The lights temporarily go out in the Cabinet Room as U.S. President Donald Trump talks about his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 17, 2018 in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
A malicious loner paralyzed one of the world’s great cities this week. Meanwhile, a drone operator shut down a major international airport.
Donald Trump and the drone enthusiast who halted flights out of London’s Gatwick Airport apparently have a lot in common. Both have been willing to wreak havoc with a callous disregard for the public.
The motivation behind Trump’s pre-holiday assault on Washington — sowing chaos, breaking promises, shutting down the federal government, changing his policies from one minute to the next, forcing out one top official after another, spooking the stock market – is easily explained. Trump is a psychopathic criminal who feels cornered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so he is lashing out in every direction.
After two years in office, at least one thing about Trump has become predictable: He reacts violently whenever Mueller appears to be making progress in his investigation. When he hears Mueller’s footsteps, Trump has one go-to move that he cynically uses time and again: He returns to the issues and slogans that energize his base, no matter what the cost. He embraces his base because he believes it will provide him political protection from the fearful Mueller.
Trump has plenty of reason to worry about Mueller these days. The signs are everywhere that Mueller’s investigation is intensifying and closing in on Trump and the crooks around him. It is even possible that Mueller may soon complete his work and issue a final report – or even a criminal indictment of Trump. What’s worse, from Trump’s point of view, is that in January the Democrats will take over the House of Representatives from his Republican enablers, making it far more difficult for him to get rid of Mueller. In fact, the House Intelligence Committee, which has been a laughingstock under Republican rule, will soon have a Democratic chair with subpoena power to conduct an aggressive investigation of Trump, perhaps picking up where Mueller leaves off.
So it is not really surprising that Trump is throwing a tantrum.
In fact, there’s been so much news about the Mueller investigation and related inquiries recently that it has been difficult to keep up.
Just last Tuesday, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who made his name with the Trump crowd by leading chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Republican National Convention, was dressed down by a federal judge who harshly mused about whether Flynn had sold out his country and could be charged with treason. Flynn was in front of the judge to be sentenced for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition after the 2016 election, but his sentencing was delayed to give him an opportunity to cooperate more fully with Mueller’s office in order to win a more lenient sentence.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has repeatedly been in the headlines in recent weeks, and is now emerging as one of Trump’s biggest potential legal problems. In November, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump project in Moscow. Cohen had told Congress in 2017 that the deal had been abandoned by January 2016, but in fact the project was still under consideration as late as June 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, when Trump was about to become the Republican nominee. In a separate case in New York in December, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for a series of criminal acts, including violating campaign finance laws by making payments to two women to keep their past affairs with Trump from becoming public during the presidential campaign. Cohen says that Trump authorized the payments.
Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, meanwhile, faced Mueller’s wrath in late November, when the special counsel accused Manafort of violating his plea agreement by lying rather than cooperating fully.
In early December, Maria Butina, a young Russian gun rights activist, pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent by infiltrating the conservative movement in the U.S. on Russia’s behalf and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Butina previously worked with Alexander Torshin, a powerful Russian politician with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican operative and Butina’s boyfriend, may also be charged, the Daily Beast reported in December. Though not part of the Mueller probe, Butina’s prosecution sheds light on a related web of Russian influence operations aimed at promoting rightwing ideas championed by Trump and his allies.
In December, the parent company of the National Enquirer admitted that it had paid a woman to suppress the story of an affair with Donald Trump during the campaign and reached a deal to cooperate with federal prosecutors in order to avoid prosecution. David Pecker, the chief executive of the magazine’s parent company AMI, has reportedly been granted immunity in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors.
Meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee agreed to turn over to Mueller the transcripts of testimony by longtime Trump ally Roger Stone. That suggests that Mueller, who has been pursuing links between Stone and WikiLeaks during the campaign, may be considering charging Stone with lying to Congress.
To top it off, there were reports in recent days that an unidentified foreign company has been fighting a grand jury subpoena issued in connection with Mueller’s investigation. Although it’s not clear what role the company might play in Mueller’s probe, a federal appeals court ruled this week that the firm must cooperate with the grand jury, according to press reports.
With so many of his cronies facing serious legal trouble and ready to cooperate with Mueller, it’s no wonder that a weak and frightened Trump has started insulting them in public. He called Cohen a “rat” for being willing to talk.
Bottom line: Anyone who thinks that Trump’s frenzied troop pullouts and government closure this week have anything to do with substantive policy issues hasn’t been paying attention for the last two years. Anyone who thinks that Trump actually cares about immigration, border security, the well-being of American troops, or U.S. involvement in Syria or Afghanistan will be deeply disappointed when he suddenly reverses himself again a few days or weeks from now, if and when he believes such a reversal will help him survive Robert Mueller.
Never forget that everything Trump does is about saving his own skin.
The post Keep Your Eyes on the Narcissist: Donald Trump’s Latest Antics Are Driven by Fear of Robert Mueller appeared first on The Intercept.
Ibrahim Musa lived a quiet life in Duluth, a small Georgia town about 27 miles northeast of Atlanta. The Somali immigrant worked as a technician at a local Nissan dealership, and he spent most of his free time with his wife and their four children. He watched his daughter Iqran, now 20, grow into a young woman; he played basketball with his sons Khalid, 17, and Khadar, 14; and he played with Abdirhman, the 10-year-old baby of the family. “The joyfulness, being around them, being the provider, being a dad, and now raising my kids,” he told me. “That was more important to me than my [immigration] papers, you know?”
It became a predictable pattern: work and family, family and work, and, when there was time, friends and community. Once a year, he would take a break from the humdrum routine of his everyday life for a check-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Atlanta. Musa had a final order of deportation, but given his clean record and family ties to the country, he was not a priority for removal. As long as he showed up when ICE asked, he stayed in the agency’s good graces. To him, these annual appointments merely gave him a chance to “kick the can down the road,” as he puts it, to postpone the inevitability of his deportation back to Somalia. He just hoped he’d be able to delay his departure long enough so that his oldest children would be ready to look after their younger siblings.
Musa, who speaks softly despite his tall and commanding figure, avoids linking his predicament as an immigrant to the country’s shifting political winds. The immigration system has been broken for a long time, and Barack Obama, like others before him, failed to fix it, Musa told me. His perspective on being deported, as he explained it, is pragmatic: “The reality is to deal with it when the time comes.” But it’s no coincidence that within months of the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, Musa’s metaphorical can reached the end of the road.
Musa was scheduled to check in with ICE on April 27, 2017. Fifteen days prior to that date, ICE agents came looking for him at home. When they didn’t find him, they called him up and said they needed an updated pay stub for their records. He agreed to meet them in the parking lot of a nearby Publix grocery store, went there with a friend, and was met by a number of ICE agents, who’d come in three cars. They arrested him and took him to their local field office.
A few hours later, Musa was transferred to the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. Over the next 15 months, he traversed the maze of immigration detention. After spending nearly eight months at Irwin, he was sent to a Louisiana detention center for a week, then to an airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, where he boarded an ICE-chartered flight to Somalia. He spent 23 hours on a runway in Dakar, Senegal, before being returned to the Krome Detention Center in Miami. Finally, for now at least, he made it home.
Musa’s odyssey is typical of the deportee experience, except in the ways that it’s not. When he and 91 others boarded a flight to Somalia on December 7, 2017, they were among tens of thousands of immigrants who were shipped out of the United States last year — often to now-unfamiliar countries they fled years ago. But in what ICE describes as a technical problem with an airplane, and Musa describes as divine intervention, he and his fellow passengers were brought back to the U.S. after being deported.
In a sense, deportation is a bureaucratic procedure that, except to the deportees and their families, seems to end once an immigrant is sent overseas. That Musa and his flight-mates returned to speak of what they witnessed and experienced onboard that flight is a striking anomaly. This unlikely scenario unexpectedly gave Musa a second chance at a life in the only country his children have ever called home.
He was also one of nine Atlanta-area Somalis picked up by ICE in April 2017, according to local advocacy groups. Most lived in Clarkston, a small town of about 13,000 people that has welcomed tens of thousands of refugees in recent decades. The arrests were carried out over a couple of weeks and spanned two counties, but to residents it was a singular act — a raid. It sent ripples through an immigrant population largely comprised of refugees — whose presence in the United States is indisputably legal — that had never before been caught in the crosshairs of ICE.
Photo: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Intercept
On first impression, Clarkston looks like any other small Southern town. On the way in from Atlanta, drivers pass a blue and white welcome sign declaring: “Small town … Big Heart.” Clustered around the town center are the police station, city hall, two churches, and a women’s club. On the other side of the railroad tracks that bisect the town are shops and restaurants, and a coffee shop operating out of a bright red bus.
But in a state where 60 percent of the population is white, the aisles of the Thriftown supermarket are stocked with food items native to countries in West Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. The shops have names like Refuge Coffee Co., Grace Oriental Market, Merhaba Shawarma, and Abyssinia Cafe Grocery. Some storefronts feature Arabic and Nepalese scripts. Just south of city limits is Compass Plaza, which shows up on Google Maps as “Somali Plaza” and is referred to locally as “Little Dubai,” with about a dozen businesses, mostly Somali-owned, including an ethnic grocery store, halal restaurants, and retailers that sell abayas, hijabs, and traditional garb.
Sometimes dubbed the “Ellis Island of the South,” Clarkston has undergone substantial demographic changes over the last 25 years. In the early 1990s, it was chosen as a refugee resettlement site because of its proximity to Atlanta, affordable housing, and public transportation. It welcomed an estimated 1,500 refugees per year until Trump came to power, after which refugee resettlement dwindled nationwide. By some estimates, half of the city’s population is foreign-born. Clarkston was featured on a recent episode of “Queer Eye,” in which Mayor Ted Terry described its demographics in a short rap: “Clarkston / the most ethnically diverse / 40 nationalities / 60 languages / in just one square mile.” The town also received national attention during the 2016 presidential campaign as Republican candidates and elected officials across the country called for additional restrictions to the entry of refugees. The anti-refugee rhetoric was a threat not only to the city’s famed ethnic diversity, but also to its economy.
While federally contracted resettlement agencies helped refugees with their initial transition to life in Georgia, Clarkston residents have made herculean efforts to fill in the gaps and to ease the cultural shift for refugees. Women Watch Afrika, run by Glory Kilanko, a Nigerian immigrant herself, holds workshops on financial literacy, health and nutrition, and civic engagement. Omar Shekhey, who first came to the United States as a student, runs the Somali American Community Center as a volunteer; in the mid-1990s, he began to help Somali relatives who were immigrating to the United States and he formalized his efforts in 2008, running after-school programs and connecting newcomers in need of housing or other assistance with donors who could support them.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been simmering in Georgia since at least 2009, when state lawmakers passed a ban against so-called sanctuary cities. The law, which was one of the first of its kind in the country, made state funding conditional on local officials’ compliance with detention requests from ICE. But laws impacting individuals without proper immigration documents had little to no bearing on Clarkston’s refugee population, and immigration enforcement actions were something of an afterthought. Then came April 2017.
A Life of UncertaintyMusa first arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s, fleeing from tribal violence in Somalia. He crossed the southern border and applied for asylum. His application was denied, and he appealed the decision. His case was heard at the immigration court in Atlanta by Judge William Cassidy, who has been on the bench since 1993. Cassidy and the other judges at the Atlanta Immigration Court are notorious for denying asylum claims at a disproportionate rate. Between 2012 and 2017, Cassidy denied 95.9 percent of asylum applications that came before him, a rejection rate only slightly higher than the 93.4 percent average at the Atlanta court overall. During that same time period, immigration judges nationwide denied, on average, 52.8 percent of asylum claims, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research center at Syracuse University.
It was a confluence of factors that led to the denials of Somali applicants’ cases, Musa told me when I visited his family in August. “Translation and everything, all that plays a part for a judge to understand if you’re lying or you’re not lying,” he said. “That’s one thing which was a disadvantage with Somalis, because a lot of Somalis — our cases were very strong, we don’t mean to come up like we’re lying — but it’s just like the translator, and you’re being nervous, being scared, and a judge not knowing about a situation in your country, you know, because nobody’s been there.”
It was 1998 by the time Musa received his final order of deportation. But at the time, the United States was not deporting people to Somalia, due to the absence of a functioning government. The lack of diplomatic ties was a godsend to Musa and many others like him, allowing them to start families and build full lives in this country. In 2013, the United States recognized the government of Somalia for the first time in more than 20 years, and the Obama administration quietly resumed deportations to the still-fragile country. But it was serious criminals who were being sent back, and Musa didn’t have anything to worry about. In late 2014, Obama issued a new policy specifically prioritizing the deportation of criminals, immigrants who posed a threat to national security, and those who had recently entered the country. Again, Musa was relatively safe.
One of Trump’s first actions in office was to eliminate those priority categories, effectively rendering all 11 million immigrants without proper documents equal targets for deportation. During Trump’s first year, deportations, including of Somali nationals, surged, ICE records reveal. Even for Somali nationals, who were being deported in increasingly larger numbers during Obama’s final three years, there was a sizeable jump: 521 Somalis were removed from the United States during the 2017 fiscal year, compared to 198 the previous year.
It was amid those changes that ICE sought out the Somalis in Georgia’s DeKalb and Gwinnett counties — which include Clarkston and Duluth, respectively — in April 2017. Within a few days of Musa’s arrest, local news outlets had picked up reports from local advocacy groups decrying the raids that had occurred. Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesperson, disputed the use of the term “raids,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time. “There is no special operation taking place in Clarkston,” Cox said.
But Cox’s words were no assurance to the families who’d just been separated.
Photo: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Intercept
When Musa was arrested, he made three calls: to his wife, his lawyer, and his boss, in that order. His wife, who asked not to be named in this article, called an old family friend who was familiar with the ins and outs of Musa’s immigration status, Hussien Mohamed.
“As soon as I picked up the phone, she was crying. She made me cry, too. She wouldn’t put the word out,” Mohamed told me as we sat in the office of Sagal Radio, an ethnic community radio station he founded and runs. “Finally, she said, ‘Ibrahim was picked up by ICE,’ and she kept crying all the time.”
Back at home, the family struggled with its newfound reality. Iqran came home from school and found her mom crying. “I thought someone was dead or something; it didn’t cross my mind that he was getting deported,” Iqran said. “She told us, and it was kind of traumatic because it was like disbelief, because he would tell us about it, he’d be all like, ‘It’ll happen one day’ — well, he would tell me, but not my brothers — but I just didn’t know it was gonna happen so soon.”
A priority for the family was to keep Musa’s arrest a secret from Abdirhman, the youngest in the family. “He almost found out on the first day because he kept telling me, ‘What’s wrong with everybody?’ and everything, and I kept saying, ‘Nothing’s wrong,’” Khalid said. “He thought something was wrong with our grandma,” Iqran chimed in. For a while, the family told Abdirhman that his father was out of town — repeatedly pushing back his expected date of return — but within a few months, he figured it out. Musa made a point of speaking to his wife and kids every day, to maintain a sense of normalcy to the extent possible.
Meanwhile, Mohamed, who has lived in Clarkston for more than 30 years, mobilized in service of both the Musa family — he helped with legal fees, he said — and the broader community. On Sagal Radio, he invited lawyers, law enforcement, and elected officials to speak, hoping that facilitating informed discussions about immigration policy would allow people to grapple with what they’d just experienced.
Within a few weeks, Women Watch Afrika and other local immigrant advocacy groups appeared before the Clarkston City Council to request the passage of a non-detainer resolution, which would limit the city’s cooperation with federal immigration officers. On May 2, the council voted unanimously to pass the resolution, though Council Member Jamie Carroll noted at the time that ICE had never asked the city to detain anyone — nor could it, since Clarkston does not have a jail.
Still, the city got some flak from “people who think we are becoming a sanctuary city, which is already against the law in Georgia,” Council Member Awet Eyasu told me when we met at Kathmandu Kitchen & Grill, a South Asian restaurant in the Clarkston Village Plaza. Under the non-detainer policy, the city returned “to the principles of the Constitution, which says you got to have probable cause and it’s got to be issued by a judge,” explained Eyasu, who immigrated from Eritrea in 2000.
The mood following the arrests was “pretty somber and sad,” said Eyasu, but things have quieted down. Still, “the conversation is definitely not over — people want to make sure there’s not going to be such a thing,” he noted. “But the community has been strong. We’re just moving on. I’m pretty sure that’s what immigrants do.”
Helping NeighborsI first arrived in Clarkston on a Saturday in late July, just days before the start of the school year. Hundreds of parents, children, and volunteers swarmed around a paved lot behind the Clarkston International Bible Church, which had partnered with other churches and a refugee resettlement agency to host a back-to-school event. Parishioners distributed backpacks and other supplies to immigrant families. Next door, at the Clarkston United Methodist Church, people were milling about as a monthly food pantry gave out supplies to families in need.
I found Kilanko, of Women Watch Afrika, in a room at the back of the Methodist Church, fiddling with a projector she was trying to connect to her laptop ahead of a biweekly health and civic engagement class that her group hosts for women. On the off weeks, the group hosts a similar class for men. As we were talking, Preye Cobham, an attorney with Women Watch Afrika who was slated to teach that week’s class, walked into the room. “Oh, wow,” Kilanko said, laughing, as soon as she saw her colleague. Cobham was wearing the same black T-shirt as Kilanko, with a quote from famed civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
It was nearly 10:30 a.m. by the time the class got started. About 10 women from Eritrea, Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan showed up that day. The focus for the week was healthy eating and exercise. The attendees completed an assignment that asked questions about the foods they’d consumed over the last week, and whether they took walks or climbed the stairs.
Cobham asked the women whether they had attended a “know your rights” session for immigrants that the organization had hosted the previous week. Five women raised their hands, and Cobham asked them to share what they had learned with the rest of the class. “If immigration comes to my house without a warrant, I don’t have to let them in,” one woman chimed in. “Yes,” Cobham said, “and if they have a warrant, it must be signed by a judge — otherwise, it’s just a request.”
The health class was conceived more than 10 years ago, Kilanko told me, because her group noticed a trend of obesity and other health problems among refugees, who were not used to the sedentary lifestyle and fast-food offerings of the United States. The class serves a very specific function, but the inclusion of the “know your rights” portion in that week’s session reflects how interconnected wellness issues are to the survival of black immigrants in this country. Women Watch Afrika wants the women it serves to eat well, have a robust social life, and learn U.S. history. But to a black immigrant who finds herself or her family member in the hands of overzealous law enforcement officers, those lessons can go only so far.
Photo: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Intercept
Later that day, I caught up with Shekhey, of the Somali American Community Center, at Refuge Coffee Co., which executes its mission of making Clarkston welcoming in part by employing refugees. He was sitting outside, wrapping up a meeting with Roberta Malavenda, the executive director of the Clarkston Development Foundation. They were exploring ways to obtain funding for Shekhey’s volunteer-run organization, which had been forced to shut down its after-school program due to a funding drought.
At 59, Shekhey is jovial, his dark eyes almost twinkling as he speaks. He is soft-spoken and calm, but he speaks with a sense of urgency, constantly motioning with his hands. He came to the United States as a student and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992, with a degree in mechanical engineering. Afterward, he worked at BellSouth, an Atlanta-based telecommunications company. He was laid off after the company merged with AT&T in late 2006 and decided to work with refugees and immigrants. Now, he drives a taxi to pay the bills, and otherwise acts like a fixer of sorts for Somali and other immigrants who find themselves in Clarkston.
In 2009, Shekhey officially launched the Somali American Community Center, which works to fill in the gaps left by refugee resettlement organizations. “We were trying to supplement the things resettlement [agencies] can’t do, such as culture, language barriers, and also issues that they might not be able to go see resettlement for, like burial help, Islamic burial help.” The dramatic reduction in refugee resettlement under the Trump administration has caused funding for groups that work with refugee communities to dry up, Shekhey said, but their advocacy work has continued, and has perhaps become more important than ever.
“The main disaster came when ICE came into Clarkston and just rounded everybody,” he said. “They pick nine of our family … members of our families … and since then we have been fighting, working, educating people.”
He has a keen grasp of immigration law, giving examples of people whose misdemeanor convictions made them ineligible for citizenship and referencing the Trump administration’s June decision to overturn asylum protections for survivors of gang or domestic violence. (On Wednesday, a federal judge struck down those policy changes.)
“The law has changed completely, and it’s interpreted differently, and ICE is aggressive now,” he said. “They frightened everybody. Are we talking about an army coming in? Not just ICE themselves, but they bring machine guns. They bring their armors. I mean, it’s like a war zone.”
Since April 2017, city residents have held more than 30 town halls to talk about immigration-related issues, Shekhey said. Advocacy groups — including Women Watch Afrika and the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR — have held “know your rights” seminars at mosques, churches, and community centers in Clarkston and the broader metropolitan area.
CAIR Georgia’s “know your rights” workshops are particularly important in immigrant communities like Clarkston, said Executive Director Edward Mitchell, a fast-talking former prosecutor who peppers his speech with refrains like “alhamdulillah” and “Allah knows best.” That’s because some members of the community have concerns “that if they stand up for their rights, if they speak up, it’s going to just to draw more attention to them in a way that’s going to hurt them or their family or endanger their immigration status,” Mitchell told me during our meeting at the Islamic Community Center of Atlanta.
“When I speak to them,” Mitchell said, referring to Clarkston Muslims, “even if the presentation is not focused on immigration, I get a lot of questions about immigration, because that’s obviously the most concern to the community there.”
Photo: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Intercept
Amid a virulently anti-immigrant political culture, black immigrants face unique challenges compared to the broader immigrant population.
In an undocumented immigrant population of about 11 million, black immigrants, one of the fastest growing demographics in the United States, are less likely to be in the country without legal authorization than non-black immigrants, according to an analysis of Pew Research Center data by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, or BAJI. Still, “due to racial discrimination, over-policing of Black communities, and invisibility within the public consciousness, Black immigrants face egregious conditions in the U.S., particularly within our nation’s immigration enforcement system,” a recent report by BAJI, titled “The State of Black Immigrants,” reads.
BAJI’s key findings, which are based on an analysis of Department of Homeland Security data and other open-source resources, demonstrate that the well-documented racial discrimination that exists within the criminal justice system also informs immigration enforcement. While blacks comprise just 5.4 percent of the unauthorized population in the United States, more than 20 percent of non-citizens facing deportation on criminal grounds are black. Black immigrants are also more likely to be detained for criminal convictions than the overall immigrant population, and they are much more likely to be deported based on a criminal conviction than nationals of other regions.
The BAJI report traces the disparities facing black immigrants back to Obama-era policies that emphasized a “good immigrant, bad immigrant” dichotomy by prioritizing the deportations of “felons, not families” — as if individuals with criminal convictions don’t have families of their own. But those same conditions have intensified in Trump’s America, where immigration policy is being shaped by white nationalists like White House adviser Stephen Miller, and where the president himself referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries.
For Isra Ibrahim, a senior at Florida International University in Miami who is involved with BAJI, talking about the shared experiences of marginalized communities impacted by state violence is a necessary step toward ending that violence. “If people can see that immigration is the Muslim ban, it’s ending family separation, it’s ending police brutality at prisons,” she said, “then you can see that these issues unite, and we can kind of just come together, collect our thoughts, and strategize what’s the best next steps to counteract state violence that affects all of us.”
Ibrahim, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants, started organizing around immigration policy after hearing about the Somali deportees whose failed flight returned to the United States last December. When she learned that those detainees, most of them Muslims like herself, were being held at the Krome Detention Center, she reached out to their lawyers to see what she could do to help. She co-founded a group called Solidarity Actions for Detained Somalis, which collaborated with BAJI and the Muslim American Society of South Florida to organize a protest outside of the Miami facility.
That’s where she learned about Ibrahim Musa’s ordeal.
A Nightmare FlightIn late November or early December of last year, Musa was transferred from Ocilla to a detention center in Louisiana, in anticipation of a flight to Somalia on December 7. He didn’t have much of a plan for going back to the place he once called home, where his one-time fear of tribal violence had been replaced by a fear of al-Shabaab, the militant group that has targeted Somalis in the diaspora in a number of attacks. “My goal was to get us together as fast as I can,” Musa told me, referring to his family, “and, you know, whether it’s go to another country and bring them there, or see whatever options I’ve got.”
Over the last eight months, Musa had gotten somewhat used to the experience of being restrained by handcuffs. “The only time you’re not shackled is when you’re in jail,” he told me, explaining that chains were used to bind immigration detainees whenever they were transferred or taken to a medical facility. But when he and dozens of other Somali natives were shackled around their wrists, waists, and legs on the night of December 6, they were about to experience something radically different.
Once they were shackled, they were taken to the Alexandria International Airport in central Louisiana, about a 1 1/2-hour drive from the detention center where they were being held, Musa recalled. There, a large aircraft he identified as a Boeing 767 was awaiting them. It was about 2 a.m., and they were seated in what would typically be considered the coach class, where they had small TV screens and could watch movies and listen to music, Musa said. After about 10 hours, the plane landed in Dakar, Senegal.
“They said it was going to be 15 minutes, then we’ll go to Djibouti, and then Somalia,” Musa said. “When the plane just sat there, commotion was going on. People were tired from sitting down after a flight from Louisiana to Senegal. Everyone was trying to go to the bathroom, asking, ‘Can we standing up a little? Can we go outside and stretch our legs?’ They said, ‘No, no one’s going out.’”
As the passengers grew restless, Musa asked an ICE officer what was going on, and the officer told him there was a problem with the ventilation. Someone would be flying back to the U.S. to retrieve a part to fix the airplane and would be returning, what Musa estimated to be a 16-hour trip. Soon, he and a few other passengers who were sitting quietly were moved to a different part of the airplane, away from the commotion that was about to unfold. “They took me and the guys beside me, and they put us on the second class so that we could not see what was going on at the back of us. We were all in the third class, so they started shifting people to the second class,” he said. “They picked the people who they were like, ‘Oh, these guys are quiet,’ so there were like 13 of us or 14 of us, they brought us up front.”
According to a class-action lawsuit filed by the Somali detainees against ICE, they experienced “inhumane conditions and egregious abuse” on the flight, where they remained in shackles for 48 hours. “When the plane’s toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or on themselves,” states the lawsuit, which was filed in December by a team of lawyers from the Immigration Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law, Americans for Immigrant Justice, the James H. Binger Center for New Americans at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Legal Aid Service of Broward County. “ICE agents wrapped some who protested, or just stood up to ask a question, in full-body restraints,” according to the suit. “ICE agents kicked, struck, or dragged detainees down the aisle of the plane, and subjected some to verbal abuse and threats.” ICE has denied the allegations.
From his vantage point, Musa did not witness this abuse. But after what he said was 15 or 20 hours of waiting on the Senegal runway, an ICE official came and said there was good news — the plane was fixed — and bad news — they would be flying back to the United States.
“It was a mixed emotion,” Musa said, describing the uncertainty he felt after having surrendered himself to the reality that he would be going to Somalia. “One thing that you have to understand is, in terms of ICE, they have a lot of power to do anything, so you don’t know what’s going to be the next step. Even though they say the plane is coming back — OK it’s coming back, are we gonna be deported the next day? Or are we going to be put up somewhere and put in detention? For how long?”
Another thought he had was whether he might be reunited with his family. “That’s one thing that I don’t know if it’s going to happen, it’s good to be true, because I’d been in detention in Atlanta for six months,” he said. “You have hope, but you don’t know where it’s going to come from. You keep the hope there, and you just pray, and just take one day at a time.”
Illustration: Katherine Lam for The Intercept
When I first spoke to Iqran, Ibrahim Musa’s then 19-year-old daughter, in May, her father was behind bars at Krome, where he’d been detained since being brought back to the U.S. in December. She told me that his arrest had caused fundamental changes in their lives. “It’s been hard on us financially, emotionally,” she said. “It took a toll on all of us. My mother had to take a job, to become both mother and father.” Iqran, too, got a job to pitch in, though her and her mother’s combined income was still not enough to make up for the lack of her father’s paycheck. She graduated from high school the month after her father’s arrest; his absence created a gaping hole in the festivities. She had been planning to attend Georgia State University, but with the family’s finances strained, she instead enrolled at Georgia Gwinnett College, a two-year school. With Iqran and her mother working, Khalid had to quit his high school basketball team, so that he could take care of his younger brothers after school.
Throughout his detention, Musa spoke to his family every day — several times a day, in fact. But he never wanted his children to visit him, to see him behind bars. “I didn’t want them to experience that atmosphere,” he said, to “come into jail and see your dad’s been locked up for nothing.”
That changed in April, about a year after Musa’s arrest. His lawyers invited Iqran and Khalid to Miami to speak at the protest that Isra Ibrahim had organized outside of Krome. They used the opportunity to visit their father. “It was not how I expected it to be; I thought it was going to be much worse,” Iqran told me, looking back on that day. “It was surreal to see the whole cage. We were talking on the phone and everything, and it was such a weird feeling just because you never … I never expected my father to be in that situation.”
In early July, Musa’s situation changed. His lawyers at the University of Miami School of Law’s immigration clinic won a motion to reopen his case, allowing him to file a new claim of asylum at the Miami Immigration Court. Musa was granted release, pending the disposition of those proceedings, and he returned home to Georgia.
By the time I visited the family in August, Musa had been home for almost a month. He was dressed casually, in a red Lacoste T-shirt and black Adidas sweatpants, sitting on one end of an L-shaped, off-white leather couch. On the wall above him hung a piece of art that read, “In this home we do …” — followed by a series of words like forgiveness, prayer, and honesty — “… really well.”
Throughout our conversations, Musa returned repeatedly to his faith. His ordeal — being separated from his family, being locked up even though he had not committed a crime, and endless uncertainty — served as a humbling reminder that a higher power is in control of his fate. “You know, it’s just the belief that you have that you don’t have no control of everything, so, you know, that’s what keeps us going, just prayers” he said. “I pray a lot, you know, and thank God I’ve got kids who understand.”
In September, Musa appeared before the immigration court in Miami for a procedural hearing. Another hearing will be held in February, and it will likely be many months before Musa’s individual hearing, at which he and his lawyer will be able to make his case for asylum. He is still waiting for the work permit he applied for when he was released from detention.
Until then, he said, they wait. “Everything lies in God’s hands.”
Correction: December 22, 2018, 6:50 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article identified Edward Mitchell as a former public defender. He is a former prosecutor.
The post A Somali Immigrant Was Deported, Then Returned. His Georgia Community Is Still Reeling from the ICE Raid That Ensnared Him. appeared first on The Intercept.
On the day the U.S. Senate passed the First Step Act, the much-heralded federal criminal justice reform bill just signed into law, 63-year-old Bill Anderson stood before a joint subcommittee of the Tennessee General Assembly. With his wife Teresa, Anderson had traveled from Cleveland, Tennessee, far from Washington, D.C., and a nearly three-hour drive from downtown Nashville.
“We’re here because of the death of our son,” Anderson began. “On December 6, 2018, he was found hanging in his cell in Trousdale Turner.” The facility is the largest private prison in Tennessee and one of the most dangerous, beset by staff shortages, gang activity and inadequate medical care. News reports, whistleblowers, and families like the Andersons have long raised alarm about Trousdale, where numerous people have died since it opened in 2016.
The hearing was set to follow up on a damning audit in 2017. Run by CoreCivic, the Nashville-based company formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, Trousdale opened under a $276-million contract, promising programs aimed at rehabilitation, from job training to drug counseling. Instead it quickly came to embody the neglect and impunity that has made private prison companies notorious nationwide.
Although the state relies on CoreCivic to house a third of its incarcerated population, the company’s recent track record has prompted local lawmakers to threaten its operations in Tennessee. For a fleeting moment toward the end of the Obama administration, the company appeared to be on the brink of losing business at the federal level as well. But buoyed by Donald Trump’s election — and after rebranding itself as a “government solutions company” — CoreCivic continues to do steady business. A “zero tolerance” immigration policy has fueled demand for immigration detention centers, where miserable conditions have also proven deadly. Like Ross Anderson, who would have turned 35 this week, immigrants held at its facilities have died by suicide after their mental illness went untreated.
In a checkered shirt and with a full beard, Bill Anderson maintained his composure as he spoke of his son. But his grief was raw. His son’s suicide occurred exactly three years after a “psychotic breakdown,” when he fatally shot his girlfriend and her 5-year-old child. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he was driven by delusions and did not comprehend his own actions, his father explained. Prosecutors wanted the death penalty but ultimately offered a plea deal, according to the local press, citing a “significant chance that he would have been found not guilty by reason of insanity.” Despite a recommendation that Anderson’s son be committed to a mental institution, he was instead sent to Trousdale. After his death, the family was notified by a prison chaplain but never heard from anyone else. “We’re tormented knowing he died alone in a place where no one loved him, and he was just a number,” Anderson said, his voice breaking.
Anderson was still speaking when Republican Sen. Mike Bell, acting as committee chair, interrupted. “Your three minutes are up,” he said. As he prepared to move on, Teresa Anderson, who had wept quietly into a tissue as her husband spoke, held up her son’s obituary from the Cleveland Daily Banner. “We got our information from the newspaper and from no one else,” she said. Repeated phone calls had never been returned. “We just want answers,” her husband said. “And I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all.”
Anderson was only the second witness to speak at the hearing that morning. But his testimony proved too much for Democratic Rep. Bo Mitchell, who erupted in frustration. It was just last year that the committee had heard similarly disturbing accounts about CoreCivic’s facilities. “I’m sick of hearing citizens of this state come in here with these stories. And then we tell ’em, Hey, your son’s life is worth three minutes,” he said. The state of Tennessee pays CoreCivic hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts, then stands by as people die in its prisons, imposing fines that barely make a dent in its bottom line.
“We do nothing, again and again and again,” Mitchell fumed. No one from the company had even bothered to show up to the hearing.
Sen. Cory Booker speaks on the passage of the First Step Act on Dec. 19, 2018 in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
As the hearing in Nashville was underway Tuesday morning, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were gearing up for a different fight. After months of wrangling and mixed signals from the president, the First Step Act was tantalizingly close to becoming law. A series of “poison pill” amendments threatened to sink the landmark legislation at the eleventh hour, with Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton raising the specter of violent criminals unleashed upon society. But the scaremongering proved unconvincing. By 9 p.m. Tuesday, the amendments had been overwhelmingly defeated. On Friday, Trump signed the bill into law.
In a political climate that feels endlessly dark and divisive, the successful passage of bipartisan criminal justice reform feels to many like an unmitigated good, if not miraculous. Since it was first passed by the House in May, the First Step Act won over skeptics from across the political spectrum — and for some good reasons. Among its bright spots are improvements on the conditions of confinement, particularly for women, as well as a number of hard-fought sentencing reforms. Federal judges will have more discretion going forward in some nonviolent drug cases. And for thousands of people in federal prison — including those denied clemency by the Obama administration — the law offers a potential path to early release.
But while it has been hailed as the most significant criminal justice reform measure in a generation, most agree that the First Step Act has limited reach. Lobbying by law enforcement reduced even further the already limited pool of individuals eligible for its central provisions; a list of revisions released by the Judiciary Committee last week included 18 bullet points of “disqualifying offenses,” from arson to assault to “felonies committed while in a dangerous street gang.” Many have also decried the categorical exclusion of immigrants who represent more than half of all federal prosecutions. Within a federal prison population that represents less than 15 percent of those behind bars in this country, the First Step Act will directly assist a relative handful of carefully vetted individuals — a fraction within a fraction of the country’s 2.1 million incarcerated people.
At the same time, critics of the First Step Act worry that it could be far-reaching in other ways. Some warn of unintended consequences down the line. Implementing the First Step Act will rely on infrastructure that has yet to be built — and which could give opportunities for companies like CoreCivic to expand their business. Indeed, along with its main competitor, GEO Group, CoreCivic enthusiastically backed the First Step Act. Both corporations have spent years repositioning themselves from private prison firms to providers of re-entry services — the very kinds of “evidence-based” tools that the legislation repeatedly invokes.
For its part, CoreCivic insists that prison reform like the First Step Act is central to its values. After all, the law’s stated goal is “to provide for programs to help reduce the risk that prisoners will recidivate upon release from prison” — a mission it claims to share. In a holiday greeting published on the company’s website this week, CEO Damon Hininger boasted about the ways that CoreCivic spent the year “building a company culture focused on reentry.” There was the release of CoreCivic’s “first-ever Reentry Report,” for example, as well as an “inaugural Reentry Conference,” where the company shared ideas and best practices with national re-entry experts. “As I visited facilities in 2018,” Hininger wrote, “I could see a growing understanding that each of us is a reentry professional and that we all have a hand in helping the individuals in our care put their lives back on track.”
Hininger’s letter was accompanied by a photo of smiling executives holding shovels adorned with red, white, and blue ribbons. Two days later, as the First Step Act made its way to the Oval Office, Hininger released a congratulatory statement. “We’ve never been better positioned to be part of the solution to one of the most costly, complex and longstanding challenges our country faces,” he wrote, adding, “We couldn’t be more excited about the work ahead and the difference we feel we can make for the American people.”
The Treatment Industrial ComplexIt is hard to say specifically how much CoreCivic stands to gain from the First Step Act. Its design and implementation will be largely up to the U.S. attorney general, who within 180 days of the enactment of the law “shall develop and release a risk assessment system” to determine who should be eligible to enter programs to facilitate re-entry. This part of the law has sparked particular alarm, since evidence shows that the algorithms used to calculate risk amount to little more than racial profiling.
The attorney general is also responsible for guiding the implementation of the programs, “developing policies for the warden of each prison of the Bureau of Prisons to enter into partnerships, subject to the availability of appropriations.” In a December 17 advocacy letter, the American Civil Liberties Union and Leadership Conference flagged this provision as one cause for concern, specifically the clause that allows for partnerships with “private entities.” This “could result in the further privatization of what should be public functions and would allow private entities to unduly profit from incarceration,” it warned.
For CoreCivic, a company synonymous with prison profiteering, this is precisely the point. The Tampa Bay Times recently reported that the bill “authorizes a $375 million expansion of post-prison services for inmates transitioning back into society” — the very products CoreCivic has spent years developing.
“These companies are very savvy,” says Alex Friedmann, associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center and a leading expert on the private prison industry. Based in Nashville, Friedmann was himself once incarcerated at a CoreCivic prison; in the years since his release, he has dedicated himself to investigating the company and others like it. He was also among those who testified at before Tennessee lawmakers earlier this week, providing context for the death of Ross Anderson. For all the drama and disturbing testimony, there was little that surprised him, Friedmann said. CoreCivic has spent decades embroiled in scandal, without paying any real consequences. As far as its potential profiting from the First Step Act, it is “business as usual.”
Friedmann traces CoreCivic’s involvement in re-entry to 2010 and 2011, when the national prison population began to level off. Private prison companies “diversified to other things,” entering the market for electronic tracking and re-entry facilities. As prison reform offering alternatives to incarceration went mainstream, a vast realm of “rehabilitative” services proved lucrative. A 2014 report co-authored by American Friends Service Committee, Grassroots Leadership, and the Southern Center for Human Rights traced the contours of the burgeoning “treatment industry complex,” showing the myriad ways in which prison profiteers had expanded their services to include “alternative” programs and technologies like GPS ankle bracelets for electronic monitoring.
As it continued to roll out new products to meet the demand for supervised re-entry, CoreCivic did what the industry has always done: pushed for more laws that would be good for business. In 2017, CoreCivic announced a stepped-up lobbying campaign to reduce recidivism, along with support for political candidates who support reform efforts. “A lot of folks would assume that we have a view that the status quo is fine, and that’s just not our view,” one executive told reporters. “We want to be a part of the solution.”
Incentives and RewardsThe 2014 report on the “treatment industrial complex” issued a prescient warning against expanding the kind of alternatives to incarceration enshrined in the First Step Act. Community confinement may be preferable to a prison cell, but the increased use of electronic monitoring can risk putting “more people on stricter forms of supervision than is necessary, for longer than is warranted.” The report also urged readers to be wary of allowing companies like CoreCivic to influence legislation. “The role of for-profit prison corporations in these important policy discussions could mean the difference between reforms that truly address human needs and a destructive ‘widening of the net’ that only serves to increase the level of control and surveillance at the expense of public safety.”
Friedmann says that in the grand scheme of things — and relative to the billions such companies make every year — the financial rewards offered by the First Step Act are not likely to be huge. “What it does is it perpetuates the industry,” he said. “It gives them another inroad to do what they do, which is to profit off incarceration.”
For some, this fulfills fears that have been a long time coming. In 2017, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began quietly defunding halfway houses across the country. Some 16 facilities lost their contracts; while the Trump administration claimed the facilities were “underutilized,” observers saw something more strategic underway. “While it is too early to say what that portends,” Prison Legal News reported earlier this year, “some critics believe the BOP is realigning its residential reentry center portfolio to make room for halfway houses operated by private prison firms that made substantial donations to President Trump’s election campaign or inauguration fund.”
DeAnna Hoskins, an outspoken critic of the First Step Act and executive director of JustLeadershipUSA, was working at the Department of Justice when the halfway house contracts were ended. Formerly incarcerated in Indiana, Hoskins had been through the reentry process herself. She remembers the concern expressed by members of Congress whose constituents said the funding was still urgently needed. “The Bureau of Prisons contracts out 100 percent of their re-entry center beds,” Hoskins explains. By slashing the existing halfway houses, then passing laws that rely on transitional housing, “now you just opened up the door for GEO Group and CoreCivic to come in.”
Like many racial justice activists, Hoskins worries that the First Step Act risks replacing “one form of incarceration with another” by placing more and more people on electronic monitoring. The contracts for such technology can be particularly exploitative since they can rely upon the subjects of such monitoring — disproportionately poor people and communities of color — to pay for the devices themselves. Once private firms have secured contracts to provide such tools, she warns, there is no incentive to reduce their use. “What is the benefit for GEO Group or CoreCivic to make sure people are successfully weaned off of home incarceration?”
Oversight and AccountabilityAmong progressive organizers who fought to pass the First Step Act, few if any would welcome the prospect of CoreCivic cashing in on the legislation. “We absolutely are not willing to have this be a moneymaking endeavor where people are profiting off of somebody else’s struggle,” says Erin Haney, policy director of advocacy group #Cut50, one of the leading champions of the law. Ensuring that the law is implemented responsibly has been a central concern, Haney says — and indeed, many groups on the left only endorsed the bill after language was added to address the need for oversight and accountability, particularly over the risk-assessment tools.
Haney points to one important safeguard, courtesy of an amendment by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee — an Independent Review Committee made up of six experts, who will monitor the rollout of the First Step Act. “The attorney general is required to report how this is going,” Haney says. She stresses that, as with the public advocacy for the legislation, which put formerly incarcerated people front and center, those with lived experience will play a crucial role. After all, they know better than anyone what works and what doesn’t when attempting to rejoin the outside world after prison.
Still, the language of the law offers few guarantees. Vivian Nixon, executive director of College and Community Fellowship, worries that the First Step Act is full of holes. “On the surface, a lot of this stuff looks good,” she said. But digging deeper into the text, she sees ambiguities and red flags. “Where is the money gonna go?” she asks. “And what are the long-term implications for the communities that are already impacted in a disparate way by our justice system?”
Like Hoskins, Nixon also spent years behind bars. She says she has a lot of respect for those who fought to pass the First Step Act. But she also knows how ruthless the criminal justice system can be when it stands to benefit off the backs of incarcerated people. When she was in prison in New York state, she said, one of the available jobs was working for Prison Industries to weld together desks — “those old, gray metal desks you used to see in government buildings,” she says. “And you had to sign a waiver that if you got hurt, if you chopped off your finger, if you burned a hole in your eye, no matter what happened to you, you could not recoup any rewards from the state.”
Indeed, one provision of the First Step Act that has received little scrutiny calls for “expanding inmate employment through Federal Prison Industries,” while auditing its “effectiveness in reducing recidivism.” What this will mean in practical terms is, like many things, hard to say for sure.
No One Would ListenBefore the hearing in Nashville concluded on Tuesday, lawmakers had heard more disturbing testimony about CoreCivic facilities in Tennessee. A woman talked about her son, an Army veteran with PTSD and bipolar disorder who is not eligible for any of the programs offered at Trousdale and has had problems receiving basic medical care. “They don’t care about rehabilitation,” she said.
Another witness spoke on behalf of a friend incarcerated at a different CoreCivic prison, where a regimen of constant lockdowns means that he is not allowed outside his cell for a week or two at a time. In a diary entry written over the summer, his friend described how the water and electricity were both shut down, leading to an oppressive combination of heat and the foul stench of his overflowing toilet, which was like an “open sewer.”
Finally, a man named Edwin Steakley approached the mic and said he had been released from Trousdale earlier this year. Wearing a yarmulke and an anguished expression, he said he had been violently targeted because he is Jewish, twice gang raped and forced to perform oral sex. When he tried to tell the proper authorities, no one would listen, he said. He could not even call the federal hotline devised by another major federal reform, the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
There was no record of the incident in the audit before the lawmakers. Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Tony Parker vowed to look into it. But he defended CoreCivic throughout the hearing. The company remains a valuable partner, he said. “They work well with us to try to correct these issues.”
Parker also pointed out that a number of the problems faced at Trousdale exist at state facilities too. Indeed, his predecessor was often under fire for prison conditions in Tennessee. Not long after Trousdale opened, that commissioner left to work for GEO Group.
The post The First Step Act Could Be a Big Gift to CoreCivic and the Private Prison Industry appeared first on The Intercept.
“Vice” is an outstanding new movie about Dick Cheney’s rise to power. Trying to make the former vice president’s life genuinely funny and entertaining must be the final boss level in filmmaking, but writer and director Adam McKay pulls it off.
Moreover, he may literally be the only person in America who could. McKay co-founded the Upright Citizens Brigade in Chicago. He then became one of the most original and prolific writers ever to pass through “Saturday Night Live”; he even invited Noam Chomsky to deliver one episode’s cold open (Chomsky couldn’t make it, so Lewis Lapham did it instead.) After leaving the show, McKay directed comedies, including “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Most recently, in “The Big Short” in 2015, he got audiences to both laugh at and understand credit default swaps, for which he justifiably won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Another writer might have a narrator explain that Cheney could make “the most wild and extreme ideas sound measured and professional.” But no one else would illustrate this with an imagined 1974 Oval Office scene in which Cheney — played by Christian Bale in an uncanny incarnation — blandly asks President Gerald Ford, “What if, on a unilateral basis, we all put miniature wigs on our penises, and we walk out to the White House lawn, and we jerk each other off?” Ford, persuaded by Cheney’s drab, bureaucratic mien, declares, “I say we do it!”
Most impressively, “Vice” serves as a response to two aphorisms that together explain why it’s so damnably hard to beat the powerful and make the world work for regular people.
In the novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously put these words in the mouth of one of his characters: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And on “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver famously said, “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”
Every society’s memory is continuously being rewritten on the fly by the people at the top so that it better serves their needs. You might think you remember that George W. Bush lied us into a huge, disastrous war, the consequences of which everyone on Earth will suffer for the rest of our lives. But on television in 2018, the former president was transformed into Michelle Obama’s rascally “partner in crime.” This is what Kundera meant, playing out right in front of us.
Still: Courtesy of Annapurna Pictures
But it’s even better for apex elites if there’s nothing much to be rewritten in the first place. The Bush administration put most of its evil inside Cheney, who was so dreary that even at the time only obsessives could manage to pay attention to what he was doing. This is what John Oliver had in mind.
For audience members who are normal people, McKay uses everything in his capacious bag of tricks to pull Cheney’s villainy back into history — and does it so zestfully that no one will have any problem remembering it after they leave the theater. And for the small number of aging oddballs who recall Cheney’s saga, the bill of indictment is rendered, by any reasonable standard, with scrupulous historical care.
Cheney did cross paths with Roger Ailes in the Nixon White House, when Ailes first began thinking of what eventually became Fox News. Cheney sincerely worried from the 1970s onward that Congress was encroaching on the “prerogatives and the powers of the president of the United States.” He is a true believer in the strong version of the unitary executive theory, which holds that the Constitution gives the president powers close to that of an elected king. Cheney’s lawyer David Addington did bizarrely maintain that vice presidents aren’t part of the executive branch. As the film’s narrator says, Cheney saw the 9/11 attacks as an “opportunity” for the Bush administration to do what needed to be done. Cheney was the driving force behind the period’s torture and expansion of extraordinary rendition — i.e., kidnapping individuals off the street or battlefield. (The movie even depicts how the U.S. would put its prisoners into diapers for the flight to various black sites around the world.) When Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont argued with Cheney on the floor of the Senate in 2004 about Halliburton, Cheney’s former company, Cheney did tell Leahy to “go fuck yourself.” We see Cheney holding the 2003 Joe Wilson op-ed, on which Cheney scribbled notes asking whether Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame had sent him “on a junket.”
In its deepest cut, the movie makes a nod to the most damning facts about Cheney and the invasion of Iraq: As Cheney and Bush discuss the 1991 Gulf War during a 2000 meeting, Cheney states that “wartime presidents are always popular.” In reality, Mickey Herskowitz, a reporter and Bush family friend who for a time worked on ghostwriting a Bush campaign book in 1999, later said that Bush was fascinated by the political capital available to leaders who win wars — and at the time already had Iraq in mind. Why? It was Dick Cheney, as Russ Baker explained after interviewing Herskowitz:
According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House — ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”
The one place where the film clearly ranges far afield from verifiable fact is in service of making Cheney look better. In the 1970s, Cheney’s mother-in-law Edna did, as depicted, somehow drown in a pond despite her lifelong fear of water. Cheney’s wife Lynne also did write in a memoir that “for years I wondered if she had somehow been the victim of foul play.” But in her book, Lynne Cheney concludes that the most likely explanation is that blood pressure medication made her mother dizzy and caused her to stumble into the water. The film, however, makes it appear likely that Cheney’s father-in-law murdered Edna — which gives the movie version of Cheney an opportunity to stand up to him in protection of Lynne and their young children. (Cheney is also accurately shown wholeheartedly supporting his gay daughter Mary at a time when this was by no means the norm among GOP politicians.)
Still: Courtesy of Annapurna Pictures
And while it seems churlish to complain about a movie that packs in so much, there are a few top Cheney highlights that didn’t make the cut. For instance, while a congressman from Wyoming in the 1980s, Cheney was a critical defender of the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra affair — something which demonstrated that he believed in the supremacy of the executive branch even when he wasn’t in it.
A few years later, when Cheney was secretary of defense during the build-up to the Gulf War, he traveled to Saudi Arabia to show then-King Fahd military satellite photos that purportedly revealed Iraqi troops massing on the Saudi border. Whatever Fahd saw, it persuaded him to allow the U.S. to station troops in his country. But as commercial satellite photos made clear, there were no Iraqi troops where the U.S. claimed they were. The movie also doesn’t mention that, according to Cheney himself, he asked his Defense Department underlings to study how many tactical nuclear weapons they’d need to destroy a division of Iraq’s Republican Guards. The answer turned out to be 17.
Finally, the movie does show Cheney’s 2011 heart transplant in graphic detail. But we don’t learn the metaphorically perfect fact that for more than a year before the donor heart became available, Cheney had an external pump pushing blood through his body at a steady rate. That is, he literally had no heartbeat. As the New York Times said at the time, such patients “are urged to wear bracelets or other identifications to alert emergency room doctors as to why they have no pulse.”
So go see “Vice” soon, and take people both old enough to remember this history and young enough that they don’t. Everything we understand about where we are depends on what we believe about how we got here.
The post “Vice” Turns the Life of Dick Cheney Into Entertainment — and Stays True to His Terrible Evil appeared first on The Intercept.
Over the course of 2018, thousands of Atlantic readers wrote us letters about articles in our magazine and on our website. Here are some of the most memorable.
A Pediatrician Tells His Former Patient: “I Am Disappointed in Myself”“I never initiated discussions relating to sexuality, abuse, or rape.” “I Want to Grow Up to Be Someone That Fights for Families Like Yours”
Teenagers in California respond to the story of a mother and son separated at the border. Gary Hart Was Not Set Up
A journalist who reported on Gary Hart’s downfall in 1987 pushes back on the notion that the candidate’s Monkey Business incident may have been staged. “My Culture Was in My DNA”
Readers share their experiences with genetic testing—and debate whether ancestry can be a meaningful proxy for culture. “I’d Rather Suffer Honestly Than Proclaim Victory!”
Readers debate the virtues of fair-weather fandom. Why Don’t Women Write to the Editor? Because They’re Doing Absolutely Everything Else.
Female readers weigh in on why they, and other women, choose not to correspond. Disagreeing About Abortion Can Be Respectful, After All
Readers respond to the essay “Three Children, Two Abortions” Why Carry a Gun?
Readers respond to David French’s essay on what critics don’t understand about gun culture. Bari Weiss vs. the “Outrage Mobs”
Readers push back on the idea that “small differences, indignation, and an infatuation with being offended” have dominated the conversation about American identity politics. Leaving America Behind Amid the Turmoil of 1968
A reader reflects on the country’s racial struggles, then and now.
In 2013, the dating app Tinder became available to all smartphone users. Five years later, it’s clear that the app has changed how a generation of Americans approach dating and courtship, says the Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters. “Meanwhile, the underlying challenges—the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and disappointment—of being ‘single and looking,’ or single and looking for something, haven’t gone away,” she writes. “They’ve simply changed shape.”
About a quarter of American households own a “smart speaker” like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, and in the not-too-distant future, a whole host of devices and appliances—from coffee makers to doorbells to toasters—could be connected to the internet. The Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker questions what could happen to all the data that companies will accumulate about domestic life, and how these devices ultimately shape people’s behavior.
HighlightsWeighted blankets have been used for decades in special-needs communities, but recently they’ve become a trendy must-have for the Instagram-shopping masses. The popularization of these blankets in recent years may have something to do with a rise in feelings of anxiety in the United States, writes Ashley Fetters.
Millennials have been accused of killing all sorts of American staples, from cars to cereal to cruises. Yet, as the Atlantic staff writer Alia Wong says, there’s one old-fashioned hallmark that younger Americans are sustaining: family holiday cards. Even while snail mail is on the decline, greeting cards have bucked the trend.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader wonders why their sister has stopped giving Christmas gifts to their two children. The reader isn’t necessarily upset about the lack of gifts, but wants to know what could have prompted the change.
Lori’s advice: Focus on your relationship with your sister, not on the gifts:
“Perhaps there’s something in your history together that has made you reluctant to simply ask her what’s up in the same way that you so clearly and compassionately expressed your question here—that the gifts don’t matter, you just want to make sure everything’s okay between the two of you.”
Read the rest, and send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
This article contains spoilers through Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
In the first act of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, a painter sings “Finishing the Hat,” a melancholic but sweepingly lovely confession that art will always come first. The impulse, for George, to paint—to finish the hat, the dog, the grass, the sky—even when it costs him love, is paramount. “When the woman that you wanted goes, you can say to yourself, Well, I give what I give,” he sings. “But the woman who won’t wait for you knows that however you live, there’s a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky, finishing a hat … Look, I made a hat.”
Amy Sherman-Palladino, who knows a thing or two about hats, it must be said, borrowed from Sondheim to title a Season 2 episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In “Look, She Made a Hat,” Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) is introduced to the late-1950s art scene in New York by her new boyfriend, Benjamin (Zachary Levi), a collector. The two of them attend a gallery opening, where Benjamin buys a large, highly prized painting, while Midge’s eye is drawn to a smaller work in a back room. Later, Benjamin takes Midge to a bar frequented by artists, where they encounter the reclusive genius Declan Howell (Rufus Sewell), who’s infamous for refusing to sell any of his paintings. Captivated by Midge, Declan invites her to his studio, where—when Benjamin ducks out to make a phone call—he shows her his masterpiece.
The scene is among the most interesting moments of Season 2. It’s uncharacteristically quiet, for one thing, and spare in detail, unlike the prodigal, picture-postcard detail of the rest of the show. Viewers don’t even get to look at Declan’s painting: The camera positions itself behind the canvas, so all we get to see is a backdrop of brown paper, and Midge’s face. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Midge tells Declan. People should get to see it, she argues. The artist explains that the painting was supposed to hang in his home, when he had a home and a wife. But he can never have that life now, because everything he ever had, he put into his work. “That’s the way it is, if you want to do something great,” he tells her. “If you want to take something as far as it’ll go, you can’t have everything. You lose family, a sense of home. But, then, look at what exists.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is by no means a perfect show, although it is a perfectly charming one. I haven’t smiled more during a series this year than I did when Midge’s manager, Susie (Alex Borstein), left the home of the comedian Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch) wearing a fur coat and an expression so perplexed it almost defied facial recognition. Sherman-Palladino’s resolute lack of imagination when it comes to, say, characters of color—or Susie’s sexuality, or vibrant, intelligent women who maybe don’t throw up innocuous patter at six words a second or see shopping as a competitive sport—is a pain point for me, as is the director’s impulse to consistently send her characters back to transparently awful men. But “Look, She Made a Hat,” combined with the Season 2 finale, did something distinct, something that sets up the series for an intriguing third season. It suggested that Midge will eventually choose comedy not only over love, but also over family.
Given how cavalierly Midge has treated motherhood over the series so far, this might not seem like much of a sacrifice. Her kids, Ethan and baby Esther, are fobbed off on her parents, dropped off with babysitters, left with the housekeeper, abandoned to holiday-camp staffers, and sometimes forgotten about completely. In the second-season episode where Midge and her parents go to the Catskills, Esther is left in a hot car by herself until Midge yells for someone to bring her in along with the rest of the luggage. Parenting, or a lack thereof, is a running joke in the show. Amy Sherman-Palladino was born in 1966, a few years after Esther; it’s possible she’s making a point about casual Boomer attitudes toward raising children, modern helicopter parenting, or both.
Midge seems to think about her children so infrequently that her realization in the season finale, “All Alone,” that she’s the kind of person who will always prioritize comedy over family is pegged to the loss of Benjamin, not the potential loss of seeing, say, her kids grow up. When the musician Shy Baldwin (Leroy McClain) calls Midge on the phone and invites her to open for him on a world tour for six months, Midge accepts instantaneously, and celebrates without compunction. She shrieks with excitement, and rushes to share the news with Susie. It isn’t until her father, Abe (Tony Shalhoub), finally tells her he’s given Benjamin his blessing to propose that Midge seems to figure something out. (Maybe even before the audience does—it wasn’t entirely unlikely to me that Benjamin, weird in his way and unfussed by Midge’s comedy, would be fine with her zipping off for a while.)
For Midge, though, her response to Shy Baldwin’s proposal signals something. Her life with Benjamin, a second marriage with the possibility of new children, represents one thing; her life with Susie, performing and traveling and having the nightly thrill of a new audience, represents another. It’s not just that the two lives aren’t compatible—to Midge, they don’t even meet to share space on her biographical Venn diagram. When she watches Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) sing “All Alone,” a wistful bit the real Bruce delivered about the end of a relationship, her realization is cemented. “I can’t go back to Jell-O molds,” Midge tells her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Joel. “There won’t be three [kids] before 30 for me. I just made a choice. I am gonna be all alone for the rest of my life. That’s what I just decided in a five-minute phone call.”
This isn’t a purely generational dilemma. Admittedly, in 1959, the concept of women having careers at all, let alone vocations, was rare enough that Midge sees no way for her personal happiness and her professional fulfillment to intersect. But she also isn’t interested in even trying to fit them together. Comedy is her calling now. It’s a less isolating field than, say, painting or writing, and Midge’s partnership with Susie seems to save her from the loneliness of Sondheim’s George. But, like George, she’s made a fundamentally selfish decision to commit herself to her work, no matter the personal cost to herself or others. All she can do is hope, like Declan, that what she creates will ultimately be worth it.
The genius of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, my colleague Caitlin Flanagan wrote last year, is how it allows its central character “to enjoy both the best of the glamorized 1950s and the best of today without any of the difficult, inevitable trade-offs and transitions that women have spent the past 60 years navigating.” Not anymore. With Midge’s final decision, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has complicated its sparkly, shiny, impossibly buoyant outlook. It’s set up conflicts for future seasons that will make the show more interesting if it explores them (rather than, for example, kicking Levi’s Benjamin to the curb without even a cursory goodbye). Midge, Sherman-Palladino seems to hope, can do what few women before her have managed: Put herself first above everything else, while still demanding that audiences like her.
President Donald Trump seems determined to force a government shutdown over partial funding for his proposed border wall, and it is not hard to see why. As Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a restrictionist think tank, observed in an interview with The Washington Post, Trump is exquisitely sensitive to ridicule from those he sees as his staunchest supporters.
As Trump’s political standing diminishes, those on the restrictionist right who’ve put their faith in him have grown less admiring and more acerbic in their assessments. The columnist Ann Coulter, who some have identified as the inspiration for Trump’s own restrictionist turn, has gone so far as to denounce the president as “gutless” for his lassitude in building the wall, and she is far from alone. Forcing a shutdown would dramatize his supposed commitment to the wall, which, for a president deeply invested in appearances, is what matters most.
Yet when we leave appearances aside, the Trump administration has accomplished something that, in the long run, is of far greater consequence than securing a $5 billion down payment for a physical barrier that, for all its symbolic resonance, will have no appreciable effect on asylum seekers or visa overstayers, and will likely fail to deter the most determined clandestine border crossers. To the surprise of many observers, senior U.S. officials appear to have persuaded the Mexican government to shelter Central American migrants who are seeking asylum north of the border. This is, in essence, the “Remain in Mexico” plan that was being discussed in late November, shortly before the inauguration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—except the U.S. and Mexican governments are both insisting that this is not a formal agreement.
[Read: Trump keeps invoking terrorism to get his border wall]
Both parties are describing the move as a unilateral decision by the U.S. that in turn has elicited a humanitarian response from Mexico. Though no one on either side is suggesting that there’s been some quid pro quo—one assumes that Trump doesn’t want to be seen as bribing Mexico, and López Obrador doesn’t want to be seen as having been bribed—it hasn’t escaped notice that the U.S. reportedly promised new development assistance to help improve living standards in Central America and southern Mexico, a high priority for López Obrador throughout his long political career, just two days before the Mexican government announced its new policy.
Why is this tacit agreement so significant? Previously, asylum seekers were routinely granted permission to live and work in the U.S. as they awaited their court hearings. Because the U.S. asylum system is so severely backlogged, this has often meant that they could remain in the U.S. lawfully for years, regardless of the merit of their asylum claims. One result is that a large and growing number of Central American migrants have chosen to go through the formal asylum system rather than enter the U.S. without authorization, a far riskier path that, among other things, can limit access to social services.
Under the new dispensation, most asylum seekers will instead be expected to remain in Mexico, and the Mexican government has declared that it will grant them work authorizations and the right to travel freely between Mexico and their native countries as they wait. Considering that even the highest, most technologically sophisticated wall can’t prevent migrants from lawfully seeking asylum, the cooperation of the Mexican government is absolutely essential to controlling Central American migrant flows to the U.S.
[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s state of exception]
Many observers were skeptical that such a deal could be struck, even if only informally. And it may yet unravel, especially if Trump further antagonizes Mexico’s nationalist government, which is keenly aware that its ability to control migrant flows gives it a great deal of leverage. One way or another, the U.S. needs to reform its outmoded and overwhelmed asylum system. What Mexico has done is give the Trump administration much-needed breathing room, and a path to a more cooperative relationship.
But rather than cement this fragile compromise with Mexico by, say, showering López Obrador with praise and calling for a new immigration agenda that would bring inflows under control by spreading prosperity throughout the region, Trump has chosen a different course of action. Once again, he will rage against congressional Democrats for refusing to fund a border wall that they feel quite confident in opposing, the heroic efforts of Vice President Mike Pence and the ubiquitous Mick Mulvaney notwithstanding. Then, after an interval of uncertain duration, he will cave as the political toll mounts, just as his detractors on the right are now predicting. Restrictionists have every reason to question their faith in their decidedly flawed champion.
NEW YORK—How blue can New York go?
The Empire State has an understandable reputation as one of the nation’s foremost progressive bastions, having cast its presidential vote for a Democrat in each of the past eight elections—a longer streak than any large state in the country, including California. But for most of that time—indeed, for all but three of the past 70 years—Republicans have controlled at least one crucial piece of state government and served as a check on the Democrats’ left-leaning ambitions.
That will change next month, when Democrats put the trifecta they earned in the November election to work. Governor Andrew Cuomo cruised to a third-term victory with a pledge to fight the New Yorker in the White House, Democrats expanded their already comfortable advantage in the state assembly, and they ousted Republicans from their long-standing edge in the state Senate.
The result is the most commanding governing majority Democrats have had in New York in decades, giving the party a seemingly unfettered opportunity to enact legislation that has been bottled up for years and to place the state firmly on the leading edge of progressive policy nationwide. In the next several months, Democrats hope to legalize recreational marijuana, overhaul an election system in New York that’s widely derided as outdated, end a cash-bail system blamed for enabling mass incarceration, enact a state version of the DREAM Act for undocumented immigrants, and tighten campaign-finance laws.
For Cuomo, the imminent Democratic takeover of the legislature brings both opportunity and challenge: He’ll have his best chance to prove his progressive mettle to doubters on the left, but he won’t have Republicans to blame if he can’t realize his ambitious vision. Success would add to his record as an effective, if unloved, Democratic governor and could even lay the seeds of a presidential campaign he says he’s not interested in waging. The question now is whether New York Democrats can seize on the moment to act in unison and avoid getting mired in the kind of parochial squabbles and power struggles that have stymied their leadership in the past.
“Obviously there’s a lot of pent-up frustration,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the incoming state Senate majority leader. “By the same token, there’s a lot of opportunity to really chart the course of a New York that is more reflective of the people that actually live here.”
Democrats last captured full control of state government a decade ago, but their narrow majority in the state Senate crumbled after dissidents, in a revolt against their party leader at the time, briefly defected to the GOP, leaving the chamber paralyzed for weeks and contributing to a Republican takeover the next year. More recently, breakaway Democrats formed an independent coalition with Republicans that helped keep the GOP in the majority for years. Several of those lawmakers lost primaries to progressive challengers in September, and Democrats won 40 of the chamber’s 63 seats in the general election two months later.
Stewart-Cousins will become the first African American woman to occupy one of the three powerful seats at the Albany negotiating table where most legislation in New York is hashed out, alongside Cuomo and the state-assembly speaker. “We’ll be making history in a lot of ways,” she told me in an interview.
New York will also be playing catch-up in a lot of ways.
Several of the top immediate priorities cited by Cuomo and senior legislative leaders are policies that either have already been enacted by other states or are intended as defensive maneuvers aimed at protecting New Yorkers from what the governor has called “the reckless unjust assault” against the state by Donald Trump’s administration.
On Monday, Cuomo committed his support for legalizing recreational marijuana after years of personal opposition. Yet 10 other states have already taken that step, and in an interview, his top aides acknowledged that the moves toward legalization by New York’s neighbors to the south and east—New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—helped force the governor’s hand.
Voting rights are another example. New York’s election laws are, by some measures, equally or more regressive than those in southern states. Last month’s general election was a mess, particularly in vote-rich New York City, where reports of machine failures and hours-long lines were widespread. There is no early voting, and people who want to change their registration to vote in a party primary must do so months in advance. Proposals to open up the system have died quiet deaths, thanks in large part to entrenched Democratic lawmakers who have little incentive to encourage higher turnout that could threaten their own incumbency.
[Read: ]New York’s worst-in-the-country voting system
In the coming months, Cuomo plans to ask the legislature to enact early voting, implement automatic voter registration, and make Election Day a state holiday to encourage higher turnout. Yet in each case, New York would be joining a host of other states that have already taken those steps. The same is true on campaign-finance reform, where Cuomo, long a beneficiary of big-money donations, has called for New York to lower contribution limits and join several other states that ban contributions from corporations.
Empire State Democrats will even have to play catch-up on a core issue for their party: abortion. One of the first laws Democrats plan to enact is a long-stalled bill codifying Roe v. Wade into state law, ensuring access to abortions in New York in the event the Supreme Court overturns the 1974 decision that enshrined legal abortion across the country. “The fact that we haven’t been able to codify it has always been mind-boggling to me,” Stewart-Cousins told me.
Yet on the left, the success of the new Democratic trifecta in New York will be judged not by the party’s ability to play defense, but on its ability to advance the next generation of progressive policy goals. On criminal-justice reform, activists have secured Cuomo’s support for making the state the second in the nation, after California, to end cash bail. And Cuomo has borrowed the language of national progressive activists on climate change, including New York’s own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by pledging to enact a Green New Deal on the state level, which includes a goal—although without a specific timeframe—of eliminating the state’s entire carbon footprint. The governor has yet to embrace, however, an emerging campaign for New York to lead the nation in enacting a first-of-its-kind single-payer-health-care program.
Those and other far more expensive proposals will be considerably more difficult to enact than laws legalizing marijuana, overhauling the election system, or enshrining abortion rights—even for a Democratic Party in New York emboldened by a decisive electoral mandate.
To a large extent, the wild card in New York is Cuomo himself. The governor secured a surprisingly large third-term victory on the back of a record that is, on paper, as impressive as that of any Democratic governor in the country. He signed into law the early legalization of same-sex marriage, paid family leave, tighter gun restrictions, and a $15 minimum wage for parts of the state. Yet the governor’s relationship with the Democratic Party’s liberal base can most charitably be described as fraught; he angered activists with a commitment to fiscal restraint early in his tenure and more recently enraged them with his seeming acquiescence to a Republican majority in the state Senate. But Cuomo ran decisively to the left in his bid for a third term, outflanking his opponent, the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon, by positioning himself as a progressive bulwark against President Trump.
Cuomo must now govern with a Democratic coalition that views him warily—and, in some cases, with outright hostility. “I think the governor and many members of the legislature understand that there’s a wave of anger and activism that is coming to the fore from people who are disgusted about what’s happening to our democracy. They want to see real action and real change,” said Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, which backed Nixon before striking a grudging truce with Cuomo after the primary.
When Jessica Ramos, an incoming state senator and progressive who ousted an incumbent Democrat in a Queens primary, described how she’d work with Cuomo, she sounded as if she considered him a member of the opposition. “This is about fixing New York on every single level,” she told me in an interview. “So I am going to be standing up to the governor when he is wrong, and I’ll be working with him when we find common ground.”
To the chagrin of progressives, Cuomo thrived in the previously divided government. He drove the legislative agenda, claiming credit for deals he struck with Republicans while putting the onus on the GOP for promises that weren’t enacted.
With Democrats in power, he won’t have that luxury. And in the heady days after their election win, some were whispering that the governor might even take a backseat to the legislature, which could force his hand by passing progressive bills and daring him to veto them. In an interview, Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, scoffed at the suggestion, pointing to his landslide victory as a clear mandate from New York voters for him to lead. “That’s a lot of bluster and a lot of empty rhetoric,” DeRosa said. “I challenge someone to talk about a bill where the governor isn’t going to want to sign it.”
Yet Cuomo has moved aggressively to set priorities for the state before the new Democratic majority in the legislature even takes office. In a speech outlining his 2019 agenda on Monday, the governor wrapped himself in the activist legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Founding Fathers. With rhetorical flourish, he called for New York to lead “a rebellion” against the “tyranny” of the Trump administration. “As our forefathers rebelled against England, resenting the king’s values and abuse, let us announce New York’s rebellion from the current federal policies,” Cuomo declared. “My friends, let this agenda be New York’s Declaration of Independence. We declare independence from this federal government’s policies. We disconnect from the nationalism, and the racism, and the chaos, and the xenophobia, and the misogyny, and the discrimination, and the dissembling of this Washington administration.”
[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]
It all sounded like the makings of a presidential pitch—except that Cuomo, unlike practically every other big-name Democrat, has repeatedly disavowed interest in joining the crowded 2020 field. “I am ruling it out,” Cuomo said in late November, sticking to a pledge he made during the campaign.
Still, the governor’s many denials haven’t convinced political observers in New York, and the grand scale of his speech this week only deepened their skepticism. “The smart money still has to be on the governor entering the race,” said David Birdsell, the dean of Baruch College’s School of Public and International Affairs. “The political field is littered with promises of not to run.”
The biggest fights among New York Democrats are likely to come not on social policy or election reforms but on budget matters. The governor’s more centrist leanings could clash with progressives’ desire for spending increases that would require bigger tax hikes than Cuomo wants to sign. Already, advocates are pushing for New York to lead the country in adopting single-payer. Cuomo didn’t mention the idea in his speech, and he has previously said it’s a policy that needs to be tackled on the federal level. The governor is also under tremendous pressure to dramatically increase spending on education and housing, and to find a dedicated funding stream to modernize the deteriorating New York City subway. He has endorsed a push for congestion pricing—charging vehicles that drive into Manhattan during peak hours—but that has drawn opposition from lawmakers representing commuters.
Despite these hurdles, for Democrats in New York the numbers are finally on their side. Their majority in the legislature is large enough to make the party’s ambitious progressive agenda achievable—as long as lawmakers, and the governor, can stay out of their own way. In a state where corruption indictments and petty political bickering often fight for front-page headlines, that could be a considerable challenge. On consecutive days this week, the top New York news stories included a Democratic state senator from Brooklyn telling a GOP spokeswoman to “kill yourself!” and a war of words between Cuomo and one of his Democratic predecessors, Eliot Spitzer. For Cuomo, Spitzer was a departure from his usual intra-party sparring partner: New York City’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio.
“There are no more excuses, my friends,” Cuomo said in his speech on Monday. “Now is the time to stand up and lead, and do what you’ve said you were going to do all those years, and make a Democratic vision a reality.”
It was a warning to Democrats not to squander their long-awaited return to power in New York, when a whole range of policy goals seems possible. But for a governor eyeing his moment on the national stage, progressives would say it’s a message Cuomo should take equal heed of himself.
The federal government has partially shut down, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have money for a border wall. Earlier this week, the president rejected a funding bill that would keep nine federal departments operational, and Congress scrambled to find a fix by a deadline of midnight on Friday—but to no avail. The rejected bill didn’t include a desired $5 billion for Trump’s long-promised wall along America’s southern border.
With control of the House of Representatives set to switch to the Democrats in the new year, the odds that Trump will secure money for the wall in the near future have been dwindling. In an effort to fill that gap, several crowdfunding campaigns have popped up to collect money for the wall directly from Trump supporters online, with the purported intent of passing that money to the White House or the Department of Homeland Security. The most successful one, a GoFundMe started by an Iraq War veteran with a background in Facebook accounts that trafficked in conspiracy theories, has raised more than $14 million. It aims to raise at least $1 billion.
Even though 10 figures raised funds would be a new frontier, it’s the logical extreme toward which online crowdfunding has been headed. What started less than a decade ago with Kickstarter campaigns to raise money for new businesses has become a way for people to pay down medical debt or avoid eviction. During the midterms, crowdfunding allowed people to find and directly support candidates in the most contentious races across the country.
Individuals start or contribute to crowdfunding campaigs for their own reasons, but on a collective scale, Americans’ willingness to pitch in 20 bucks to a stranger online is among the defining phenomena of 2018. Its popularity is made possible by two intersecting realizations: Some of the vital structural underpinnings of life in the U.S. don’t work very well, and the ideas that end up mattering most are often those with money behind them.
Medical debt in particular helped online crowdfunding turn the corner from being mainly a project of personal desire to something both darker and more political. Debilitating health-care costs manifest as an individual problem, but they’re generally the result of flawed systems far beyond the control of the people who receive those bills. Even for those with insurance, bills can be overwhelming. And many people’s savings are running dry in general: A 2017 Federal Reserve study found that 44 percent of American adults don’t have even $400 in cash on hand in case of an emergency. That exposes a growing number of people to the sort of precariousness that can make crowdfunding attractive.
[Read: The secret shame of middle-class Americans]
People often think of the practical issues associated with medical problems as primarily affecting Americans who are older and, as a result, may be in worse health. But medical debt disproportionately impacts Millennials, at least in part because young people get kicked off their parents’ insurance at age 26. Young people are also more likely to be classified as independent contractors at work, and contractors rarely have access to employer-subsidized insurance. What Millennials do have, though, is a generally strong grasp of social media’s dynamics and uses, which means the best way for them to deal with the structural failures of American medical care may indeed be to leverage their online connections and cobble together the needed funds piece by piece.
Identifying who has money, who needs it, and how it can be redistributed to help the most people is also a primary project of socialism, a political ideology that has gained significant ground among young liberals in recent years. Crowdfunding, in a way, serves as a person-to-person shortcut to live those ideals in a time when structural power opposes them: People with a little extra money can give it directly to those who need a little extra, without the services of an unreliable third party.
But it isn’t just young people and the political left who have dwindling confidence in the structures that have long animated American life. The border wall, a central policy goal of Trump and his supporters, couldn’t get funded during the two years that Republicans controlled both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. To circumvent congressional gridlock, supporters have turned to nongovernment funding alternatives, a choice that gives them potential access to a privilege previously accessible only to the very wealthy: treating large-scale government projects that will affect millions of people like personal hobbies. That’s true even if raising a significant portion of Trump’s desired $5 billion seems unlikely. (The people running the two largest border-wall crowdfunding campaigns didn’t immediately return requests for comment.)
Whether or not raising money directly from Trump supporters can fund the entire wall misses the point, though. The goals of politically motivated crowdfunding go beyond practicality. Access to funding is access to power in America, and as that access becomes increasingly unequal, demonstrating an idea’s popularity via visible, public fund-raising can be a tool of consolidating that power.
The border wall is the most recent example of this idea writ large, but a few months ago, a GoFundMe to support Christine Blasey Ford’s personal-security needs in the lead-up to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings raised nearly $650,000, more than four times its goal. Money is one of the few ways to do or say anything with impact in America, and acknowledging that may be one of the most nonpartisan ideas we have left.
The warning signs were there all along, yet President Donald Trump’s brusque decision to pull U.S. forces out of northeast Syria nevertheless stunned Syria’s Kurds. Overnight, their dream of establishing an autonomous Kurdish region has been dashed, and they must now choose between a return to the mountains in a bid for survival, or staying put, awaiting a resurgent Assad regime and what it has in mind for them after six years of self-rule.
The fear of betrayal by superior powers is written into the Kurds’ DNA. Their birth as one of the world’s largest nonstate nations from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire derived from a broken promise by the victors of World War I, or this is how the Kurds see it. Divided over four states—Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—since then, they have fought and died in search of freedom and nationhood. Their successes invariably proved short-lived; each time, a vacuum they had exploited disappeared. Powerful allies on whose support they thought they could rely abandoned them.
They had pressed for advantage in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which allowed Iraqi Kurds to establish a federal region; and again following popular protests in Syria in 2011, which evolved into a civil war, thereby creating a vacuum in the northeast that Syrian Kurds were quick to fill. When the Islamic State emerged on the scene in 2014, the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria readily joined the U.S. alliance forged to fight the group, which posed a direct threat to them. They had hoped that loyal support for the United States would translate, at war’s end, into Washington’s backing for steps toward Kurdish national objectives.
[Read: The Kurds are right back where they started]
It was not to be. Just over a year ago, the U.S. refused to come to the aid of Iraqi Kurds when the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Masoud Barzani, ignored Washington’s insistence that he not stage a referendum on Kurdish statehood. The plebiscite itself, along with the warnings from the United States, gave Baghdad an opening to retake territories in northern Iraq long claimed by the Kurds, thereby setting back Kurdish aspirations for independence by years.
A second warning signal came in 2018, when the United States stood by as Turkish forces overran the majority-Kurdish district of Afrin, in northern Syria, pushing out fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian manifestation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. The YPG had taken control of northern Syria in 2012, when Syrian government forces were tied down fighting rebels elsewhere in the country. Lacking manpower, Damascus was resigned to letting them do so. It also remembered its relationship with the PKK dating back to the 1980s; if faced with the choice, it preferred the secular YPG, which harbors ambitions only for the Kurdish north, over Islamist rebels seeking to overthrow the regime.
Both Barzani’s Peshmerga fighters in Iraq and the YPG in Syria proved outstanding and reliable assets in the anti-ISIS coalition’s drive to defeat the group. Yet neither would receive the reward to which they deemed themselves entitled. They might have lived with that knowledge, while quietly continuing to build their relationship with Western states in the faint hope that the future might bring greater returns.
But what hurt was that Washington appears to have gone further, turning its back on them and leaving them at the mercy of the post-Ottoman states. They should be excused, perhaps, for now believing that the United States has simply used them essentially as if they were private security companies, part of a tactical alliance in pursuit of its own, eventually diverging, strategic agenda. Now the contract with the YPG seems to have expired.
[Read: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects]
Iraqi Kurds have the advantage of controlling a federal region that has been on reasonably good terms with Baghdad, and of having representatives in the central government that can help moderate Iraq’s approach toward the Kurds. The YPG, by contrast, is surrounded by enemies—Turkey, the Syrian regime, and even Barzani’s Kurds, who view them with suspicion.
So what is next for the YPG? It could choose to put up a fight, but the low-lying terrain does not favor them, especially against armies. It has two other options: withdraw into the mountains of northern Iraq, where the PKK has long had its stronghold and where it could yet survive fire from Turkish forces; or strike a deal with the Syrian regime to preserve some of its post-2012 gains.
Over the summer, the YPG had already initiated talks with Damascus, but these soon foundered over the Assad government’s stubborn refusal to give the Kurds an inch, and the YPG’s belief that the U.S. had its back. If Kurdish negotiators return to Damascus now, they will find an Assad even less willing to compromise, because Trump’s announcement of an unconditional troop withdrawal has left them twisting in the wind. The best they can hope for is an alliance with Damascus to keep Turkish forces out of Syria—President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pledged to target the YPG—but would Bashar al-Assad give the Kurds a measure of self-rule in the north in return?
[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]
There is no good way forward for the Kurds. But the worst can yet be avoided. It now falls on Russia, which holds most of the cards in Syria, to bring Ankara and Damascus to the table. For Turkey, the bottom line is a border with Syria not under the control of the YPG/PKK, which it considers its mortal enemy. For Assad, it is a Syria free of Turkish troops and a return of the Syrian security apparatus to all parts of the country, including the Kurdish north. It can live with the YPG, but only in its “proper” place: defanged, compliant, and a useful ally against Ankara.
The question now is whether Russia’s diplomats can rise to the task of preventing the worst-case scenario: a YPG fight to the death with Turkey, the Syrian Kurdish population’s panicked flight into northern Iraq, and, perhaps, the return of an ISIS keen to do what it knows how to do best: exploiting chaos.
The story is told of Jim Mattis, when he was the commanding general at Quantico, relieving a young lance corporal on Christmas. The rest of that wintry day, those entering the front gate of the Marine base were startled to see that the sentry was a general, checking passes and waving cars through so that a young man could spend the holiday with his family. It is the kind of behavior animated by sentiments Donald Trump could not understand, and it reflected a kind of code by which he cannot live.
The president misunderstood his secretary of defense. The Jim Mattis one saw on the battlefields of Afghanistan and in the shattered cities of Iraq was not “Mad Dog,” a sobriquet he loathed, but a resolute military leader who was a reader and a thinker. Give him a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and he would compare it with the other two editions that he already owned.
He was, to be sure, a fierce enemy. In 2005, he got into trouble for saying, “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” He was also the man who said, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” And he meant it. He did not think you had to hate an enemy to kill him, but that just made him a more formidable leader in combat. His menace to America’s battlefield enemies was that of the superbly calm tactician, not the blood-crazed berserker.
[Read: James Mattis’s letter of resignation]
Mattis was also the man who said, “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon,” the commander who praised the quick-thinking Marine squad leader who was smart enough to take a knee when he saw a Shia funeral procession filled with armed men walk by in the newly liberated streets of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq. And above all, he was the division commander who, when his tour was over, got in a car and crossed the country visiting families of his fallen Marines. To see him explaining to his security detail and his driver the political importance of driving into downtown Ramadi to hobnob with the potentially hostile sheikhs was to see leadership of a subtle kind. Those young Marines were ready to follow him anywhere. Literally, anywhere.
The president had a vague notion of the killer part when he appointed Mattis. He had no notion of the morally and strategically informed restraint, of the intellectual sophistication, of the selflessness.
It was not Mattis’s idea to become secretary of defense, and indeed, he may not have been the best pick for the job in normal times. But then again, 2017 was anything but a normal time, and even those who believed that the job should in principle go to a real civilian rather than a retired general were relieved that Mattis took it. In office, he had to spend most of his time buttressing the alliances that the president despised, and affirming values of fairness and legality that Trump could not comprehend. Success in government is often measured less by the brilliant things one does than by the stupidities one prevents. By that standard, Mattis’s tenure as secretary of defense was a success.
[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]
His story, however, has a larger significance. From the unlikely victory of Trump in the November 2016 election to the present, some have argued that principled patriots could serve in high office, retain their character, and either mitigate the damage or do some positive good. To be sure, they would need their red lines, their signed-but-undated letters of resignation. But they could pull it off. Though they might be maligned by irresponsible enemies of the administration, they would serve the country, and do so more honorably than mere critics.
Mattis indeed had his walking points, and he leaves with his head held high. But he is alone. The clusters of sub-Cabinet officials who privately boasted about their walking points have, with very few exceptions, stuck it out. They give sickly smiles when, at a seminar or dinner party, someone describes the president’s character as it is; they give no evidence of sticking their necks out to take positions that might incur the wrath of the America Firsters; they have taken the mad king’s shilling, and they are sticking with the king.
The departure of Jim Mattis from government service is proof that you cannot have it all. You have to walk if you are to remain the human being you were, or conceived yourself being, before you went in. He alone refused to curry favor, to pander at the painful televised Cabinet sessions, or to praise someone who deserved none of it. In the end, he could not do his job and serve the country as he knew it had to be served. No one could.
[Thomas Wright: Trump, unchecked]
Henceforth, the senior ranks of government can be filled only by invertebrates and opportunists, schemers and careerists. If they had policy convictions, they will meekly accept their evisceration. If they know a choice is a disaster, they will swallow hard and go along. They may try to manipulate the president, or make some feeble efforts to subvert him, but in the end they will follow him. And although patriotism may motivate some of them, the truth is that it will be the title, the office, the car, and the chance to be in the policy game that will keep them there.
They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.
Jim Mattis’s life has been shaped by the Marine motto: semper fidelis, always faithful. Against the odds, he remained faithful to his beliefs, to his subordinates, to the mission, to the country. The president who appointed him to the office might have as the motto on his phony coat of arms nunquam fida, never loyal. His career has been one of betrayal—of business partners, of customers, of subordinates, of his wives, and as we may very possibly learn from Robert Mueller, of his country. The two codes of conduct could never really coexist, and so they have not.
There is something corrupting not just about the struggle for power through politics but about politics itself. Philosophers and pundits have long condemned the political as both profane and belittling, the near opposite of the pure and higher spiritual pursuits. In his valediction for the great, controversial scholar Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Indeed, if it had not been for the irruption of abrupt force into the life of his extended family and the ripping apart of the region by partition and subpartition, I can easily imagine Edward evolving as an almost apolitical person, devoted to the loftier pursuits of music and literature.”
Recently, Andrew Sullivan argued that in losing religion, Americans have more and more sought to satisfy their search for meaning publicly rather than privately. In his response, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood wonders how we might desacralize politics and points to Japan as an alternative, if still flawed, model of lower-stakes competition. Countries that have experienced fascist rule or military defeat, or both, are more likely to accept normal politics, Wood suggests, although even in these places the rise of right-wing populist parties, such as the Alternative for Democracy (AfD) in Germany, points to the limits of historical remembrance.
But neither returning to the Christianity of previous generations nor desacralizing American politics is likely to fix a public sphere that is simply too invested with meaning for anyone’s safety. Instead, Americans need to construct a different sort of public faith—one that borrows from religious sensibilities to infuse debate with a spirit of humility, instead of theological certainty. The problem with America’s public life isn’t that it has too much religion, or too little—but rather, that it has the wrong kind.
[Graeme Wood: The gods that will fail ]
Both Sulllivan and Wood draw a clear, almost idealized line between the private and public. It is certainly true that, in the Christian West, the line has always been there—in theory if not necessarily in practice—to a degree it never was in Muslim-majority contexts. As Sullivan writes: “Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus’ formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar.” But this distinction between the religious and the political, which solidified itself with the rise of liberal, secular politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, has remained more fungible than we might like to admit, particularly among intellectuals and philosophers who proved unable to content themselves with being merely that.
In The Reckless Mind, Mark Lilla looks at some of the most influential Western philosophers of the modern era to make sense of how men so brilliant could become so dangerous in political life. Martin Heidegger, who made common cause with the Nazis and remained a member of the party until the end of the war, told a German newspaper in the 1960s (after coming to see himself as a victim of the Nazis): “Only God can save us now.” Hannah Arendt, his lover for many years, tried to explain Heidegger’s Nazism by pointing to “a spiritual playfulness that stems in part from delusions of grandeur and in part from despair.” In Lilla’s reading, philosophical passion—or “intellectual sorcery,” as he also calls it—all too easily morphed into a kind of magical political thinking. Meanwhile, the hugely influential jurist-philosopher Carl Schmitt—who also joined the Nazis and helped provide legal justification for their ideas—wrote about the political as a form of divine struggle (for him, the political always seemed to be in a state of italicized agitation). Lilla calls Schmitt “a theologian marooned in the realm of the profane.”
In each of these cases, political fanaticism seems to draw from a sublimated religious impulse; God isn’t enough. But the notion that actual religion might temper worldly passions might sound odd to the modern ear. After all, among the more secular-minded, it is basically an article of faith that religious passion fuels extremism and intolerance (which it no doubt sometimes does). But there is also a private contentment, rooted in religious faith, that allows individuals to accept imperfection in this life in anticipation of the next.
[Alex Wagner: The church of Trump]
The question that both Sullivan and Wood are asking is how we might make politics more boring, after the interregnum of near-constant excitement known as Trump. Sullivan wants a return to a Christian cultural sensibility, if not a Christian religious faith, that allows us to live with a public politics that is more or less procedural. Wood asks that we consider how the Japanese have built in an expectation that politics isn’t and shouldn’t be especially interesting.
The difficulty with these proposals is that they ask something of people that, even in our secularizing age, is easier to achieve in principle than in practice: the separation of the personal and the political. The line will always be breached, particularly by the more passionate among us (a passion often amplified by technology). Sullivan is right to recognize that we are all religious even when we’re not members of any faith, that we desire not just meaning but ultimate meaning. For those who believe in God, this shouldn’t be surprising: If God exists, presumably he would instill such a desire into his creation. But perhaps the kind of religion that can be insulated from politics is itself becoming untenable, even within otherwise secularized Christian cultures.
In his masterwork City of God, Saint Augustine wrote that the city of man and the city of God, though they inevitably overlapped, were separate, and he sometimes even portrayed them as walled cities, standing in opposition to each other. The gap between them could not be erased, at least not entirely. This dualism in Christian theology sometimes led to a passivity and fatalism. This passivity is more difficult to sustain in an era of mass politics. Higher literacy rates, the spread of university education, and universal access to information (and the resulting sidelining of clerics as the protectors of knowledge) have been major drivers of ideological politics, in the form of socialism in the West and Islamism in the Muslim world.
[Read: Politics as the new religion for progressive Democrats]
The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, who—unusually for a theologian—served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, is the major modern exponent of “Christian pluralism.” He believed that all ideas, when strongly held and believed, were effectively faith-based. According to his intellectual biographer, the American theologian Matthew Kaemingk, Kuyper thought that although one can find some individuals who wish to keep their belief private, “the absence of an ultimate point of loyalty, meaning, or purpose cannot persist for long.”
If this is the case, then it becomes a question of where individuals find their “ultimate point of loyalty.” Is it in a nation, rationalism, truth, God, or some mix of these things? The inherent risk of finding ultimate loyalty in a charismatic leader or a sovereign state is that they are of this world. To claim them, then, requires seeking victory in this world, because they are of this world and this world alone. As the writer Kyle Orton remarks, “Tolerance might not be possible from the secular world, tinged as it is with utopianism and a drive for final victories.” The fundamental question becomes how to clip such a drive.
Kuyper and Kaemingk offer one potential answer. Christian pluralism sees the city of man as inherently broken and fallen from sin, which, in turn, means that politics must be acknowledged as a site of uncertainty, rather than certainty. The solution, then, wouldn’t be walling off one’s Christianity from the domain of Caesar, but rather applying it in a more self-conscious manner.
There is a corollary in Islam that receives perhaps even less attention. One Koranic passage declares: “No one can know the soldiers of God except God.” The “soldiers” part of this tends to attract notice, some of it negative. But some religious scholars, such as the American Islamic legal theorist Khaled Abou El Fadl, interpret this as an endorsement of suspending judgment: No one can know, in this life, who is in fact God’s soldier. In a famous prophetic hadith, if a mujtahid (an authority in Islamic law) strives for God’s truth and is “correct,” then he receives two good deeds; if he is wrong, he still receives one bounty. If the mujtahids disagree with one another, then only God knows which one of them is correct.
If only God knows, then we cannot know. The key idea in these somewhat lost traditions is not the suspension of judgment, so much as the postponement of judgment. For the believer, the judgment presumably comes, but it comes later. For those who do not believe in God, it simply wouldn’t come at all.
Regardless of their faith (it would be a practical challenge to transform a critical mass of Americans into theological pluralists), a small but growing number of citizens can make the conscious decision to resist making the political wholly theological. They can choose to abstain on the question of whether a policy matter—an immigration quota or a Supreme Court nomination—represents an absolute, incontrovertible truth. In practice, this would mean that very few citizens of any nation are outside the fold or beyond the pale. For Americans, it means that, save for a relative few on the fringes, there are no “good” or “bad” Americans in any ultimate sense—or at least not in any ultimate sense that mere humans might be privy to. This is what an American public faith could theoretically look like, and the good thing is that anyone can start believing in it.
Andrew Cherng started working in the United States at 18, while he pursued an undergraduate degree in mathematics at Baker University, in Kansas. Starting in 1967, he began spending his summers in New York City, working in a restaurant where his father had connections. It was his first real job. The work was fast-paced, his English wasn’t perfect, and New Yorkers were ruthless, he says.
After Cherng had been working in the restaurant for six summers, his cousin, who also lived in New York, decided to open a restaurant in Washington, D.C. The new business needed a manager, and Cherng seemed an obvious choice. In 1972, his cousin moved the restaurant to Hollywood, and Cherng followed. Several months later, Cherng’s parents moved to the United States.
In 1973, Cherng and his father found a place to start their own restaurant: Pasadena, California. After six months of remodeling, Panda Inn, which would inspire Panda Express, was created. Cherng ran the dining room while his father ran the back. Cherng’s father died in 1981, before he could see the restaurant chain take off.
Panda Express now has 2,000 restaurants globally and more than 35,000 workers. I recently spoke with Cherng about his first jobs in the United States, how they differed from his father’s experience working in restaurants in China, and how he created Panda Express’s company culture.
Lola Fadulu: What was your first job?
Andrew Cherng: I grew up in Asia. Just before coming to the United States, we actually moved to Japan from China. I was a high-school student for the most part. My father got me a job in the kitchen in a restaurant somewhere in Chinatown in Yokohama, Japan.
Then I came here, to the U.S. One of my first jobs was working in a school cafeteria as a dish washer. We had this industrial bacterial dish-washing machine. So there would be people working, and the plates, the silverware, would go onto this moving assembly-line-like thing. They’d go through a very hot wash. I had the job of picking up the hot plates at the end of it. And it was really, really hot. By the end of it, my hands got pretty tough.
Fadulu: How was working in a school cafeteria for you?
Cherng: It was okay. I mean, you know, it was a job. You’d have to be pretty quick because if the plate does not get picked up, the line stops. When I was in college, I also worked in the library. I did some filing and organized some shelves in the library and stuff like that. One of the more relevant jobs that I’ve done is that from the first summer, which is 1967. I actually went to New York and, for the first time, learned how to work in a restaurant. That was really an eye-opener, because that’s when I found out how difficult it is to adjust to working in a restaurant.
Working as a waiter—that wasn’t easy. I remember I took a job in Clifton somewhere. The restaurant was pretty big, and there were a couple people working, a couple waiters working. One minute, the restaurant was pretty slow, and within 15, 20 minutes, my section was totally full, and that’s probably 10 tables. I was like, “Are you kidding me? I don’t know how to do this.” And I don’t even know how I got through it. I worked in New York all through my college years, including graduate school. Just about every vacation, I would either fly up, or I would drive up from the Midwest—from Kansas when I was in college, and Missouri when I was in graduate school. So I worked five or six summers, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas holidays, New Year’s, and those times.
Fadulu: Why New York, specifically?
Cherng: My father knew some friends working in New York, and that’s where I knew some people who could help me. He got me in touch with the people who helped me, so that’s where I went. My father was a chef.
My dad actually started to work in restaurants at a very young age, in China. My dad grew up in the countryside, and he never went to school.
[Read: Westworld star Jeffrey Wright on the lessons he learned from sports and summer jobs]
Fadulu: How did working in restaurants in New York inform how you went about creating Panda Express?
Cherng: We always think about getting our people to adopt to this idea of I can do more than just working, I can learn to take responsibilities, I can thrive, and I can also help other people to do the same. We like people who work hard and didn’t think they could be a manager; when we suggest it to them, we have to push them a little bit. We like that because taking responsibility is something they can learn. Restaurant people, by nature, don’t mind working hard, because it is a seven-day week. You work harder on holidays—that’s expected. If you’re looking for an easy job, you wouldn’t work in the restaurant. We need to figure out how they should grow personally.
One of our values is continuous learning, whether you go back and get a degree or whatever learning they think will help them advance themselves.
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