and our own.
Squinting at the blurry image on the sonographer’s screen, Cindy Marie Jenkins—flanked by her husband and her young son—scanned excitedly for signs of life. Her first pregnancy had been so straightforward that this seemed like a special moment the entire family could share. But as the minutes dragged on, the sonographer became very quiet, leaving to find a doctor, who delivered the news: There would be no baby.
Jenkins had signed up to receive alerts from the ovulation apps Ovia and Glow, and pregnancy updates from BabyCenter, which she checked incessantly, sometimes up to four times a day. After the loss of the pregnancy, she ignored the apps for the longest time until she could muster the emotional strength to delete all the accounts. Still, she found the process of getting rid of her Glow account to be cumbersome, which only amplified her pain. “It should have been easier to figure out how to ‘report a loss,’ which is what they call it,” Jenkins told me.
App companies say they try to make it easy for women to delete or update their accounts. Jennifer Tye, the chief operating officer of Glow, told me that the app tries to make it as simple as possible for bereaved mothers to report a loss. “Glow offers a ‘Healing from a Loss’ experience that connects women with a community that is going through the same thing,” she says. “To set this status, users need to click on the ‘more’ tab within the Glow app and change their status to ‘I’m healing from a loss.’” That said, in the aftermath of a miscarriage, doing so may be emotionally taxing for women, even when it is technologically simple.
[Read: Making sense of a miscarriage]
Up to 10 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. And after the loss of a pregnancy, couples can find reminders of their once-promised future all around. It could be a color swatch picked out for the nursery walls or a bag in the closet containing an impossibly small pair of socks. Although grieving mothers have always struggled with these tangible souvenirs, now they often must also contend with an array of digital reminders of what might have been: Apps like BabyCenter, Glow, Ovia, and Sprout that chart their pregnancy and compare the developing baby to the size of different fruits keep sending reminders long after it’s all over, while online advertising can flood these would-be moms with ads for baby products they no longer want or need. For women like Jenkins, these reminders can be upsetting, and stopping the onslaught of notifications and ads isn’t always an easy endeavor.
While only some women download pregnancy and fertility apps, even more face online ads that can evoke what they have lost. After a woman goes through the trauma of a miscarriage, it can take months to overwrite the profile that marketers have built of her as a soon-to-be mother. So-called targeted advertising presents messages to people based on their previous browsing history—so if a woman has been looking for pregnancy or baby items online, chances are that her social-media feeds will be bombarded with “new mom” messaging, with ads for everything from folic acid to cribs to cord-blood-banking services.
[Read: Is this the grossest advertising strategy of all time?]
Andy Sambandam, CEO of the privacy-management company Clarip, says that while companies have long tailored their ad campaigns to specific groups, the internet has allowed them to follow users around from site to site with a watchful eye and, in turn, to show them more specific ads based on their interests. “Organizations can track individuals across the internet in multiple ways, such as their IP address, a cookie saved on their computer, or their username when they are logged in to a specific website,” he told me.
But problems arise when people no longer want to see certain messages. There are usually ways to stop the ads, but the onus is on the individual to manually unsubscribe. “Consumers must take the time to go through the opt-out process of every organization and trust that their preference is honored,” Sambandam says.
Sunny, who is being identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, suffered a string of three devastating miscarriages, and lingering ads only made the experience worse. “I kept getting targeted ads on Facebook and other social-media sites about newborn and pregnancy items,” she told me. “Then when I updated them all to note the miscarriage, I started getting emails about trying again and pregnancy-loss support groups.”
That’s echoed by Elizabeth, a Los Angeles–based artist who also asked to be referred to by her first name only. After she lost her pregnancy, she still saw ads for strollers and Diaper Genies on the internet. “I was grief-stricken,” she told me, “and the ads felt like more proof that everything in the universe was conspiring to make me sad. It all felt invasive because I hadn’t signed up for anything.”
Despite the pain, not all women are eager to quickly delete all traces of the pregnancy apps on their phone. For Sandi Haustein, who miscarried at 12 weeks, the finality of closing her account was something she avoided, even though she found the reminders intrusive. “It felt cruel that I had to even think about going in and canceling the record of my baby—I wanted her life to count,” she says. “Keeping the account and allowing those emails to continue helped me feel like I was still remembering her.”
Even when fires are not threatening them from both sides, freeways are a brutal part of California’s physical and metaphysical infrastructure, providing a map in your mind of where it’s possible to go—and raising the question: Can you bear to drive there? The roads crisscross the soul, seeming to open up all kinds of destinations but, overcrowded, under construction, whimsically closed for unstated reasons, pretty much block your way to wherever you might be thinking of going. The freeways, which in name conjure hair-blowing convertibles, were not planned for a population this size. The arteries are clogged in the old circulatory system. The hair does not blow.
I live in this soul-crushing web of lies. By which I mean that my job forces me to drive at least twice a week from Los Angeles to Orange County, and then back again during rush hour.
It’s a ridiculous commute. Just to be clear, and for my Southern Californian readers—or anyone fond of old Saturday Night Live jokes—this means that I drive 20 minutes from my house to the 101, and take that megaroad in virtually unmoving traffic to the 5, and then maybe get on the 605 or the 710 (or both, one after the other), depending on what’s sort of vaguely moving, and then, always, onto the fearsome, capricious, cruel 405, for many a long, harrowing mile. Then, having failed to die in a crash with a jackknifed tractor trailer or overturned RV or lane-splitting motorcycle, I exit from one of the 405’s three leftmost lanes, fling self into a final short spin on the 73, and plunge onward toward work.
[Read: Kim Kardashian’s private firefighters expose America’s fault lines]
The whole trip of about 50 miles takes anywhere from one and a half to three hours. It’s both as boring as it sounds and yet also life-threatening and full of drama. In addition, it gives you plenty of time to brood on your failures and disappointments and how little you’ve achieved in life and how little time is left for you and how you are wasting your few remaining years (if you don’t crash in the next ten minutes) in a slow-moving, carbon-spewing pointless exercise in late capitalism, climate destruction, and poor urban planning. This is the place where people tell you always to have a full tank so you can get out in case of an earthquake. No one is getting out.
Friends from elsewhere laugh when Angelenos describe these transportational sagas, but that’s how life is lived here, unless you’re a screenwriter and can stay home all day, just popping out to Starbucks for an occasional public tussle with your laptop.
It’s tough out there on the asphalt. You’re trapped. And you feel trapped.
Sometimes, while re-reading the license plate ahead of me for the hundredth time and thinking about the futility of switching lanes, I call to mind an aborted alternate terror plan of the San Bernardino Christmas-party shooters. They had an idea that they would launch an attack on the 91 with pipe bombs and machine guns. Obviously not that familiar with this particular road, they included an unnecessary first step: they would drop tire-ripping glass shards and nails from an overpass to stop traffic before beginning the assault. Dumb. The 91 never moves. Probably there are commuters on there who’ve been trying to get home for years. No need for the glass and nails.
[Read: The simple reason that humans can’t control wildfires]
And as if it weren’t bad enough to be locked in traffic, thinking about terrorist attacks, freeway catastrophists (a group larger than the Democratic Party in Southern California) must add fire to the list of possible obstructions, possible fates. I have actually driven, in another fire season, past, and toward, and through fires that threatened the roads. In 2003, I covered a Simi Valley fire for a book I was writing. Fires licked at the edges of the 118 and we all sort of shimmied together toward the center barrier of the road to stay away; you can see this behavior in videos from the fires now.
Dickens or Tana French may be on the audio system, but fire is igniting my imagination. To think of myself as fuel for a mad inferno, stuck in my stupid car, is too awful to contemplate, and yet I am contemplating it. And, yes, I know that the fact that I am here to contemplate it means I’m lucky. So far, the Camp and Woolsey fires have killed at least 59 people; at least seven were found burned in their cars.
In overpopulated Southern California, cars are sad. A car often feels, as it doesn’t move toward a destination it can’t get to, like your final resting place. Cars here are a reminder of the region’s civic and urban failures rather than symbols of freedom and the rights of the individual, as they once were. L.A. is based on cars (we call it “car culture”); its geography is a combustion-engine geography. The city’s developers drew its broad map never imagining or trying to imagine the fate of cars.
The fate of cars here now is not to go, but to stop. Not to free, but to imprison. And not to evacuate a population but to trap it in fire and smoke.
Vicky Warren feels like she’s been attacked from all sides lately. Across the street from her rental apartment in the working-class Los Angeles County city of Hawthorne, noisy planes take off and land at all hours, diverted to the local municipal airport from wealthier Santa Monica, where neighbor complaints have restricted air traffic. On the other side of her apartment, cars on the 105 Freeway sound the frustration of L.A. traffic. She’s even getting assailed within her walls: Termites have invaded so completely that she can’t keep any food uncovered. Flea bites cover her legs; rats are aggressively attacking the boxes she has stored in her garage.
So Warren was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that invaders are coming from underground, too. She lives on 120th Street, where 40 feet underground Elon Musk’s Boring Company is building a 14-foot-wide, mile-long tunnel to pilot a futuristic transit system untested anywhere in the world. When it’s finished in December, the tunnel will start at the nearby headquarters of SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, and end a few blocks past Warren’s apartment. “We’re just sandwiched in between so much already,” Warren told me, shaking her head.
Musk sees the future of American transportation in tunnels like this one. Inside them, electric skates would whisk cars and pods containing passengers to their destinations; eventually, tunnels could also be used for a “hyperloop,” which would transport people even faster through a network of low-pressure tubes. Musk has pledged to revolutionize tunneling technology, and says that digging 40 feet underground will make less noise than someone walking on the surface would. Musk fans and mayors love the idea—the Boring Company told me a new city makes contact daily—and municipalities like Hawthorne have been quick to approve the tunneling. But aboveground, where the poverty rate is 19.2 percent and the median household income is $45,089, people like Warren struggle to meet basic housing needs. They know nothing about Elon Musk or his dreams.
[Read: Elon Musk is his own worst enemy.]
Even if Musk is building world-changing transportation underneath Hawthorne, and even if the residents ultimately welcome the technology, he is undertaking this project with strikingly little public input or oversight.
The Boring Company’s chosen tunneling site, 120th Street, is a hodgepodge of houses, random businesses, and, most of all, cars. On one side sits the high fence of the Hawthorne airport and a flight school; on the other side is the housing complex where Warren lives. A row of defeated-looking single-family houses sits behind locked fences, their windows grimy from the four lanes of traffic whizzing by. Nearby 119th Place is a tightly-knit neighborhood where the homes are small, with pocket-size front yards and barking dogs. They are largely owned by black and Latino families who bought here because it was affordable, being sandwiched in between a freeway and an airport. That affordability comes with a trade-off: The greater Los Angeles area has the worst pollution in the country, and it’s even worse near freeways and airports.
I talked to a dozen people who live along the tunnel’s route, and most said they hadn’t witnessed any extra noise or traffic. But none had been informed ahead of time that a private company would be digging a tunnel beneath the street. Some only learned about the tunnel in mid-2018—not when the digging started, in 2017—because the company purchased a dilapidated house on 119th Place for nearly $500,000 in cash. (Other homes in the neighborhood are assessed at between $200,000 and $500,000.) The company plans to install an elevator in the garage of the house to practice raising cars from the tunnel to ground level. It says it will rent the rest of the house to SpaceX employees.
The company sent letters to some neighbors about the project and held public meetings to discuss it with residents in July 2018. But when those public meetings occurred, the tunnel was nearly complete. This is an oversight that would have been unimaginable in a higher-income neighborhood. Indeed, when Musk tried to build another underground tunnel in a wealthier neighborhood in West L.A., residents quickly sued. The project got tied up in court, and the Boring Company said it was no longer a priority. This dynamic is common in the building of public infrastructure, too. Wealthier individuals are more likely to have the time and money it takes to launch a successful NIMBY campaign.
Yet, in many ways, the tunnel is a triumph of privatization. Plans to extend the Los Angeles Metro system under the Sepulveda Pass first went on the ballot in 2016, after years of planning; the project itself won’t be completed for decades, because of federal and state regulations. Musk just needs to find the money. Since the Boring Company is private, it is able to avoid the years of tedious environmental reviews required when the government tries to build transit. It is also exempt from “Buy American” requirements necessary for projects that receive federal funding. This allows the company to try a new technology much faster than if the government got involved. Musk’s SpaceX was able to lower the cost of space travel through private rocketry, and the Boring Company hopes to do the same for tunneling, a spokesman told me.
But environmental review and public input exist for a reason—to make sure everyone impacted by a project has a say. That input is anathema to entrepreneurs who want to move quickly with low overhead and few regulations. That may have worked for Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, but they were tinkering with computers, not digging transit under someone else’s backyard.
The Boring Company bought a house on 119th Place in Hawthorne, California. (Alana Semuels)Many of Hawthorne’s residents said they felt like even if they had had their say, it wouldn’t have mattered. “They have so much money, so much capital, to make things happen, that your vote wouldn’t mean anything,” Fred Lopez, who lives a few houses down from the Boring Company house, told me. During the planning-commission hearing in which the Boring Company’s plans were discussed, one resident, Sammy Andrade, said he was worried about whether the digging would make his home sink into the ground eventually. Then he said, “But I’m a nobody, and I know there’s a lot of political money involved with this big project for the city.”
The residents are right: It might have been hard to stand in the way of what many places see as progress. Musk’s plans have cities across the country salivating. He says he’s gotten verbal permission to build a hyperloop between New York and Washington D.C., and he joined Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in June to announce plans for an underground transit system between Chicago and O’Hare International Airport.
Hawthorne seems particularly eager to make sure that Musk and the Boring Company keep their transportation research in the city, and not elsewhere. “We want this to be an awesome project that’s going to propel us into the future and determine what the future of transportation is,” Hawthorne Mayor Alex Vargas said during the 2017 meeting when the digging was approved. Mike Talleda, the chairperson of the Hawthorne planning commission, reminded his colleagues during a 2018 meeting that although the project seemed a little “James Bond,” the people who work at the Boring Company “are pretty high-tech, qualified engineers” and they could be trusted to dig a tunnel right. “Someday we might be able to say, ‘Hey, this new system began in our little neighborhood right under my house,’” Talleda said. When one member moved to amend the zoning code so that the Boring Company could build the elevator, two others stumbled over each other in their rush to second him. It passed 5–0.
No American city has anything even vaguely similar to Musk’s project. That may be partly due to the fact that transit experts say the smartest way to improve public transit is to expand upon existing systems—add more rail lines to existing subways, more buses to existing routes. Even cities building these systems for the first time tend to integrate them with other dominant modes of transit, taking into consideration how people are already moving through the space. The hyperloop, by contrast, is “incompatible with every other mode of transportation,” as Jeff Tumlin, a transit consultant at Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, told me. It would be difficult to link up the tunnel with Metro Center, a subway station in Central L.A., and there are few public-transit modes near the Hawthorne location where the Boring Company is digging. (A Boring Company spokesman told me that many of its tunneling projects will someday hook up to public transit.)
Musk seems more interested in finding a convenient test site for a bold idea, one that he believes leapfrogs existing technological options, rather than doing the tedious work of improving an old system. “We seem to be having two separate conversations: one focused on getting around congestion with flying cars and boring tunnels, and another focused on actually solving congestion with pricing policies and public transit,” says Molly Turner, a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Earlier this month, Musk publicly criticized plans to build high-speed rail in front of a room of mayors working on precisely those projects.
SpaceX was also one of the most vocal opponents to a proposed apartment complex adjacent to its headquarters, the very same headquarters where the test tunnel begins, even though urban planners say that building housing near employment is one of the very best ways to reduce traffic and improve transit for everyone. “While we do believe there is an absolute need for affordable housing in the city of Hawthorne, we do not think that this specific site is the place for it,” a SpaceX director of facilities, who is now working on the test-tunnel project, said in 2017.
Musk is not alone in his approach—most Americans do not seem particularly interested in investing in existing transportation technology either. They prefer, instead, to dream up new ways to get around. For example: A proposed tax in Nashville to fund public-infrastructure improvements was defeated because opponents argued that cities shouldn’t be investing in “outdated” technologies like trains, since autonomous cars will soon make them obsolete. “I worry that the big new tech ideas will distract us—or worse, divert resources—from the more complex policy decisions and infrastructure investments we need to make to solve the root causes of our mobility problems,” Turner told me. Some Americans think public transit is so bad, it seems better to throw it all away and build something new.
[Read: How driverless cars will change the feel of cities]
Indeed, Musk seems to have first gotten excited about the hyperloop while pooh-poohing another publicly funded transit system. In 2013, in a blog post on the website of Tesla, his electric-car company, Musk criticized plans for a high-speed rail in California. In 2008, voters had approved a $9 billion bond to build one, but Musk predicted it would be expensive and slow. Instead, he proposed the hyperloop, which would whisk people in aluminum pods through vacuum tubes elevated on columns running next to Interstate 5, California’s biggest north–south route. Since the state was throwing away its money on high-speed rail, he would have to fund it himself.
The project lay dormant until late 2016, when Musk tweeted that “traffic is driving me nuts,” and that he was “going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.” By January 2017, he had announced plans to build a tunnel across from SpaceX. By April, he’d acquired a tunnel-boring machine and announced a cheeky name for the new venture: the Boring Company.
To dig under a public street, Musk needed the city’s permission, and the Boring Company quickly sought it. By late July 2017, the City of Hawthorne had contracted a consultancy, WSP USA, to research the test tunnel. Specifically, it asked for a “mitigated negative declaration”—essentially a document asking that the Boring Company be exempted from the part of the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, that requires an environmental-impact report (EIR). Preparing an EIR could take anywhere from six to 36 months to complete, but an exemption would allow the company to move much faster, relying on its own environmental studies as evidence. From the start, the City appeared to assume that the exemption would come through; Irena Finkelstein, a WSP consultant, wrote that “the entire CEQA clearance process could be completed in less than three months.”
She was right. Less than a month after the initial contract, in August 2017, City Council approved a subsurface easement to allow the Boring Company to construct and operate its test tunnel. The city attorney also declared that the Boring Company was determined exempt under the CEQA. When the council opened the floor for public comment at the meeting, only one person came forward—a man who wanted to make sure the buildings on the surface wouldn’t be affected by the digging underneath, as parts of Hollywood Boulevard had been when the Metropolitan Transit Authority built the Red Line in 1995. The council couldn’t answer his question, but the Boring Company assured him that the digging wouldn’t impact the surface.
The CEQA allows residents 35 days to push back against granted exemptions. After the City of Los Angeles fast-tracked the Boring Company’s plan to build a tunnel in West L.A. in 2018, for example, two neighborhood groups filed a lawsuit, stopping the process. But in Hawthorne, the 35-day window passed with little fanfare. Some of the meetings were called 48 hours in advance, and some negotiations were not open to the public, Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. “The Hawthorne tunnel did happen pretty quickly, and it doesn’t seem like anybody regionally was paying attention when that approval happened,” Matute said. “This is typical with CEQA—a community that’s more disadvantaged and not as politically engaged doesn’t have the capacity to file lawsuits.”
The city of Hawthorne did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. A lawyer representing the city said it preferred all inquiries regarding the tunnel be answered by the Boring Company itself.
In public documents, the City indicated that it had published a notice of the hearing at which the Boring Company’s easement was granted in the August 10, 2017, issue of the Hawthorne Press Tribune. The paper has a circulation of 2,750 and is distributed for free at City Hall and other places around town. None of the residents I talked to in Hawthorne had heard of it.
By May 2018, the Boring Company had requested another exemption from the Hawthorne City Council. It wanted to deviate from the tunnel route to build its test elevator in the house it had bought on 119th Place. That required another CEQA exemption, and it also needed the City to amend the Hawthorne Municipal Code, which prohibits research projects in residential neighborhoods. The Boring Company held two public meetings, and after a hearing in August, the city unanimously approved both exemptions, in September 2018.
Even the City seemed taken aback by the speed with which the Boring Company was moving. “Why does this seem so rushed?” the council member Angie Reyes English asked at the September hearing. Brett Horton, who was representing the Boring Company at the hearing, answered that the company had had two public hearings about the project, when the law didn’t require it to have any, and that it is trying to show proof of concept to others. “We are trying to revolutionize transportation,” he said. “We don’t want to get bogged down, and we want to show potential investors, other cities, the city of Hawthorne, our employees, that we can succeed, we will succeed, and we won’t slow down, and we won’t take any approach that doesn’t get us to our goal as quickly as possible.”
As the tunnel neared completion, disruptions to the community increased. The company bought another building, this one on the corner of 120th Street and Prairie Avenue, for $2 million, according to public records, to allow for the extraction of tunneling equipment. Adrian Vega had run a cabinet business in that building for 18 years. When his landlord sold the building, the Boring Company came in and offered Vega’s company, Los Vegas Kitchen Cabinets and Doors, extra cash to get out in three months. Vega took the money, and asked for even more time from the Boring Company, which he was granted. But he couldn’t find another space; since moving in August, his business has been closed and his customers don’t know that he’s moved, he told me.
Adrian Vega’s closed shop (Alana Semuels)The tan industrial building still has his business’s name and advertising painted on the side. An arrow next to the text Parking in rear now points to a lot surrounded by a fence. Through a gap in it, you can see a giant hole in the ground, next to a large crane. When I asked three construction workers walking to their cars what they were digging, they glanced at one another, said “A hole,” giggled, and walked away. None of the people whose houses backed up onto the lot knew what the digging was for, but all said it was loud early in the morning.
Shunyaa Turner lives in a small house on 119th Place with his wife and two kids. He said that in the past year, they’ve had to battle more pests, such as raccoons, mice, skunks, and opossums, which they’ve never seen before. He isn’t sure if this is related to the digging; the Hawthorne airport has also been doing more construction as it gets busier, so the animals could have fled from there. He and his wife said they’ve also noticed more cracks in their impeccably maintained walkway. Turner, who works as a trash collector for the City of Los Angeles, attended one of the company’s community meetings. He was frustrated by how few of his neighbors showed up, but he knows that some are worried about their immigration status, or have two jobs, or don’t have the time to attend a meeting about something that might be out of their control anyway. “You know, it’s one of the things where if this were Santa Monica, West L.A., any of those areas, they would have come out and stopped this,” he told me.
Jorge Herrera, another resident of 119th Place, told me that he is going to miss Vega, whom he’d grown close to. But most of all, he’s worried about how quickly Hawthorne City Council approved the digging project. “It shouldn’t just be the city of Hawthorne but the whole state of California deciding about what’s going on here,” he said. Council members don’t have expertise on geology or on the long-term effects of digging underground, Herrera told me, as his young daughters played on a small swing in the front yard. But they gave permission to dig. “They didn’t even sleep on it,” he said, shaking his head.
Of course, that’s just the point. Entrepreneurs don’t do things by committee, after all. “You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero,” Steve Jobs said proudly about Apple in 2010.
But even Musk skeptics admit that there’s something refreshing about a company that can circumvent all the red tape that comes with building a transit project. “This is one of those areas in which the planning world is ripe for disruption,” said Tumlin, the transit consultant. “Public consultation is really important and valuable, super well intended, and rarely delivered effectively.”
Usually, only the most privileged and angry people show up to public meetings, he said, and then delay most things that are proposed. This is why NIMBYs can so easily stop affordable-housing projects in their backyard; planned transit extensions take years to build, and even projects like California’s high-speed rail end up being loathed by many people. They are all projects solved by committee.
[Read: Solving public transit’s perpetual crisis]
The Boring Company told me that it has already come up with some cost and time savings. It modified its boring machine to use an electric, rather than a diesel, motor, which means less pollution, and the machine can operate for longer without having to ventilate the tunnel. It is getting closer to figuring out a new transit method, while the City of Los Angeles perfects existing ones. The company may help drive down the costs of building transit, so more money could go to things such as schools or repairing potholes, it told me. It’s also inspired young inventors across the country to get excited about thinking up new transportation ideas, a spokesman said. It’s learning from its mistakes, too—the company hopes to remedy an early lack of communication with residents and is “taking feedback to heart.”
Musk can also move more nimbly and change up plans much more easily than a government agency. The original contract with the City stipulated that the test tunnel would not be used by the public, but Musk tweeted in late October that the company would provide rides to the public on December 11. He said originally that rather than lugging all the dirt from the tunnel to a dump, he would make bricks out of it and sell them to consumers; the Boring Company released a video of the bricks being made, but none have yet gone on sale. The initial document also claimed that the test tunnel would not involve digging under private property, but that, too, has changed—though the company has now bought all the private property it is tunneling underneath. The company has also closed a lane of Jack Northrop Avenue, a street on the other side of SpaceX headquarters, and erected a mile-long, aboveground hyperloop test tunnel that was ostensibly created for annual competitions of student prototypes but never taken down.
SpaceX’s aboveground hyperloop test tunnel (Alana Semuels)If Musk does expand his project beyond the Hawthorne test tunnel, he won’t be able to ignore state and federal environmental regulations. He already had to set aside his plans for tunnels in West Los Angeles; even if the CEQA lawsuits hadn’t been filed, public officials there were skeptical. “There’s pressure in Silicon Valley for companies to move fast and break things,” Meghan Sahli-Wells, Culver City’s vice mayor, said at the time. “But those companies don’t have to pick up the pieces ... We’re not going to let them come in here without a plan.”
Musk’s new plan, he says, is for a tunnel system from a to-be-determined nearby Metro station to Dodger Stadium. This plan is strange for many reasons: It is for a route that would only be used for a small part of the year, and it would compete with a project pushed by Drew McCourt, the son of the former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, to build an aerial tramway to the ballpark. One wonders why Musk doesn’t just build a test hyperloop somewhere like Idaho where the environmental regulations are a little more lax than those in California. But then again, part of the project seems to be driven by his frustration with sitting in Los Angeles traffic. He has called Los Angeles traffic “soul destroying” multiple times, and showed up late to a meeting about the proposed West L.A. tunnel because he was stuck on a major Los Angeles thoroughfare, the 405. The Boring Company acknowledges that it is “personally motivated to eradicate” L.A. traffic, but insists that the main reason for doing work in the city is “so we can go see it and work on it easily.”
That work won’t be as easy in other parts of the city as it was in Hawthorne. The Boring Company is not asking for a CEQA exemption for the proposed Dodger Stadium test tunnel, perhaps because it learned its lesson about the difficulty of building tunnels in higher-income neighborhoods. That means the process will be costly, and it will not be able to even start thinking about building for six to 36 months. “I would be very surprised if it happened,” Matute, the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies deputy director, told me. “I give it a 50–50 shot at making it to the end of the environmental-impact review without them losing interest in it because of unfavorable economics.”
Meanwhile, in Hawthorne, the company that promised its transit test projects would be completely unnoticeable by the community has since uprooted a small business, purchased a house, and closed a lane of traffic indefinitely. Local residents are learning what it’s like to live in the way of technological progress, real or imagined. Vicky Warren is planning to move out of her apartment on 120th Street and stay with her sister until she can find a new place with fewer problems.
But moving is disruptive, as Adrian Vega found out when he had to relocate his cabinet business. He has nothing negative to say about the Boring Company—he just blames himself for agreeing to be out so quickly. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, so he didn’t know what was fair. Nor did he know how hard it would be to set up a new store—the process of getting new city permits, he said, is a lengthy one, and he can’t find a way to cut through the red tape.
In last week’s election, the bill came due on the defining bet placed by congressional Republicans during the Donald Trump era.
Led by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House and Senate Republicans made a strategic decision to lock arms around Trump over the past two years. They resolutely rejected any meaningful oversight of his administration; excused, or even actively defended, his most incendiary remarks; buried legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and worked in harness with the president to pass an agenda aimed almost entirely at the preferences and priorities of voters within the GOP coalition, including tax cuts and the unsuccessful attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even as Trump’s presidency careened through daily storms, many of his own making, they lashed themselves to its mast.
In the election, the consequences of that decision became clear. The general trend in midterm elections is that voters’ decisions, for both the House and the Senate, increasingly correspond with their attitudes about the president. But the 2018 results raised that long-term trajectory to a new peak.
In the midterms of 2006, 2010, and 2014, between 84 and 87 percent of voters who approved of the president’s job performance voted for his party’s candidate in their local House race, according to exit polls. Last week, 88 percent of Trump approvers said they backed Republicans for the House, according to results from the Edison Research exit poll, which was conducted for the National Election Pool and published on the CNN website.
Likewise, in those previous three midterm exit polls, between 82 and 84 percent of voters who disapproved of the president voted against his party’s candidates for the House. But on Tuesday, that number soared: Fully 90 percent of Trump disapprovers said they voted for Democrats for the lower chamber. That was the worst performance for the president’s party among disapproving voters since Ronald Reagan in 1982.
[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening.]
Political strategists in both parties generally consider it easier for senators to establish an independent identity from the president. But attitudes about Trump were a powerful force in those races, too. Exit polls were conducted for 21 Senate contests in which a Republican faced a Democrat. Democrats won at least 90 percent of voters who disapproved of Trump in 15 of those 21 contests, and up to 89 percent in five more. Scandal-tarred New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was the only Democratic candidate to win a smaller share of voters who disapproved of Trump, at 79 percent.
Meanwhile, Republicans carried at least 90 percent of Trump approvers in seven of the 21 Senate races, and between 80 and 89 percent in 13 others. Joe Manchin in West Virginia was the only Democrat to hold his Republican opponent to less than 80 percent of Trump supporters.
The power of these relationships shaped the outcome in both chambers. In total, the tightened connection between votes for Congress and attitudes about Trump was a negative for Republicans because significantly more voters disapproved of him (54 percent) than approved (45 percent) in the national House exit poll.
Those topline numbers contained a stark divergence that drove the pattern of congressional results. This year’s exit poll found that just over three-fifths of whites without a college degree approved of Trump’s performance. That helps explain why Democrats made only very modest gains in rural or heavily blue-collar House districts. (Northeast Iowa and two upstate New York seats were among the few exceptions.)
That support also powered the Republican Senate victories in the preponderantly white and blue-collar heartland states of Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. Huge margins among working-class whites also keyed the apparent GOP wins in the Florida and Georgia governor’s races, and in Florida’s close Senate race. The biggest exceptions to this pattern were two folksy Democrats, Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana, and the populist Sherrod Brown in Ohio, who each won in predominantly blue-collar states where a majority of voters said they approved of Trump’s performance.
On the other side of the ledger, almost exactly three-fifths of whites with a four-year-college degree or more disapproved of Trump, as did just over 70 percent of nonwhites. That gale-force rejection powered the sweeping Democratic gains in white-collar and diverse metropolitan House districts across the country. Democrats swept away Republicans clinging to House seats in otherwise blue metropolitan areas in and around New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Seattle, and the northern exurbs of Los Angeles.
The recoil from Trump extended even to many of the metro areas where the GOP had maintained an advantage in recent years. Republicans lost House seats in Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California’s Orange County, and possibly Salt Lake City. For Republican members in both varieties of suburbs, occasional votes against party positions or tepid and intermittent public quibbles with Trump’s behavior could not mollify voters dismayed by the GOP’s overall subservience to his leadership.
[Read: The drawbacks of Trump’s electoral bargain]
The same dynamics were evident in statewide contests. In Senate and governor’s races, Democrats scored decisive victories in suburban counties that have moved toward them in recent years, from Arapahoe and Jefferson Counties in Colorado; to Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester Counties in Pennsylvania; to Oakland County in Michigan; to Hillsborough and Orange Counties in Florida. But as in the House races, the collapse also extended to places that had functioned as the GOP’s last outposts inside metro America.
Trump in 2016 carried only 13 of the nation’s 100 largest counties, according to data compiled for me by the Pew Research Center. But last week, about half of that already modest group shifted toward Democrats in statewide races. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs in Arizona, was the largest county that Trump won. But as of Tuesday night, it provided the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema a decisive margin of about 40,000 votes in her Senate victory over the Republican Martha McSally.
Tarrant County in Texas, which includes Fort Worth, was the second-largest county that Trump carried. But last week, it narrowly backed the Democrat Beto O’Rourke over the Republican Ted Cruz. Among the other large counties that Trump took in 2016, Suffolk (New York), Pinellas and Duval (Florida), Macomb (Michigan), and Oklahoma (in Oklahoma) all broke for Democrats in governor and/or Senate races.
Texas offered perhaps the most dramatic example of the undertow Trump has created for Republicans in metropolitan areas. In addition to his slim win in Tarrant County, O’Rourke carried Harris County (including Houston) by about 200,000 votes, Dallas and Travis Counties (including Austin) by around 240,000 votes each, and Bexar County (including San Antonio) by roughly 110,000 votes. As recently as 2012, Barack Obama’s combined margin across those four counties had been only about 175,000 votes. (He lost Tarrant by 94,000 votes, whereas O’Rourke won it by about 6,000.)
[Read: How both parties lost the Texas Senate race]
The surge toward Democrats in Harris County was so strong that the party elected a slate of candidates to posts across the government, including 17 African American women to county judgeships and a 27-year-old Latina who had never held public office to the job of the county’s chief executive. Democrats also won a majority on the county commission.
And O’Rourke extended his gains beyond core urban counties to win surrounding suburban areas, including the counties of Fort Bend (near Houston) and Williamson and Hayes (outside Austin). Obama lost all three in 2012 and Hillary Clinton lost the latter two in 2016; she carried Fort Bend only narrowly. Democrats still face an uphill climb in Texas, but by consolidating their advantages in its largest urban centers in the O’Rourke race, they have established a foundation from which to plausibly contest the state for the first time since the early 1990s.
Even with the GOP’s net gain in the Senate, these patterns represent a heavy price to Republicans for the choice congressional leaders made to bind the party to Trump. Paul Ryan, who had been among the most openly skeptical of Trump during the 2016 election, sublimated any private doubts to a posture of public deference and a policy of legislative cooperation. Now Ryan leaves Washington as the architect of the GOP’s biggest loss of House seats in any election since Watergate.
Kevin McCarthy, who House Republicans selected Wednesday to replace Ryan as their leader, pressured his fellow California Republicans to stand with Trump on key votes. As of now, Republicans have already lost four of their California House seats; as the vote counts continue, they are highly likely to lose a fifth (Mimi Walters’s seat in Orange County), and could surrender a sixth (the open Orange County seat vacated by Ed Royce). Even a seventh loss (for Representative David Valadao in the Central Valley) remains possible, though not probable at this point. After following McCarthy’s lead, California Republicans will emerge from the midterm elections holding no more than 10, and possibly as few as seven, of the state’s 53 congressional seats. It appears that no Republican will capture even 40 percent of the vote in any statewide California election either.
These reversals don’t mean Trump can’t win in 2020. Midterm elections have not consistently predicted presidential results two years later. Big midterm losses for the president’s party in 1958, 1966, 1974, 1978, and 2006 did foreshadow a shift in control of the White House in the next presidential contest. But Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, Ronald Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, and Barack Obama in 2010 all recovered from significant losses in their first midterms to win reelection with margins that ranged from comfortable (Clinton and Obama) to overwhelming (Eisenhower and Reagan).
In this election, Democrats demonstrated renewed strength by winning Senate and governor’s races in the three Rust Belt states that keyed Trump’s victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And they sent a clear message that Republicans in 2020 can’t entirely count on the emerging Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. North Carolina, where Republicans lead by about 80,000 ballots in the total House popular vote, also remains highly competitive, if leaning slightly toward the GOP.
But Trump is likely to be a much stronger competitor in the big three midwestern states than the Republicans who were on the ballot last week. And while Democrats don’t necessarily need to win Ohio or Florida in 2020, last week’s results offered them more reason for concern than optimism in those states, which have been the past quarter century’s most fiercely contested swing states. Ohio, at least, is unlikely to again draw the huge investment of time and money from Democrats that it has in the past.
Whatever it augurs for Trump’s own chances, though, the 2018 results underscored how he has truncated the opportunities for congressional Republicans. So long as the party is defined by his racially infused nationalism, it will be a strong competitor in states and House districts dominated by older, blue-collar, and evangelical white voters. But at the same time, the party seems guaranteed to struggle in suburban areas. It will also face growing challenges in Sun Belt states from Democrats who can mobilize an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites. This year, those voters elected to the Senate Sinema in Arizona and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. And they allowed O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race to run more competitively than any Democrat had in those states for decades. That same formula in 2020 could threaten Republican Senate seats in Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, and possibly Texas.
Over the past two years, Republicans up and down the ballot could have tried to establish an identity divorced from Trump. Instead, led by Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they sent voters an unmistakable signal that they would not act in any meaningful way to restrain, or even to oversee, him. In 2018, voters in turn sent Republicans an equally unmistakable signal: that their fate is now inextricably bound to the volatile president they have embraced as their leader.
“Things have a way of escalating out here in the West.”
So explains Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) near the beginning of the Coen brothers’ new feature, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. A dandified, singing gunfighter whom we first meet as he’s playing guitar on horseback—we’re treated to a cunning shot from inside the guitar, peering out through the sound hole at his strumming fingers—Buster refers to himself as the “San Saba Songbird.” Others, less generous, refer to him as the “West Texas Twit” or the “Runt of Rheardan Pass.” His WANTED poster, in what is presumably an inside joke on the Coens’ own reputation, is more succinct: “The Misanthrope.”
Buster is correct in saying that things escalate: both quickly, over the course of his own story, and more gradually, over the course of the six individual tales that make up the Coens’ Western anthology, which Netflix has released for a small theatrical run before expanding to more theaters and streaming on November 16.
Though it may provide the movie with its title, Buster’s ballad is short-lived. He engages in one bloody, slapstick shoot-out in a saloon, and then a second, a masterpiece of choreographed comic geometry. (“Your tactics gotta be downright Archimedean,” Buster explains after a particularly baroque bit of gunplay.) But then a younger quick-draw artist named “The Kid” arrives in town, as these types routinely do, and the yarn ends more or less the way it always does, only with more singing.
In a sense, the Coens have been building toward Buster Scruggs for much of their career: with the neo-Westerns Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men, the neo-Western satire Raising Arizona, their remake of the genre classic True Grit, and the cowboy characters of The Big Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. This time around, the half-dozen tales the Coens wind up telling (of which Buster’s is the first) are separate narratives they conceived over the course of 25 years. Tying them together is the conceit that they are “chapters” of the same “book,” complete with the device—shopworn? ironic? both?—of showing pages flipped every time one story segues to the next. Together they present an impressively comprehensive six-part taxonomy of the mythical Old West: the gunslinger, the bank robber, the traveling showman, the prospector, the wagon train, the stagecoach.
The second chapter, which stars James Franco as a not particularly capable thief—his is a neck very much in search of a noose—is a bit less daffy than the first, though still firmly in the comic mode. But after this tale the film veers into darker terrain, with three stark and pitiless fables: Liam Neeson, almost unrecognizable and near-mute, plays a grizzled, town-to-town impresario whose “meal ticket” is a young orator who has neither arms nor legs; Tom Waits has perhaps the film role of his career as a solitary gold rusher panning and shoveling his way to the score of a lifetime; and Zoe Kazan stars as a young woman who encounters surprises both good and bad on a long journey along the Oregon Trail. It all closes with an odd but intriguing fillip, a mildly macabre vignette in which five very different passengers share a notably uncomfortable stagecoach ride. This last installment almost seems like the opening act of a much, much better version of The Hateful Eight.
As always, the Coens’ production is meticulous, featuring details both cinematic (the squeak of a windmill recalls Once Upon a Time in the West; a hat that blows away, leaving its owner vulnerable, conjures the brothers’ own Miller’s Crossing) and historical (the explanation that a wagon train requires professionals both in the front, the “pilot,” and in the rear, the “drag”). The cinematography, by Bruno Delbonnel, with whom the Coens also collaborated on Inside Llewyn Davis, is entrancing. So, too, is the score, by Carter Burwell, who seems always to save his best for the Coens.
The performances are excellent across the board, from the stars already mentioned to the character actors (Clancy Brown, Stephen Root, Saul Rubinek) who appear in smaller roles. And ever alert to new talent—from Frances McDormand in Blood Simple to Alden Ehrenreich in Hail, Caesar!—the Coens provide promising introductions to the American actor Bill Heck and the Irish stage star Jonjo O’Neill.
But though the stories are individually captivating and very much worth the price of admission—see the film on a big screen if you can—they fit together awkwardly. The shifts in tone and pace are extreme, and rather than alternate among moods, the Coens, well, escalate: two helpings of farce, followed by three of stark drama, with a dessert of black comedy that is gone from the plate just as one has begun to appreciate its flavor. Though this menu is clearly by design, the result is both a meal that feels less than the sum of its parts and individual courses that themselves feel somehow undercooked. I found myself simultaneously wanting both more and less.
In 1998, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton on one charge of perjury and one charge of obstruction of justice. The articles of impeachment had their origin in a relationship between the president and a 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The intimate details, revealed by an independent counsel, had consumed the country for 11 months: part morality tale, part soap opera, part high-stakes knife fight. Politically, the country was divided—less so than now, but ferociously. We have been living with the consequences of the Clinton impeachment ever since. The political battle has stoked resentments, influenced elections, given rise to conspiracy theories, and prompted many to think about the nature of the relationship that lay at its core—one that Lewinsky has called consensual but has come to see as a “gross abuse of power.” With the anniversary approaching, The Atlantic set out to tell the story of that battle—fought by lawyers, politicians, and an assortment of hired guns—through the differing recollections of people who played a role in investigating, prosecuting, or defending Bill Clinton.
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I. a breaking storyIn July 1995, Monica Lewinsky started work at the White House, initially as an intern. She and the president developed a flirtatious rapport, which intensified during a weeklong government shutdown, during which interns served as support staff. By early 1996, White House aides had grown concerned about the relationship. In April, Lewinsky was reassigned to the Pentagon, where she became friends with Linda Tripp, a career civil servant who disliked the Clintons. Lewinsky told Tripp that she had had a sexual relationship with the president, which Tripp in turn told the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, withholding Lewinsky’s name. On October 6, 1997, Tripp invited Isikoff to a meeting with the conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. Tripp revealed that she had surreptitiously recorded her phone conversations with Lewinsky, and offered to play one of the tapes for Isikoff.
Michael Isikoff: I’d been talking to Tripp for some months, so I assumed the meeting was to provide me some further details about who the woman was. I was not quite sure what to expect or what I would learn, but when Linda Tripp provided the name and a few details, I felt I had made some progress.
Then they informed me they had been doing the taping. It was a little bit of, like, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” That threw me for a loop. It became clear that there was nothing conclusive, but also that this was an ongoing process—she was still taping, and she and Lucianne were trying to enlist me in their scheme. Listening to that tape would not have brought me any closer to publishing a story. I had gotten what I wanted to get, which was the name.
Linda Tripp, who taped dozens of her phone calls with Monica Lewinsky (Gluekit / Reuters)Lucianne Goldberg: He didn’t want to listen. He had a car downstairs waiting to take him to some TV show. The tapes just stayed in the shopping bag for several weeks.
Tripp also tipped off the lawyers representing Paula Jones in a lawsuit, filed in 1994, accusing Bill Clinton of sexual harassment for an incident that allegedly took place in Arkansas in 1991. On December 5, 1997, the president’s lawyers received a witness list that included the name Monica Lewinsky. Ten days later, Jones’s lawyers requested that the White House “produce documents that related to communications between the President and Monica Lewisky [sic].” Around 2 a.m. on December 17, Clinton called Lewinsky and told her, as she later recalled, that it “broke his heart” to see her name on the list. Meanwhile, others were scrambling, including the Washington lawyer Robert Bennett, who was representing Clinton in the Jones case.
Robert Bennett: Her name was misspelled, and I didn’t really know who she was. Bruce Lindsey [the deputy White House counsel] told me she was an intern who had brought pizza to them on the day the government had shut down. He sort of brushed it off. You know prosecutors—you always start at the bottom, and maybe it’s somebody who’s heard a rumor. Sometimes people go on fishing expeditions.
On January 17, 1998, Clinton was deposed in Washington by Paula Jones’s lawyers and denied having “a sexual affair” with Lewinsky. Bennett cited an affidavit executed by Lewinsky stating that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,” and the president testified that the affidavit was “absolutely true.” At the outset, the Jones team introduced a 92-word “Definition of Sexual Relations.”
Robert Bennett: The deposition was bizarre, to say the least. Clinton was there, and we asked that the judge be there. If you’re at a deposition and someone asks your client something you don’t think is appropriate, the usual situation is that he has to answer and then we later say to the judge, “Strike it,” because we objected. That doesn’t work very well with a president. If the judge was in the room, she could rule immediately on the propriety of a question.
I can’t remember the exact wording, but the plaintiff’s lawyers had this very involved definition of sexual relations, which the president took full advantage of in answering.
Meanwhile, Isikoff was close to breaking the story of the president’s affair, but after meetings on January 17, Newsweek editors decided to hold the story from that week’s edition. That night, the Drudge Report scooped Isikoff, running its revelations under the headline “Newsweek Kills Story on White House Intern.”
Lucianne Goldberg: I gave it to Drudge. By the time Newsweek turned it down, Isikoff was fit to be tied. They made him wait until late, late on a Saturday night. He was absolutely pissed.
I found myself with this hot potato. So I talked to some friends of mine that had been along for the ride, Ann Coulter being one of them. She said, “Why don’t you call Drudge?” I think it was Ann, or my lawyer, or Tripp’s lawyer. Drudge broke it within the hour.
Michael Isikoff: The New York Times asked me if I felt suicidal tendencies afterward. What I told them was “No, I don’t think I had any suicidal tendencies. But I won’t deny that I might’ve had some homicidal tendencies.”
Lanny Davis, a law-school classmate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, was due to leave the White House at the end of January after a stint defending the administration in several other scandals. He learned of the Lewinsky story when a reporter called.
Lanny Davis: I was sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of scotch. I got a phone call from Peter Baker of The Washington Post. He said, “You’ve got 90 minutes. What’s your comment on President Clinton having an affair with a young intern named Monica Lewinsky?” I said, “Monica who?”
I hung up the phone, called the White House, and got John Podesta, the deputy chief of staff on duty. He told me to come to the White House. When I got there, I went to the outer administrative office of the Oval Office and asked President Clinton’s special assistant, Betty Currie, if I could talk to the president about a breaking story. She told me he was in an important meeting in the Oval Office and couldn’t be disturbed. By the look on her face, I guessed that she knew what the story was about.
On January 21, Clinton told PBS’s Jim Lehrer, “There is no improper relationship.” Five days later, during a White House news conference on education, he went further: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never.” The next day, Hillary Clinton appeared on the Today show and made the first reference to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Meanwhile, the president and his aides—James Carville, Robert Shrum, and Mark Penn among them—were preparing for the upcoming State of the Union address.
James Carville: I was in San Francisco, at a Hyatt hotel, trying to digest the new information. I always kind of thought people figured it out for what it was. Maybe it’s just growing up in Louisiana or maybe it’s just my kind of view of the world, but it was about sex, and lying about sex, in my world—you know, it’s different. He lied about it because he didn’t want his wife and other people to find out. Okay. That bothers me about one-100th of 1 percent. I was way more upset when they passed the welfare bill.
“I show up for a State of the Union speech prep, and the place looks like a bomb shelter. Everybody’s in the corner, they’re whispering, they’re huddling. Clinton had made the strong denial, which was just false.”— Clinton Aide Mark Penn
Robert Shrum: We went into the Cabinet Room. It was about eight or nine days before the speech. And Bill Clinton was not Bill Clinton. He really wasn’t interacting. I had known him since college, and I said, when we were done, “Can I see you for a minute?” And I said, “Look, I don’t want to know anything about this stuff, but a week from now, when you give this speech, Congress is going to make a judgment about you.” What I didn’t say, but meant, was that people are going to decide whether you can still be president.
The other thing was, we had all sorts of people sending in passages about the scandal that they thought he should begin the speech with. I said, “I think this is the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. If we do this, that will be the news. There will be no oxygen left for anything else.”
Mark Penn: I show up for a State of the Union speech prep, and the place looks like a bomb shelter. Everybody’s in the corner, they’re whispering, they’re huddling. Clinton had made the strong denial, which was just false. So they decide not to hold the regular speech prep. It was just me and Podesta with the president in the Cabinet Room. And he very artfully told me something like “I did not have intercourse with that woman,” which said to me all I needed to know. I’d been around the president for a number of years. He was very precise in his phrasing.
II. THE INVESTIGATIONSince 1994, a team led by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, a former federal judge and solicitor general, had been investigating a series of scandals involving the Clintons, beginning with the failed Whitewater real-estate deal and expanding to include other matters—Travelgate, a contested shake-up of the White House Travel Office; Filegate, which involved allegedly improper use of FBI background checks; and the apparent suicide of White House counsel Vince Foster, whom conspiracy theorists believed had been murdered. Members of Starr’s team included Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, and Rod Rosenstein, now the deputy attorney general. As the Jones lawsuit moved forward, the Office of the Independent Counsel seemed to be winding down its inquiry. At drab quarters in Little Rock and Washington, lawyers and FBI agents sorted through documents on paper, sent faxes, and pecked at WordPerfect. Starr’s office first became aware of the Lewinsky story in January 1998, when a lawyer with knowledge of the Paula Jones case tipped off a staff lawyer about a story that Linda Tripp wanted to tell. The staff lawyer was unaware that the information had come from the Jones team. He insisted that Tripp come forward. On January 12, she did.
On January 13, Tripp met Lewinsky for lunch, wearing a wire provided by FBI agents working for the independent counsel. On January 16, Starr sought and was granted permission to expand his investigation, and later that day FBI agents and prosecutors ushered Lewinsky into a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Arlington, Virginia, and questioned her for 11 hours.
Paul Rosenzweig was the lawyer who got the tip about Tripp. Sidney Blumenthal was an assistant and special adviser to the president, responsible for, among other things, media outreach.
Paul Rosenzweig: At some level, as I look back, everything happened as it should. Some friends of mine told me this story about this woman, Monica Lewinsky, who they said was going to lie in the Jones case and who was getting a job through Vernon Jordan [a Clinton adviser and friend], and that sounded a lot like some of the hush-money investigations we’d been doing. And so I told my boss, and he said, “Have Tripp come in the front door and call me.” I conveyed that message, and then she came in. So in some way I took a tip, I gave it to my boss, and my boss said, “We don’t take tips. I want the testimony of a live witness. Bring it on.” When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound at all odd.
In retrospect, I regret not asking more questions, like: How did this information come to you? What’s your role in this affair? Who else knows about it? I think that’s the place where, if I could go back and change history, I would’ve counseled Starr to let the Department of Justice conduct the investigation. It wasn’t close enough to our original remit.
Sidney Blumenthal: We did not fully know what we know now about what was going on in Starr’s office. We knew that they were politically motivated, we knew that they were leaking grand-jury information in violation of Federal Rule 6(e) to reporters, and that they were obsessed with media relations and controlling the narrative. But we didn’t know that they had divided their office into what they called a “Likud faction” and “commie wimps” and written it on a blackboard with names underneath. We learned that afterward.
Paul Rosenzweig: It had certainly entered many of our minds that Lewinsky was potentially a fabulist. I remember the day that we knew the story was real. Betty Currie had knowledge of what was happening—Lewinsky’s visits to the Oval Office. She got a subpoena for anything relating to Monica Lewinsky. Her lawyer walked in with a box of gifts that Bill Clinton had given to Lewinsky, and that she had boxed up and given to Betty Currie for safekeeping. Now you have the president giving Monica Lewinsky gifts, and they’re real gifts. They’re not like something the president gives everybody. One was a T‑shirt from Martha’s Vineyard. He’d been to the Vineyard for his vacation. So the connection between the president and Monica Lewinsky—we know it’s real.
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr testifies before the House Judiciary Committee. (Gluekit / Doug Mills / AP)On March 23, 1998, Kenneth Starr subpoenaed the records of Kramerbooks, a store in Washington, to obtain a list of purchases by Lewinsky. One of the paperbacks Lewinsky was revealed to have bought—and given to Bill Clinton after reading it herself—was Nicholson Baker’s Vox, a novel about phone sex.
NICHOLSON BAKER: I was pleased—really totally surprised and flattered—to learn that Lewinsky had given the president her very own copy of my book. She was saying, I’m passing on my extremely personal page-turning experience to you. But the subpoena was just bad. Vox is a conversation between two people who are excited by the idea that they get to tell their private stories to each other. They get to tell stories and to be real to each other even while they have this artificial distance—they’re connected just by the phone. The book is trying to celebrate the secret hideouts that novels offer readers. And I love that about books. That kind of privacy ought to be respected.
On April 1, a judge dismissed Paula Jones’s lawsuit. (She appealed, and later settled with Clinton for $850,000.) Starr continued on, seeking testimony from several of Lewinsky’s fellow White House interns. Nicole Maffeo Russo, a former East Wing intern, was by then working in Boston. She flew to Washington to appear before a grand jury in April. Blumenthal, too, was called to testify before the grand jury (and was drawn into other legal actions).
Nicole Maffeo Russo: It was scary. I went down there not knowing what they wanted to talk about or why I was being subpoenaed. When I was in front of the grand jury, they asked me, “Well, what do you know?,” and I said, “I don’t know anything. I heard rumors and gossip.” And Starr’s team said, “Well, did you believe it?,” and I said, “Well, what does it matter what I believe?” I was very terse and snarky. I was a petulant child, really. But I would do it again.
I’m very proud of Monica Lewinsky for her anti-bullying campaign and for standing up for the #MeToo people—as someone who was one of the first people to go through it, she’s become a voice and a leader. If I could turn back time, I would’ve offered more support.
Sidney Blumenthal: Like others in the White House, I was subjected to right-wing suits from Judicial Watch, by Larry Klayman, who eventually sued his own mother. They were nuisance suits that nonetheless required you to have a lawyer and were attempts to create immense financial burdens and distract you and scare you. There was the Linda Tripp defamation suit. There was a suit from Bob Barr [a Republican representative from Georgia], in which he claimed that somehow information about his wife’s abortion had been leaked. There was no end to it. The legal bills all added up.
The first issue of Brill’s Content, a media-watchdog magazine, hit newsstands in June with a cover story by its founder and editor, Steven Brill, titled “Pressgate.” Brill quoted Kenneth Starr as admitting that he or members of his staff had selectively leaked information to the press—and took the press to task for running stories that advanced the independent counsel’s agenda.
Steven Brill: We were launching the magazine in June, and I decided by mid-January, late January, that the press around the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal really ought to be the lead story. The role of the press vis-à-vis the government had totally flipped since Watergate. Watergate was all about two reporters for The Washington Post—and then a lot of other reporters—not believing the prosecution’s version of things and refusing to be misled by Richard Nixon’s Justice Department. With Ken Starr, it was exactly the opposite: The press was the tool of the prosecution. The prosecution just kept leaking, and the press just kept lapping it up. In my view, Starr was also violating a statute related to grand-jury secrecy, which is now a little bit relevant because his deputy at the time was Brett Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh was one of two people who were basically identified as leaking to the press.
In July, Lewinsky met with Starr’s team and reached an agreement under which she would be granted immunity for past statements in exchange for testifying to the grand jury. Lewinsky also agreed to turn over a blue Gap dress, which she believed (and DNA tests confirmed) was stained with the president’s semen.
David Brock had been a leading anti-Clinton reporter for The American Spectator but began to question his politics. He announced his change of heart in 1997 in an article for Esquire, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hitman,” and began passing information to the White House about right-wing projects.
David Brock: From day one—literally the day after the election in ’92—there were people in my orbit who were actively talking about trying to thwart the Clinton presidency and get him impeached. So I was in a unique position. I don’t know how much of what I had was shared with Bill Clinton, but Hillary was getting these strings of information about what the right wing was up to. I had heard specifically that whoever the White House intern was—and I can’t totally recall that I even knew the name—she had evidence in the form of a dress.
Sidney Blumenthal: It’s hard to remember, but Bill Clinton was perceived as illegitimate in a lot of quarters when he was elected, and with immense suspicion and hostility. Some of it was because he had disrupted a long Republican era and all the relationships that had gone with that. Some of it was generational. There was a lot of antagonism toward Clinton as a representative of the ’60s generation.
“In his testimony, the president dodged and weaved. It’s very difficult to use harsh prosecutorial tactics on a president. You can’t yell at him. You can’t startle him.”— Paul Rosenzweig, a lawyer for The Office of the Independent Counsel
Mark Penn: Hillary wanted us to fight, fight, fight. We basically went back on campaign footing. That meant finding issues, finding communications, running the message, just like a campaign—but not about impeachment. The polling principle was: Keep the president’s approval above 50 percent at all costs, because above 50 percent, people are reticent to kick the president. Below 50, it’s to people’s political advantage to kick a political figure. That’s why a lot of people fall very quickly from 45 to 35.
We always had this distinction between public behavior and private life. In his public life he was an exceptional president. In his private life …
Lanny Davis: Hillary Clinton’s strength of character and her inner moral compass allowed her to survive what would have broken a lot of other people. She kept us all going even while we knew how difficult it was for her, far more than for us.
David Brock: I think Hillary Clinton’s Today-show appearance was critical in rallying first Democrats and then the rest of the public. You could see over time that the Clinton folks made a lot of headway in turning public opinion around to the idea that, even if something had happened between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which we ended up finding out was true, nothing was on the level of an impeachable offense. That’s why [Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich’s effort in ’98 ended up biting him in the ass.
III. THE APOLOGY SPEECHOn July 17, Starr served the president with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. The subpoena was withdrawn when Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily. Starr made a number of concessions: Clinton would appear via closed-circuit TV from the White House, his testimony would be limited to one day, and his lawyers could be present.
Clinton testified on August 17. Asked whether he had been truthful in affirming that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind” with Lewinsky, he answered, “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” That night, the president appeared on national television and expressed regret: “As you know, in a deposition in January I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information,” he said. “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife.” In the speech, he also angrily criticized the Starr investigation for overreaching and breaking ethical rules.
President Bill Clinton addresses the nation after his grand-jury testimony. (Jim Bourg / Reuters)Paul Rosenzweig: In his testimony, the president dodged and weaved. It’s very difficult to use harsh prosecutorial tactics on a president. You can’t yell at him. You can’t startle him. We never got a very successful theory on how to counteract that. Most of the people that we get into a grand jury, they don’t have a time limit. We can say we’re going to stay here forever until you answer the questions. We can take them out in front of a judge and ask to hold them in contempt. Just looking at 23 jurors makes it hard to refuse to answer a question.
Mark Penn: The elites didn’t like the speech. I actually had an instant poll running, and the speech did fine. It did what it needed to do, and it also didn’t let down his supporters. I think people underestimate in these fights that the complete mea culpa deflates your supporters. So the mixture of “I did wrong, but, you know, there are also some other wrongs here” kept the flame going for a lot of people.
On August 20, the U.S. launched cruise missiles at what were suspected to be al‑Qaeda sites in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The attacks invited comparison to the plot of a recent movie directed by Barry Levinson, Wag the Dog, about military action taken to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal. General Anthony Zinni, the head of Central Command, oversaw that campaign, known as Operation Infinite Reach, as well as a second campaign, Operation Desert Fox, against potential weapons sites in Iraq, in December.
Anthony Zinni: The secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I flew up to Camp David. The president was there—supposedly reconciling with Mrs. Clinton, as I understood it. We went through the options. And in the end the president kind of laughed and said, “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” Because there were two things that were coming out in the press at that time. One was the follow-on of the Wag the Dog movie—he would be doing this to distract. And the second was No, he won’t act—he’s been so weakened that he wouldn’t act. But really he gave the okay based on a full set of existing policies. He was not making a decision from a cold start. I think for the president to say “Let’s say not strike,” he would’ve violated all the policy that had been put in place.
Barry Levinson: David Mamet [one of Wag the Dog’s screenwriters] wrote a terrific piece of political satire that is just degrees off of what was possible. I had to go into the hospital for some minor surgery that summer. I was given some kind of painkiller. And the television was on and they were talking about the air strike and Wag the Dog. And I’m watching the TV in my slightly drug-induced state and saying, What?
IV. ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENTThere was talk in Congress of impeachment at least as early as November 1997, when Representative Bob Barr moved to open an inquiry into foreign donations to Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. After the president’s apology in August, Republicans in Congress prepared to receive a report from Starr laying out possible grounds for impeachment. Julian Epstein was the chief Democratic counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.
Bob Barr: Everything changed with the revelation of the Monica Lewinsky incident. To me, this was unfortunate, because it took the focus away completely from what I thought, and continue to this day to think, were the far more serious and more substantive grounds for impeachment.
Julian Epstein: We were pretty sure by March, with all the overheated rhetoric from the Republican leaders, that they were going to impeach. I started making hires for impeachment staff in March.
Mark Penn: The question you really have in a crisis is: Can the business keep operating while you resolve the crisis, or not? If it can’t keep operating, then you have to dissolve it regardless of whether you’re innocent or guilty. If you can keep it operating, if you can make decisions and prove to people that you can supply the product or function, then even if you’re guilty on some of it, it’s okay. And that really became what the strategy was. The strategy was that he would do the job of president. He would talk about the other stuff as little as possible.
Several people on the independent counsel’s staff took a hand in drafting what came to be known as the Starr Report, which included a narrative of events and a legal argument, and was in places sexually explicit. Among the writers were Brett Kavanaugh and Stephen Bates. Bates, a lawyer and former literary editor at The Wilson Quarterly, now teaches at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He contributed much of the narrative of events. David Kendall, a Washington attorney, represented Clinton on matters involving the independent counsel.
Stephen Bates: The idea was to do a factual summary in part to simplify things for the reader and also to have some indication of why you should believe Monica Lewinsky. And so that required including a lot of information about when she went to the White House, what time, how long she was there, what she heard with the president on the phone, that sort of thing.
Part of the point of including all that information was to bolster her credibility. Because on some of the crucial things, it was her account versus his account. She had an incredible memory. To the extent that the report is a story, it’s a story with an apparatus of footnotes or commentary. Like [Vladimir Nabokov’s] Pale Fire.
I recall only a few things left out of it, things that I thought were significant but that other people said shouldn’t be in there. One involved the fact that Lewinsky, as I remember, used Betty Currie to get material to the president—if she gave him a gift, it went to Betty Currie, and it was sort of a back channel. We knew the names of some other people who were on Currie’s list, including Barbra Streisand. I thought they showed that this is not just some starry-eyed intern; she’s part of a select group. Other people said, “You’re implying that there’s something sexual going on with Barbra Streisand,” which never occurred to me. So that ended up not making the cut.
David Kendall: The Starr Report made no attempt to summarize accurately the evidence the Office of the Independent Counsel had developed. A statement that remarkably was not included in the report was this one, from Ms. Lewinsky’s grand-jury testimony: “No one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence.”
On the afternoon of September 9, 1998, Starr’s deputy Jackie Bennett informed the House Judiciary Committee that two vans would soon arrive at the Capitol. They carried 36 boxes of evidence. Capitol Police officers conveyed the boxes to a locked room set aside for members of Congress. Starr’s team expected that, like the 1974 report on Watergate, assembled by Leon Jaworski, its work would remain confidential. Some Republicans, like Representative Bill McCollum, of Florida, felt that Democrats were never interested in a good-faith consideration of whether Clinton might be worthy of impeachment. Many Democrats believed the salaciousness of Starr’s report would work against it. On September 11, the House voted 363–63 to release the report to the public. Barney Frank was a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts.
Bill McCollum: You could go over there anytime you wanted, but it was basically under lock and key. Any House member could go. It wasn’t just the Judiciary Committee. One of the sad things about this, in my view, was that we couldn’t get Democrats to go read it—to go actually look at it. I don’t think they wanted to look at it.
“Starr used the compelled testimony of Ms. Lewinsky to paint a detailed, lengthy, and graphic account of their relationship. To what end? To humiliate and demean both people.”— Clinton lawyer David Kendall
Stephen Bates: We thought Congress would just use the report for their own purposes. When I was working on it, I got in touch with the National Archives and said I wanted to see Jaworski’s report from 1974, and they said you can’t. It’s still under judicial seal. During Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee was allowed to see it and nobody else, and it never went public.
In retrospect, I guess it was naive to think the same thing would happen in 1998. The only model we had was the Jaworski report, and how Congress treated that report as secret. And then Congress voted to release the Starr Report unread.
David Kendall: There was no need for Starr to send the detailed, pornographic report to Congress. In his grand-jury testimony in August 1998, the president had admitted that when he was alone with Ms. Lewinsky, he had engaged in conduct with her “that was wrong,” that did not constitute sexual intercourse but “did involve inappropriate intimate contact.” The president refused to answer further questions about this conduct, and Starr chose not to try to compel him to do so. The specific anatomical details were not relevant to anything, but Starr used the compelled testimony of Ms. Lewinsky to paint a detailed, lengthy, and graphic account of their relationship. To what end? To humiliate and demean both people.
Julian Epstein: The day we got that report, we knew it was over. We were certain of two things. One is that there wasn’t a strong legal case, either on perjury or on obstruction. The second thing was how much ammunition the report gave us—just the countless pornographic details and how unprofessional the work itself was from a legal standpoint. All this stuff about cigars and all the other gratuitous sexual things were absurd. The foolishness of Starr and the Republicans not to see how the sexual material in the report would backfire was just jaw-dropping to us.
Barney Frank: In September, Starr sends Congress a report—the congressional elections are in November—saying that the president has behaved badly and we can impeach him. He does not mention the other items he had been investigating, with one exception. Early on they had said that Vince Foster had killed himself—that the idea of murder was ridiculous. But the other three charges—Whitewater, the FBI files, and the travel office—were still pending, and people in opposition to Clinton were saying, “Oh, it’s all part of a pattern.”
After the midterm elections, when we had the hearing, before voting on impeachment, Starr said, “By the way, with regard to everything else I investigated, I have nothing negative to say about the Clintons.” So when I questioned him later, I asked why, before the election, he gave us the bad news about the subject he’d been investigating for only a few months, and withheld the good news until after the election. His answer was all mumbo jumbo. He said, “I can’t give you a date certain about how long before the election I knew.” I said, “Well, give me a date ambiguous.”
The decision to release the Starr Report created an opportunity for the fledgling publishing house PublicAffairs. Its founding editor, Peter Osnos, had been at Times Books and Random House and had pioneered a genre known in-house as “rabbits,” because they were pulled out of a hat: public-domain and political documents that cost nothing and could be published instantly. The PublicAffairs edition of the Starr Report was an immediate best seller.
Peter Osnos: It was announced on a Tuesday that it would come out on a Friday. I called The Washington Post and asked them if they would give us a disc of the report and the first-day Post coverage, which we could then use as the basis for the book. We struck a deal.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, David Kirkpatrick, who was then the publishing reporter for The Wall Street Journal—remembering the history of “rabbits” at Random House—called and said, “Are you thinking of doing a book?” And I said, “We are.” He wrote a story. We then heard from Amazon, which was still at its early stage but already significant, and they said, “Can you send us a jacket?” So we made a jacket, and we sent it to them. That was Thursday. Friday, the report was released, and we were in the newsroom of The Washington Post to pick up the disc. It was 8 o’clock. And I got a call from Bill Curry, the press guy for Amazon and a former Washington Post reporter. He said, “Congratulations, your book is now No. 1 on our best-seller list.” And I’m standing there thinking, Okay, this is a new world. I didn’t have the disc, there was no book, and we were No. 1 based on orders. Books started arriving in stores midday Monday, shipped by air.
Over the next several weeks, more evidence became public, including Clinton’s videotaped grand-jury testimony from August. Darrell Hammond’s impersonation of Clinton became a staple of Saturday Night Live during the impeachment process.
Darrell Hammond: In the videotapes, when Clinton was being questioned, he did the most interesting thing: He elongated his neck slightly, as a form of physical rectitude. Like, I’m not ashamed of anything. I’ve apologized for what I did, and I was right to do that, and I’d like to move on, and you’re really taking me away from presidential business.
When he got to engage these great legal minds in a debate over the meaning of the word is, that debate went on just long enough for the audiences I was playing for around the country, anyway, to decide this thing was just silly.
Bill Clinton and his Saturday Night Live impersonator Darrell Hammond (Gluekit / Stephen Jaffe)The biggest change in the media landscape as impeachment unfolded—and one that impeachment accelerated—was the emergence of the cable-news channels Fox, CNN, and MSNBC into a position of influence. Lanny Davis, having left the White House, became a constant presence on TV defending the president.
Lanny Davis: Given the legal concerns, there was no way the White House could put people on TV to discuss the Starr investigation. So that’s how I came to be the person who did so many cable-news shows, sometimes three to four times a day and night. I was now a private citizen and a volunteer to help the president. It was very difficult, physically and mentally. In August I had to go into the hospital because I had something called diverticulitis. After the operation, President Clinton called me and he said, “So what’s the condition?” I said, laughing, “I’m calling it ‘Clintonitis.’ ”
Lucianne Goldberg: I think I did 500 TV shows. I’d say, “I was on your show two weeks ago and told the whole thing.” They’d say, “Our audience can’t get enough.” My son was working the phones and said, “It’s Tom Brokaw! He says he wants to talk about oral sex.” I said, “I bet he does.”
Some aspects of the news media had not changed at all since the 1970s, including the recurring “Washington society is special and you have to know the rules” column. Sally Quinn of The Washington Post published one in the fall of 1998. She quoted the Post’s David Broder about Clinton: “He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”
James Carville: I can easily tell you what the high point of that whole time was. The high point was the Sally Quinn piece in The Washington Post where every fool was mouthing off about how Washington was a village and how dare the Clintons intrude on their turf. I don’t think she intended it this way, but she turned the tape recorder on and people just stood in line to make fools of themselves. No one could stop laughing at that. David Broder—just priceless.
Clinton remained popular with the public. After he denied an affair with Lewinsky in January, his Gallup approval rating spiked 10 points, to 69 percent. It remained in the 60s until the impeachment vote in December, when it shot up again, to 73 percent.
Lanny Davis: Everybody in the country got it in about a week. Bad judgment. Personal. Whatever you want to say. Nothing to do with abuse of presidential power. Nothing to do with the impeachment clause. He had publicly apologized to the country, to Ms. Lewinsky, and to his wife and family. It took all of Washington, including me, about a year to figure that out.
Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House as impeachment gained momentum (Tim Boyle / Getty)On October 5, 1998, the House Judiciary Committee voted to launch an impeachment inquiry, followed by the full House three days later. With less than a month to go until the midterm elections, Newt Gingrich decided to place the president’s misconduct at the center of the GOP’s campaign in television ads around the country.
Gingrich predicted that the Republicans would add significantly to their majority. Instead, the Democrats gained five seats in the House. Although the Republicans retained the majority, Gingrich was weakened and planned to resign his seat. Bob Livingston, of Louisiana, was expected to be elected the next speaker. Representative James Rogan, a California Republican, was a member of the Judiciary Committee.
Bob Livingston: We should have, when Clinton got into trouble, just not focused on his problems in the media. Had we really concentrated on our accomplishments in welfare reform, reducing taxes, and balancing the budget, we’d have had a lot to talk about. But we didn’t talk about them.
James Rogan: Suddenly the Republicans realized all this talk about impeachment almost cost them the majority. The speaker lost his job because of it. Within a day, I got a call from one of Gingrich’s people, who said, “You’ve got to make this go away. The speaker doesn’t want this to be the last thing on his watch.” Then, within, like, an hour, I got a call from one of Bob Livingston’s guys, who said, “You’ve got to try to make this go away. The speaker doesn’t want this to be the first thing on his watch.”
Barney Frank: It was always my view that Henry Hyde, the Judiciary chair, did not want to go ahead and press impeachment all the way, but Tom DeLay [the majority whip] was calling the shots and kept pushing them and pushing them.
As the Judiciary Committee began its inquiry, the typically rule-obsessed House had little sense of how to proceed. The Constitution lays out no specifics, and no president had been impeached since Andrew Johnson, in 1868. Members modeled the process on the Nixon investigation, a quarter century earlier. Charles Johnson was the House parliamentarian.
Charles Johnson: The rules governing the actions of the Judiciary Committee almost entirely mirrored what had gone on in the Nixon investigation. In ’74, things were getting pretty hot for Nixon. We had gone back to the journals of the Johnson impeachment, which were written in quill pen. We got them from Archives just to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. Of course, by the time articles of impeachment were ready to come to the floor, Nixon had resigned. Now, in 1998, the House was Republican, obviously, with Clinton, and had been Democratic with Nixon, but one basic thought that the leadership had was that they didn’t want the process, at least to the extent they could control it, to appear to be partisan.
On December 8 and 9, lawyers for Clinton pressed his case before the Judiciary Committee, arguing that, whatever Clinton’s transgressions, they did not rise to the level of impeachment. The White House presented as witnesses several veterans of the Watergate process as well as the Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz.
Sean Wilentz: I wanted to be as direct as possible about what the stakes were. There were still some House Republicans not on the committee who were on the fence, and I wanted to make it clear to them that impeachment was a terrible thing as far as the Constitution was concerned, that voting for impeachment for partisan or self-interested reasons was what the Framers had feared. I wanted to find some way to say that. So I put in a line about how “History will track you down.” It came from Congressman John Lewis. He and I had spent some time together two years before, for an article I wrote, and at one point I asked him why he thought he had done what he’d done in the ’60s. He said, “Well, you know, history just tracked me down. History tracked me down.” It stuck in my mind.
When I adapted the phrase in front of the Judiciary Committee, I could see off in the corner that the Republican staffers were really very riled. Afterward—from Lewis’s office, in fact—I called the White House to get their reaction, see what they thought of what I’d said. Sid [Blumenthal] told me, “Well, some people thought you were a little over the top, but it was good.”
The Democrats sought to strike a deal to censure Clinton instead of impeaching him. It was ruled out of order. On December 11, the Judiciary Committee voted essentially along party lines to send three articles of impeachment to the full House, and added a fourth the following day.
The first article alleged that Clinton had committed perjury by lying to the grand jury in August about his relationship with Lewinsky, and in prior false statements. The second alleged that he had also perjured himself in his January deposition in the Jones case. The third accused him of obstructing justice—coaching Lewinsky and Betty Currie on their stories, concealing gifts he had received from Lewinsky, and attempting to find her a job. The fourth alleged that he had abused his office by attempting to stonewall the impeachment inquiry.
Hearings in the full House were scheduled for December 17, but were delayed for a day when Clinton launched air strikes against Iraq—prompting renewed outrage and Wag the Dog analogies.
Caroline Self spent her White House internship working for Betty Currie. She, too, had been called to testify before the grand jury. Self returned to Harvard to finish her degree but arranged to visit Currie on December 18, on her way home to Alabama for Christmas—the day before the impeachment vote, when televised debate was in full swing.
Caroline Self: On my way in, I saw a friend and said, “What’s it like in there?” She said, “It’s like a morgue.” I went to see Betty. I saw the president. He said hello, and then he asked Betty to turn up the volume on the TV. Then we watched the impeachment debate on the TV. Talk about surreal. He was very engaged, but he wasn’t dwelling on it. I think it’s probably one of those things that, if he was okay, he hoped other people would be okay. I wonder what he was really feeling.
In October 1998, Hustler’s publisher, Larry Flynt, took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post offering $1 million to anyone who could prove they had had “an adulterous sexual encounter with a current member of the United States Congress or a high-ranking government official.” Flynt also had his own investigators dig for dirt. Outwardly, Washington laughed. “I’d like to commit adultery so I could get the $1 million,” Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, told the Post. Privately, some members were nervous. Gingrich, while married, was conducting an affair with his now-wife, Callista. Several representatives confessed to earlier extramarital affairs, including Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth, and Dan Burton, who had become infamous for shooting at melons in his yard in a bid to prove that Vince Foster had been murdered.
Around midnight on December 15, a staffer called House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston and said Flynt had turned up affairs of his from years earlier. On December 19, Livingston told a shocked House that he would not stand for speaker and planned to resign. “I can only challenge you in such fashion if I am willing to heed my own words,” he said. Representative Ray LaHood was presiding over the impeachment hearing.
Bob Livingston: For more than two decades, I’d worked to establish a very fine career in Congress, unblemished, and all of a sudden the bottom fell out. Flynt was sitting there holding all the cards. I had heard that he’d had some success with other people. I just didn’t think it was going to be me. To sweep it under the rug would have meant a total catastrophe on the opening day of Congress. And I couldn’t do that to my colleagues, I couldn’t do it to the party, I just couldn’t do it to anybody else.
It was raucous when I called on Clinton to resign, told him that it would be painful but that other people had done exactly what he had done and had gone to prison for it. That’s when the Democrats just went nuts—“You resign!”—and I would say not all Democrats, but certainly a lot of them. And then I just put my hand up and carried through with my own resignation. There was a pall. There was a lot of quiet.
Ray LaHood: The air went out of the chamber. John Conyers, who was the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, came up to the podium and said, “Do you think we should suspend the debate?” And I made a very quick decision and said, “Absolutely not. We are going ahead with this. This is what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Charles Johnson: Ray LaHood was in the chair, and members, really responsible members on the Democratic side—Vic Fazio, I remember, and Mel Watt, two or three others—came up and urged LaHood to run as a caretaker speaker. I can remember him telling them he wasn’t going to do it. Several hours later, Denny Hastert’s name emerged on the floor while the debate resumed on the articles of impeachment. Hastert emerged from nowhere.
Larry Flynt: It was hypocrisy up to his eyeballs. I remember somebody asked Livingston what he thought of me and he said, “I think he’s a bottom feeder.” Somebody asked me for comment and I said, “Well, that’s right, but look what I found when I got down there.”
James Carville: Clinton was lucky in his choice of enemies. I mean, you look back and you just can’t help but laugh out loud. Dan Burton shooting melons in his backyard. Some of these people were just unbelievable. And we forget how unpopular Gingrich was at the time.
David Kendall: Starr has complained that a country enjoying peace and prosperity just couldn’t properly understand the Clintons’ many misdeeds. There’s an alternative explanation for the public’s distaste for impeachment: The focus on President Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky also brought to light a number of frisky Republicans—Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, and Helen Chenoweth, to name a few. The public reasonably concluded that the drive to hound the president from office was both hypocritical and an overreaction.
“We had maybe half the Senate standing along the back rail of the House chamber watching the vote. There was just absolute, utter shock … they were apoplectic: ‘What’re we going to do now?’ ”— Republican Congressman James Rogan
The House voted in favor of two articles of impeachment, finding that Clinton had committed perjury before the grand jury and had obstructed justice, but rejected accusations of perjury in the Jones case and of abuse of office.
James Rogan: I don’t think any of us believed that Clinton would actually be impeached until the very, very end of the process. I just never believed it was going to happen.
Ray LaHood: When the votes were taken—and I announced each one separately—I think people were surprised by the fact that Clinton was impeached by the House but not on all four impeachment articles.
Barney Frank: One thing that never got enough attention was that the impeachment process was conducted by a lame-duck Congress. If the Congress elected in 1998 had voted, instead of the one that did vote, one of the articles would not have passed the House, because there were a number of pro-impeachment people who were defeated by anti-impeachment Democrats. Some weirdo from New Jersey was defeated. He was the one who sang on the House floor, “Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr, now we see how brave you are.”
James Rogan: We had maybe half the Senate standing along the back rail of the House chamber watching the vote. There was just absolute, utter shock. I walked by a bunch of them, and they were apoplectic: “What’re we going to do now?” I said, “Well, you’re going to have to try the case, that’s what you’re going to do now.”
V. THE TRIAL AND ITS AFTERMATHOnce Clinton was impeached, it fell to the Senate to put him on trial and decide whether to remove him from office. The trial was set to begin on January 7, 1999. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott called Minority Leader Tom Daschle and said he wanted to work out the process. One of their decisions was to host executive sessions for the full Senate, with no media present. They chose to meet in the Old Senate Chamber, which had housed the Senate until 1859 and then for decades was the home of the Supreme Court.
Tom Daschle: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster spent their careers in that chamber, so there’s just an awesome feeling of history. In the public sessions, people were speaking to the camera, but in the executive sessions people were speaking to each other. They were very candid, very emotional sometimes.
We had one question in particular about how we were going to proceed. [Senator] Phil Gramm made some proposal and almost immediately Ted Kennedy agreed with that, and we were so enamored of the fact that you had Ted Kennedy and Phil Gramm finding some consensus that we said, “Do you all share that view?,” and everybody said, “Yeah.” Walking out, Trent and I felt we needed to make an announcement that, procedurally, this is what we were going to do. Trent said, “Do you understand what we actually agreed to?,” and I said, “No, I thought you did.”
James Rogan and Bob Barr were among the 13 House Judiciary Committee members selected as managers for the Senate trial—in effect, prosecutors. They worked with the Republicans’ chief investigator, David Schippers, to negotiate a process with the Senate.
James Rogan: Trent Lott did handsprings trying to make it go away. Lott finally told Schippers and me, and this is about as precise a quote as I can give you, because it still rings in my ears, “We don’t care if you have photographs of Clinton standing over a dead woman with a smoking gun in his hand. I have 55 Republican senators, seven of whom are up for reelection next year in very tough races. You guys in the House just jumped off a cliff. We’re not following you off the cliff.”
Bob Barr: They didn’t want to have anything to do with an impeachment. The procedures were, from the standpoint of a trial attorney, laughable. We could call no live witnesses. They limited the overall evidence that we could use to only that evidence which already was in the public domain. So they made it impossible for us to present a strong case.
Tom Daschle: If witnesses had been called, it would have been far more sensational, and we wanted to keep the sordid nature of some of this out of the public spectacle, to the extent we could. I think we always knew we had the votes not to convict. What I was more concerned about was ensuring that at the end of the day not one senator would say, Well, if I only had known this, I would have voted differently.
David Kendall: The president apologized repeatedly for his conduct and to Ms. Lewinsky. At a White House prayer breakfast on September 11, 1998, he said, “I have done wrong,” and “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.” He apologized explicitly to “everybody who has been hurt,” including “Monica Lewinsky and her family.” The Starr Report came out later that day. In every pleading we filed in the House and Senate, we repeated this apology, and on behalf of the president, my partner and I apologized directly and personally to Ms. Lewinsky in January 1999, when her deposition was taken by the House managers as part of the Senate trial.
Monica Lewinsky speaks to ABC two months after the impeachment trial. (Rick Maiman / Getty)After arguments in the Senate concluded, on February 9, senators repaired behind closed doors to deliberate. When they voted, on February 12, both articles were defeated. Forty-five senators voted to convict on perjury, and 50 on obstruction—well short of the 67 needed to remove Clinton from office. Shortly after the vote, the Capitol had to be evacuated because of a bomb scare. Some Democrats went to the White House to meet with Clinton.
Tom Daschle: Within an hour after I had voted on impeachment, I was walking around the Air and Space Museum, because we all had to clear the building and we had no place to go.
Julian Epstein: Clinton certainly felt the scarlet letter of impeachment. He was embarrassed and ashamed, for sure, and he felt like it had really hurt his second term. But he thought of himself as the Comeback Kid. I think he felt good about being vindicated. I think he felt good about beating Starr. He’s generally a pretty upbeat person, and he definitely was that day.
The day after the acquittal, Saturday Night Live featured Darrell Hammond as a triumphant Clinton in the White House Rose Garden.
Darrell Hammond: You had this person who was, you know, sort of a scallywag, but only on about a Daffy Duck level. He was the kid who’d been sent to the principal’s office but now was back, and he was okay. He didn’t get a paddling, he didn’t get a suspension, he didn’t get after-school detention. He was sprung free.
And once that happened, the first thing we did on the show was have him walk out there and say, “I am bulletproof.”
Bill McCollum: It was all about the rule of law. Henry Hyde said those words over and over again, and people wondered, What in the world are you talking about? The rule of law is about the public’s faith in the court system, in the law. When you have a president who violates the law in court, in a deposition or in front of a grand jury, and you don’t hold him accountable, that undermines the faith people have in the court system. It wasn’t about the actual underlying facts of what happened in the White House or about Monica Lewinsky. It was about upholding that rule of law.
Lucianne Goldberg: This guy was a horndog. We chopped him alive. He never was the same. I don’t care whether he got impeached or not. I just wanted people to know what kind of person he was.
Privately, some Democrats felt the party would be better off if Clinton resigned and allowed Al Gore to become president ahead of the 2000 election. Despite Clinton’s high approval ratings, his personal reputation was tarnished, and Gore distanced himself from Clinton during the campaign. He narrowly won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College after the Supreme Court intervened in the Florida recount.
James Rogan: Eddie Markey, who’s now a senator from Massachusetts, came up and put his hand on my shoulder and whispered to me, “You know, Jimmy, truth be told, we should all be impeached for perjury.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Because you Republicans want the son of a bitch to stay and we Democrats want the son of a bitch to go.” What he meant was that Republicans were better off in the 2000 election with a tarnished president that Vice President Al Gore had to defend, whereas it would be far better for the Democrats nationally in 2000 to have Clinton just go away and have Gore sworn in as president.
Robert Shrum: Without the Lewinsky episode, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Al Gore would’ve won the election. Basically, Bush’s pitch was that he wasn’t going to change much of anything except that he was going to give a tax cut to people to share the prosperity. The central thing, however, that he said he was going to do was restore honor and dignity to the White House, and that was code for everything that had happened. The Bush appeal was very clever, I have to say.
Robert Bennett: I often think, Would it be different representing President Clinton now? Would Clinton have survived among today’s attitudes? In the Clinton era, I had all these women—Cabinet officers—I went out and talked to many of them, talked to Patricia Ireland of now. There were many women who liked his politics, so they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Now would they believe him? I don’t know.
David Brock: The fact that there is a group of organized Clinton haters out there is one thing the Clintons took forward. It played out in the controversy over Benghazi, it played out in the controversies over the Clinton Foundation. Donald Trump’s closing argument in 2016—“Lock her up”—was something that had been seeded more than 20 years before.
Impeachment had failed, but a criminal investigation was still open. One issue was whether Clinton had lied under oath. A sitting president was unlikely to be indicted, but a president could face legal action after leaving office. Kenneth Starr left his job as independent counsel in 1999 and was succeeded by Robert Ray. As the Clinton administration neared its end, the president and his lawyers sat down with Ray to sign a final agreement ending the independent counsel’s investigation. The president admitted to “testifying falsely” in his January 1998 deposition, agreed to pay a $25,000 fine, and surrendered his Arkansas law license. Ray had met Clinton only once before—shaking hands on a rope line at the Army Navy Country Club, where both were playing golf.
Robert Ray: Around the holidays—Christmastime 2000—there was a meeting between myself, my chief of investigations, and my deputy, together with the president, David Kendall, Nicole Seligman [another Clinton lawyer], and the White House counsel, in the Map Room of the White House. It was done after hours, at night, after the last candlelight tour left the White House. It was after 10 o’clock.
The purpose of the meeting was for me to speak to the president without any filter and say, “Listen, in the best interests of the country, this is what I’m prepared to do so long as you’re prepared to do the following things that I ask. It’s not negotiable. If you do those things and you accomplish them all before you leave office, I am prepared to forgo prosecution.” The things I asked for included acknowledgment in writing of false testimony under oath; agreement to resolve matters with the Arkansas bar, which resulted in the suspension of his law license for five years; and agreement to forgo claiming legal fees in connection with the independent counsel’s investigations. And he did what I asked. That was the resolution that was announced on January 19, 2001.
When I was getting up to leave—everybody was kind of saying their goodbyes—I heard a voice. I wasn’t completely paying attention; I was distracted. Then I realized it was the president talking to me. He said, “Been out to play golf anytime recently?”
On Christmas Eve 2017, Monica Lewinsky ran into Kenneth Starr at a restaurant in New York City. They had never met before. Lewinsky is now a writer and an activist. As she recounted in an article in Vanity Fair, she said to him, “Though I wish I had made different choices back then, I wish that you and your office had made different choices, too.” In reply, Starr called the situation “unfortunate.” He made no apology.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “The Inside Story of the Clinton Impeachment.”
* Illustration: Gluekit; photos: Associated Press, CNP, Getty, Reuters; Bob Galbraith, Chris Pizzello, Colin Braley, Doug Mills, Greg Gibson, J. Scott Applewhite, Joe Marquette, Joel Rennich, Joyce Naltchayan, Kevin LaMarque, Kevork Djansezian, Khue Bui, Luke Frazza, Mark Wilson, Peter Morgan, Ron Edmonds, Stephan Savoia, Wilfredo Lee, William Philpott, Win McNamee
Amazon is getting pounded from the left, right, and center for the outcome of its HQ2 contest. A “sham,” a “stunt”, and a “bait-and-switch” are just a few of the many insults used to describe the company’s decision to plant new offices in two rich areas that, as the saying goes, will now get richer.
Amazon received 238 bids for HQ2. New York City, Northern Virginia, and Nashville—which is getting an operations outpost— won. That means there are 235 losers. But the critics are missing the silver lining: There’s a lot of potential value in losing, for those cities that are willing to make the most of it.
The 1991 competition for a United Airlines maintenance base was the Amazon HQ2 of its day. The two finalists were Oklahoma City and Indianapolis. Oklahoma City, civically desperate in the wake of the 1980s energy bust, was sure it would win. Its subsidy package was the best. Its voters had even approved a temporary sales-tax increase to raise $120 million for United.
United picked Indianapolis. After some prodding, United told Oklahoma City’s leaders that the reason they lost was that it couldn’t imagine its employees living there. Oklahoma City’s leaders took this tough feedback to heart and decided to do something about it. They asked their voters to once again approve a temporary sales tax—but this time to invest in their own city instead of in United Airlines subsidies. This turned out to be the first of three major capital programs, each totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, that helped transform Oklahoma City for the better. In his new book, The Next American City, the former mayor Mick Cornett calls United Airlines “the best thing that never happened.”
[Derek Thompson: Amazon’s HQ2 spectacle isn’t just shameful—it should be illegal. ]
Oklahoma City is not the only place that’s won for losing. New York City was one of five finalists to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, which ultimately went to London. But New York benefited enormously from that disappointment. To prepare the city for the Olympics, local government proposed several major civic improvements that went forward anyway, including the redevelopment of the Far West Side of Manhattan. This required changes such as rezoning the area for high-rise development and the construction of an extension of the No. 7 train.
Dan Doctoroff, who spearheaded New York’s Olympics bid and served as deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg, wrote in his book, Greater Than Ever, “I don’t think the Hudson yards rezoning, the subway extension, and all the other investment would have happened if the Olympics catalyst and its strict timetable … hadn’t existed.” Doctoroff’s team also focused attention on the East River waterfront, which helped catalyze development in Long Island City. Yes, Long Island City, where Amazon is now locating its New York HQ2. So, in a sense, there’s a connection between New York losing the 2012 Olympics and winning the HQ2 competition.
The pressures of an Olympics bid created the conditions under which farsighted leaders could create and push through changes faster than would have otherwise been possible. And guess what? There’s already evidence that the just-concluded HQ2 competition had the same effect.
The process helped local leaders in Indianapolis, one of Amazon’s 20 finalist cities, accelerate changes in their approach to economic development. Michael Huber, the CEO of the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, told me that “Amazon’s process forced us to throw out the traditional rule book for attracting business investment and talent—traditionally a cost- and incentive-focused process. Their process forced us to think more creatively about human capital and the workforce of the future. We used the Amazon process to add a sense of urgency to the new tools and partnerships (workforce/talent, land use, transit) we are developing as a region.”
[Read: Amazon’s HQ2 will only worsen America’s “great divergence.”]
Other Amazon finalists took a similar approach. Chicago pushed forward development on several of its megaprojects. Curt Bailey, the president of the developer Related Midwest, told Crain’s Chicago Business, “We had to think more clearly and more quickly about what to do with our sites. There was a great exercise involved in that.” In Denver, J. J. Ament, the CEO of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, said a year ago, “Whether Amazon chooses Colorado or not, this process has been helpful to our community.” Whatever you might think of Amazon, it’s hard to deny that savvy civic leaders leveraged the process to their advantage.
Smaller, less prominent finalists, like Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh, which may never have been legitimate candidates, at least generated significant positive press in the national media that they wouldn’t otherwise have received.
There’s also a valuable lesson here for anyone paying attention, and it’s not just that the rich get richer. By running such a highly public process and then picking New York and the Washington, D.C., area, Amazon sent a clear signal about what it takes to lure a major tech company in the 21st century. It’s not weather—Los Angeles didn’t make the cut; it’s not subsidies—other regions offered more subsidies. It’s talent.
For those cities that aspire to compete for technology or other knowledge-economy jobs, Amazon just provided a gigantic case study on the importance of talent over subsidies. While criticizing Amazon for its process is entirely justified, in this area, at least, the company has done American cities a service; it has revealed the way the game is really played and won.
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