Dentre os vários derrotados nas eleições brasileiras de 2018, um em especial já havia perdido a disputa bem antes do primeiro turno. A rara unanimidade de candidatos e programas à direita e à esquerda, conservadores e até autointitulados liberais garantiu a vitória contra o licenciamento ambiental.
Prevalece entre os setores políticos, em especial no legislativo, e em parte da sociedade, a percepção de que o licenciamento é culpado por não termos estradas suficientes, ferrovias, linhas de transmissão, portos, usinas, indústrias, importantes projetos minerários. Se a greve dos caminhoneiros parou o país, disseram os oportunistas, boa parte da culpa é das licenças para modais alternativos que nunca saem. A ferrovia ferrogrão, a BR-319, o linhão de Tucuruí e os novos blocos do pré-sal estariam aí para comprovar como o licenciamento é um entrave ao desenvolvimento do país.
As propostas de solução para o “problema” são um show de horrores: temos que escolher entre uma ampla flexibilização da legislação ou o estabelecimento de prazo máximo para a emissão de licenças. Se o órgão X não se manifestar no tempo Y, é como se não houvesse discordância e o licenciamento é feito por W.O.
Mais do que a avaliação de viabilidade, importa aqui o cronograma da obra, os prazos do empreendedor. Uma completa inversão de prioridades. Subentendida, ainda, a noção absurda de que as licenças devem ser obrigatoriamente emitidas.
Na quarta-feira, dia 12, o próprio presidente eleito Jair Bolsonaro disparou sobre como “fica difícil empreender num país como esse aqui”. A frase foi uma referência às dificuldades do governo do Paraná em construir uma rodovia em um dos últimos blocos bem preservados de Mata Atlântica do Brasil. A obra tem como objetivo principal facilitar o acesso a um porto privado no litoral paranaense e enfrenta forte resistência por causa dos impactos e das falhas nos estudos ambientais.
A barragem de Mariana não se rompeu por excesso de “burocracia”. Foi justamente o contrário.Como solução ao “problema do licenciamento”, a equipe de transição do novo governo já propõe revogar vários decretos que tratam do tema, assim como passar a atribuição do licenciamento do Ministério do Meio Ambiente para a Presidência da República, criando uma Secretaria de Licenciamento Estratégico.
Desmantelar o Ministério do Meio Ambiente, flexibilizar e afrouxar regulamentações para destravar licenças parecem ser o caminho que o governo escolheu. Para desatar esse nó discursivo sem passar pelo desmonte de uma das mais importantes barreiras a projetos ineficientes, caros e de grande impacto socioambiental, precisamos olhar o cenário com um pouco mais de cuidado. E talvez perceber que o “problema” a ser enfrentado é mais um problema cognitivo de quem fez o diagnóstico do que outro vício burocrático incorrigível deste país de vícios burocráticos incorrigíveis. Afinal, a barragem de fundão em Mariana, Minas Gerais, não se rompeu por excesso de “burocracia”. Foi justamente o contrário.
Sabe-se que a estrutura dos órgãos licenciadores é precária, que o orçamento desta área tão estratégica não para de sofrer cortes, que os servidores estão se aposentando às centenas sem reposição e que muitas regras que norteiam a condução dos estudos deveriam ser mais claras, que falta integração entre os agentes e órgãos governamentais envolvidos.
Também ajudaria muito ter alguma sinalização prévia em zoneamentos específicos pelo governo de quais são as regiões preferenciais para investimento e quais as regiões onde uma licença ambiental levaria a impactos tão grandes que o processo seria complexo, caro e com grandes chances de negativa. Afinal, estamos no Brasil, o país mais biodiverso do mundo, onde um simples inventário de biodiversidade, o ponto de partida para uma avaliação de impactos adequada, pode ter logística e complexidade técnica sem precedentes. Mas nada disso parece ser levado em conta nas grandes discussões sobre as melhorias do licenciamento.
Uma questão talvez ainda mais importante como fator indutor de atrasos e dificuldades no processo também é frequentemente ignorada, apesar de já ter sido identificada em todos os diagnósticos mais sérios feitos pelos próprios órgãos ambientais, pelo Ministério Público e pelo Tribunal de Contas da União: a responsabilidade das empresas ao apresentar péssimos estudos ambientais.
Lembro bem da primeira vez em que trabalhei com um estudo ambiental muito ruim, que me pareceu à época uma exceção extravagante, mas que eu viria a descobrir que é situação assustadoramente recorrente. Tratava-se da implementação de uma pequena usina hidrelétrica no interior de Rondônia, para a qual deveríamos refazer todos os estudos ambientais. O original, sumariamente recusado no órgão local, era um emaranhado de textos colados quase aleatoriamente, mapas sem resolução e listas de espécies com erros primários, inclusive contendo espécies de outros biomas. Tudo isso tornava impossível a tarefa de entender o básico: como era a área onde se pretendia instalar o empreendimento, o que havia ali, como a operação da usina impactaria a região, de que forma poderia ser mitigado ou compensado – em resumo, o bê-a-bá do licenciamento ambiental. Não havia nenhum item completo de modo correto.
Com maiores ou menores carências, a maioria esmagadora dos estudos ambientais precisa retornar aos empreendedores para complemento, em uma ordem de grandeza que pode chegar a nove de cada 10 processos. Um vai-e-vem que emperra a decisão sobre as licenças, atrasa os ritos, sobrecarrega os órgãos ambientais e abre caminho para judicialização, que atravanca tudo mais um pouco. Cada estudo tem milhares de páginas, modelagens complexas em temas diversos e imensos buracos de informação. Quando finalmente são analisados, entram e saem da fila para pedidos de complemento.
O Ibama tem hoje 2.800 estudos para analisar e apenas 300 servidores. Apesar disso, chegou a 1.300 pareceres em 2017 e caminha bem com o cronograma dos projetos prioritários do governo. Mas ainda é insuficiente para encerrar a fila interminável. Destaco aqui um trecho elucidador de uma carta aberta das entidades que representam os servidores a respeito de acusações de que o licenciamento é demasiado lento:
“Destaque-se, portanto, que o licenciamento seria mais rápido caso os empreendedores de fato dessem a importância necessária para os estudos e programas ambientais, assegurando qualidade ao menos satisfatória dos trabalhos a serem entregues ao Ibama – a crítica à qualidade desses trabalhos não é feita apenas pelo corpo técnico do Ibama, mas por diversos atores envolvidos no licenciamento, como o Ministério Público da União e a sociedade civil organizada.”
Em agosto de 2017, o órgão precisou dar um ultimato à petroleira francesa Total, que pretende explorar petróleo na foz do Amazonas: “Caso o empreendedor não atenda aos pontos demandados pela equipe técnica mais uma vez, o processo de licenciamento será arquivado”. Era a terceira vez que os estudos, que foram definitivamente rejeitados na última semana, eram submetidos com os mesmos problemas.
No começo de novembro, foi a vez da petroleira britânica BP ter estudos devolvidos para complementação. Detalhe: eram projetos semelhantes ao da Total, na mesma região e com as mesmas lacunas de informação. Como os processos são públicos e contêm informações estratégicas para a obtenção das licenças, é de se estranhar que o diagnóstico da primeira não haja sido aproveitado pela segunda empresa em seu diagnóstico.
No licenciamento ambiental da Ferrogrão, uma ferrovia de 1.000 km que conectará a soja produzida na região Centro-Oeste aos portos para escoamento na bacia do Amazonas, outra obra consagrada por seus problemas com o licenciamento, o Ministério Público interveio e pediu a suspensão do processo:
“O diagnóstico apresentado tem falhas consideradas graves pela Justiça, como omissão das comunidades quilombolas afetadas e cópia de trechos de estudos feitos para as hidrelétricas da bacia do Tapajós. O relatório (…) utilizou imagens do Google Earth como ferramenta de diagnóstico, deixou de realizar estudos técnicos prévios essenciais, não trouxe entrevistas com moradores, não levantou vestígios culturais e arqueológicos no traçado da ferrovia.”
Mas, afinal de contas, por que muitas empresas parecem incapazes de apresentar estudos que contemplem as solicitações ou parecem deliberadamente insubordinadas aos ritos definidos pela Constituição no Brasil?
Em muitos casos, o empreendedor é o próprio governo, que também financia e licencia os projetos, expondo um óbvio conflito de interesse.Essa resposta tem dois aspectos importantes. O primeiro é econômico, na medida em que estudos completos são mais caros e demorados, encontram mais “problemas” e encarecem também o financiamento dos programas de mitigação de impactos ao longo da obra. Essas ações incluem, por exemplo, resgate de fauna em área desmatada, construção de sistemas de esgoto e planos de reassentamento para as pessoas afetadas. Parece mais fácil deixar que o órgão ambiental indique as lacunas que consegue encontrar, preenchê-las de qualquer jeito e obter a licença. A ironia é que o rigor técnico das avaliações muitas vezes faz o esforço original do estudo se perder, com solicitação de mais estudos de campo, mais análises, mais tempo, tornando as licenças mais custosas em tempo e dinheiro.
O segundo aspecto é de governança, que torna o ato de emissão de licenças permeável a decisões políticas. Um estudo ruim pode ser aprovado, e as exigências podem ser empurradas com a barriga se você tem a seu favor a imprensa, o governo, a opinião pública ou qualquer tipo de constrangimento. Em muitos casos, o empreendedor é o próprio governo, que também financia e licencia os projetos, expondo um óbvio conflito de interesse.
Como o empreendedor é quem tem a obrigação de apresentar os estudos ambientais, sua ação poderá estar influenciada por um ou ambos os aspectos, variando na intensidade. Assim, muitas empresas de consultoria ambiental vêm se aprimorando como especialistas na aprovação de licenças em vez de prestar serviços de assessoria técnica. Esta situação fragiliza muito o processo e gera riscos às pessoas e aos ambientes diretamente afetados.
A operação Lava Jato iluminou esta questão recentemente com a exposição de um cartel de empresas que se revezavam para assumir os projetos mais “complicados” por conta da expertise em construir a aprovação de grandes obras (e também por sua disposição em participar de esquemas de desvio de dinheiro público). Entre as diversas práticas descritas, estavam a ocultação de espécies ameaçadas das áreas afetadas, a subestimação de impactos e a adulteração de relatórios de consultores. Uma destas empresas era a Leme Engenharia, responsável pelo Estudo de Impacto Ambiental de Belo Monte, uma obra apresentada em 2009 que trazia 15 mil páginas de informações, mas que assustava mais pelas páginas que deixava de trazer.
Belo Monte veio cercada de tanta polêmica que imediatamente a sociedade civil se organizou para uma análise “independente” dos estudos, sendo o Painel de Especialistas o documento mais relevante produzido, embora não o único. Eram mais de 200 páginas demonstrando a insuficiência dos estudos, a ocultação de impactos e vários problemas metodológicos.
Apesar disso, e mesmo contra a opinião dos próprios servidores, o Ibama concedeu em 2010 a licença prévia, a primeira de três que compõem o rito do licenciamento de grandes obras. Ela elencou 40 requisitos que deveriam ser trabalhados antes da segunda licença.
Mas com o sinal dado e a disposição demonstrada pelo governo em fazer a obra a qualquer custo, as condições não seriam cumpridas. Dilma Rousseff já garantia, desde quando era ministra de Minas e Energia, entre berros e entrevistas, que Belo Monte iria sair “no horizonte mais rápido possível”.
Foto: Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress
Uma reunião fechada na primeira semana do seu governo selou o destino da segunda licença da usina e o então presidente do Ibama pediu exoneração por não concordar com a pressão pela liberação da licença de instalação. Na sequência, um sujeito chamado Américo Ribeiro Tunes assumiu interinamente o órgão, emitiu uma licença parcial e deixou o cargo no mês seguinte. Na falta de requisitos para emitir a licença prevista em lei, emitiu uma licença que não existe e entrou para a gloriosa história da burocracia brasileira. E, assim, fez a obra andar, consolidando a ideia de que Belo Monte estava imune à legislação do licenciamento.
Aliás, imune no sentido literal: ao fim de 2012 já eram mais de 50 questionamentos na justiça, que não tinham efeito sobre a construção por conta de um instrumento da ditadura, a suspensão de segurança, que permite suspender unilateralmente decisões de instâncias inferiores por um suposto risco de “ocorrência de grave lesão à ordem, à saúde, à segurança e à economia públicas”.
Nove anos depois, a ausência de licenciamento ambiental foi o principal fator que levou Altamira ao caos completo, à destruição de aldeias indígenas, a uma interminável lista de exigências não cumpridas (a despeito de já ter licença para operar), a uma conta de R$ 39 bilhões – grande parte dinheiro público. Sem mencionar a imensa desconfiança sobre sua utilidade para o país nos termos em que a obra foi imposta. Todos estes indícios, somados às evidências produzidas na operação Lava Jato, reforçam a hipótese de que Belo Monte talvez não tivesse propósito primeiro de produzir energia, como se denunciou desde o início.
Belo Monte é mais um dos vários maus exemplos do que acontece quando se faz um licenciamento de fachadaÉ claro que é descabido generalizar o modelo Belo Monte – de ocultar, depois contestar e, por fim, ignorar os impactos dos empreendimentos, confiando na interferência política e na imunidade ao judiciário – para todos os estudos ruins que atravancam o dia a dia dos órgãos ambientais. Mas tampouco se pode imaginar que se trata de um caso isolado. Não é. Uma olhada mais próxima no licenciamento das usinas de Jirau e Santo Antônio, na década passada, ou no interminável processo de asfaltamento da BR-319, no trecho que liga Porto Velho a Manaus, revela os sinais do que se configura um modus operandi já bem estabelecido em grandes projetos, em especial quando o governo é quem empreende.
Belo Monte é mais um dos vários maus exemplos do que acontece quando se faz um licenciamento de fachada, apenas para formalizar burocracias. O procedimento é e deve ser complexo e abrangente – como são os desafios de se empreender em um país com tão estupenda diversidade biológica e cultural. Respeitar esses ritos é proteger nosso patrimônio socioambiental e favorecer alternativas mais amigáveis à sua conservação. Esse patrimônio é, em última instância, o nosso futuro.
O grave contexto de crise fiscal no governo com a estagnação econômica do país levou ao sucateamento dos órgãos licenciadores e acirrou os ânimos bem no momento em que é necessário encaminhar discussões complexas, essencialmente técnicas. O licenciamento se encontra fragilizado e sob risco iminente de que se tomem medidas prejudiciais ao país em longo prazo.
Vai ser desastroso para o país se o licenciamento deixar de ser a principal trincheira de defesa ambiental para se tornar, de fato, uma mera burocracia, a papelada inútil que o futuro presidente já o acusa de ser. Uma espécie de profecia autorrealizável cada vez mais próxima de se concretizar.
The post Não são os ativistas ou o Ibama que emperram grandes obras. São estudos ambientais mal feitos. appeared first on The Intercept.
Há duas histórias para a trajetória de sucesso da grife feminina Amissima. A versão glamour é a da marca de roupas presente em dois templos paulistanos do luxo (os shoppings Cidade Jardim e JK Iguatemi), liderada pela diretora de estilo da marca, a sul-coreana Suzana Cha. Não é só isso. A Amissima também emplaca vestidos em capas de revistas, viaja com jornalistas a Paris – as fotos estão nas redes sociais da marca – e conta com influenciadoras como @luizabsobral, @lelesaddi e @thassianaves para exibir os modelos da grife para milhares de seguidores no Instagram.
A outra história, desumana e sem sofisticação, é a da empresa que lucrou à base de trabalho análogo ao de escravo.
O Intercept teve acesso exclusivo a uma investigação de auditores fiscais do trabalho em São Paulo que descobriu que, em pelo menos duas das 25 oficinas de costura que produzem exclusivamente para a marca, os trabalhadores são submetidos à condições análogas à de escravo. Ainda segundo os agentes, as demais 23 oficinas apresentam indícios de condições semelhantes, o que será verificado em desdobramentos da operação.
No dia 6 de novembro, visitei duas delas junto com os auditores da Superintendência Regional do Trabalho e Emprego de São Paulo, que investigam as irregularidades.
As oficinas terceirizadas que produzem com exclusividade para a marca funcionam em imóveis degradados em bairros periféricos de São Paulo. São contratadas diretamente pela Amissima, sem intermediários. O ambiente é abafado e inseguro. De frente para a rua, em uma sala retangular espaçosa, sete máquinas de costura trabalhavam sob uma lona e um teto de isopor. Nem a nossa presença interrompeu a produção.
A oficina também funciona como casa para muitas famílias que costuram para a marca e dividem o mesmo imóvel. A prática é ilegal. Ali, os trabalhadores aceitam um esquema de divisão de pagamento chamado “um terço”: um terço do valor da peça fica com o trabalhador, outro terço vai para as despesas da casa, divididas igualmente entre todos, e o último terço para o dono da oficina (a pessoa que assume a negociação com a empresa).
Assim, dos R$ 9 que a Amissima paga para a oficina por peça, R$ 3 vão para o costureiro. O resto vai para a casa e para o dono da oficina – em geral, outro migrante nas mesmas condições.
Entre lenços e sem documentosNas oficinas, a rotina é sufocante. Os funcionários costumam trabalhar das 8h às 22h, com rápidos intervalos para as refeições – todas feitas no mesmo ambiente. Os pagamentos são feitos de acordo com a produtividade e a qualidade nas entregas.
Nas duas oficinas, 14 costureiros bolivianos foram encontrados entre amontoadas de tecidos e máquinas de costura. Nenhum tinha carteira de trabalho assinada, e dois não tinham sequer documentos brasileiros. Alguns desempenhavam a função há anos – o caso mais antigo é de 2012. Os auditores fotografaram tudo, recolheram documentos e peças piloto: quatro vestidos, um top cropped e uma blusa de cetim.
O Ministério Público do Trabalho autuou a Amissima por 23 irregularidades depois da operação. A marca terá de pagar R$ 553 mil em indenização aos trabalhadores. Com o fundo de garantia, os trabalhadores receberão perto de 600 mil.
Tecidos, linhas e remédios para dor“Você não arrematou a roupa? Você viu a foto, ela falou que vai descontar seu prêmio, tá bom?”, diz uma das funcionárias da Amissima em mensagem de WhatsApp enviada para um dos costureiros e interceptada pelo Ministério Público do Trabalho.
Na marca, “prêmio” não é bônus ou gratificação. Os trabalhadores esclareceram que o “prêmio” é o valor do pagamento integral pela costura da peça e serve para pressionar os oficinistas a entregarem no prazo correto e sem defeitos. Ficar sem “prêmio” significa, portanto, ter descontado cerca de 15% por peça, mesmo depois de refazer o serviço e entregar o produto como o cliente pediu. “Para mim, não tem prêmio. Só desconto”, disse um dos trabalhadores resgatados.
Quem avança nas horas trabalhadas e, assim, costura mais peças, ganha mais. “[Os costureiros] estavam submetidos a uma jornada não menor do que 13 horas de trabalho diárias, mas habitualmente de 14 horas”, diz o relatório dos auditores sobre as jornadas exaustivas, um dos elementos que caracterizam o crime, segundo o Código Penal. Para costurar para a marca, eles eram submetidos a 70 horas de trabalho por semana – no mínimo.
Foto: Luiza Mandetta/The Intercept Brasil
Esse sistema de produção os pressiona a trabalhar até a exaustão, de segunda a sábado – incluindo feriados –, o ano todo, “sem condições de repor as forças, de curtir os filhos, de ter lazer, um vazio completo de humanidade”, afirmou o auditor fiscal do trabalho Luis Alexandre de Faria.
Por isso, analgésicos, antiinflamatórios e cintas ortopédicas para aliviar a dor lombar dividem espaço na oficina com linhas e tecidos e cadeiras sem encosto, regulagem e, em muitos casos, quebradas.
Segundo os depoimentos e registros encontrados, cada trabalhador recebia cerca de R$ 900 por mês – o piso da categoria para oito horas de trabalho diárias é de R$ 1.450,02. O salário, além de baixo, era pago sem regularidade – em geral, depois do pagamento da Amissima pelo lote. Os funcionários também não recebiam FGTS, férias com adicional, 13º salários ou adicional por horas extras.
Vida sem escolhasNa blitz promovida na oficina que presta serviços para a Amissima, um dos casais resgatados vivia em um cubículo onde cabe uma cama, uma máquina de costura e um armário pequeno, sem privacidade ou ventilação, separado da cozinha de uso coletivo por uma cortina de chuveiro. Lâmpadas pendiam do teto, aumentando riscos de incêndio, segundo os fiscais.
Vestido fotografado pelos fiscais na oficina.
Foto: Luiza Mandetta/The Intercept Brasil
Dois rapazes solteiros dividiam espaço com as famílias. Na parte de cima, outros quartos improvisados e um banheiro de uso comum. “Você tem um risco adicional pelas crianças, expostas a desconhecidos”, disse a auditora Lívia dos Santos Ferreira.
“Moramos apertados. Se a gente recebesse direito, poderíamos ter uma oficina, uma casa grande. Se pagassem pelo menos 10% do valor (vendido ao público) de peça, viveríamos em uma condição melhor”, disse um dos costureiros. Em média, a Amissima paga pouco mais de 1% do valor da peça na loja ou no e-commerce da marca. Ele, como os demais, pediu anonimato por segurança e por medo de perder o contrato. Como outros na mesma situação, migrou da Bolívia para fugir da pobreza. No Brasil, já trabalhou com outras marcas, que pagavam pior ainda, segundo ele.
Isso é trabalho escravoTanto a gestão de Michel Temer quanto a de Bolsonaro caminham para afrouxar as regras de combate ao trabalho degradante. O primeiro tentou tornar mais difícil enquadrar um trabalhador como escravo. Também empregou um ministro que tinha um histórico de violações trabalhistas. Mas Bolsonaro vai mais longe: o presidente eleito já anunciou a extinção do Ministério do Trabalho, que é o órgão responsável por coordenar o tipo de fiscalização que flagrou os escravizados da Amissima.
Na semana passada, a Comissão Nacional para a Erradicação do Trabalho Escravo relatou “profunda preocupação com a política de descontinuidade da política de enfrentamento ao trabalho escravo, especialmente quanto às ações de fiscalização coordenadas pelo Ministério do Trabalho.”
Luiza Mandetta/The Intercept Brasil
Durante a campanha, Bolsonaro foi um dos candidatos que não se comprometeram com o combate a regimes de trabalho análogos à escravidão. Na verdade, o presidente eleito já demonstrou que não sabe o que é trabalho escravo, assim como seu antecessor, Michel Temer, que comparou situações degradantes à mera ausência de “uma saboneteira” no banheiro da empresa.
Tecnicamente, para que uma situação seja enquadrada como análoga à escravidão, é preciso que existam graves violações a direitos fundamentais. Jornada exaustiva, condições degradantes e submeter os funcionários a riscos de saúde ou de vida, por exemplo. Além disso, essa prática também dá uma vantagem ilegal à empresa frente à concorrência, explica Giuliana Cassiano, auditora fiscal do trabalho. “O consumidor é quem tem mais poder para coibir esses crimes, porque é ele quem diz sim ou não para um produto que é produzido com trabalho escravo.”
Por telefone, o CEO da Amissima, Jaco Yoo, afirmou que errou ao não fiscalizar as condições de trabalho nas oficinas contratadas pela marca e lamentou pelos migrantes sem documentação. “Meus pais vieram da mesma situação (eram migrantes). Sei das dificuldades, jamais faria isso.”
Disse, ainda, que pagava semanalmente as oficinas, o que os trabalhadores negam, e que eles não “produziam muito”. Também prometeu contratar metade dos costureiros para trabalhar na empresa.
The post Exclusivo: com vestidos a R$ 800, grife Amissima faz roupas com trabalho escravo appeared first on The Intercept.
Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican recently elevated to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee after the death of John McCain, was implicated recently in what looked to be an insider trading scandal. A few days after meeting with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to successfully advocate for a military budget increase, Inhofe purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in defense contractor Raytheon, which stands to profit from additional defense spending.
Inhofe tried to manage the controversy by claiming that a third-party financial adviser handles his stocks and made the purchase without his knowledge. Minutes after being questioned about the trades, he wrote a letter to his adviser, asking him to no longer trade defense or aerospace stocks. Inhofe has even taken to carrying around a card with a stock reply to journalists about the matter.
But the Raytheon trades represent only a fraction of his trading activity. The same day that Inhofe revealed the Raytheon purchase, he also disclosed the sale of between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock from Celgene, a biotech firm, along with a similarly sized sale of stock in Aptiv, the auto parts maker formerly known as Delphi. A month earlier, Inhofe revealed trades in General Electric, Salesforce.com, American International Group, XPO Logistics, Albemarle, Intuitive Surgical, and Intellia Therapeutics.
There’s no way to test Inhofe’s claim that a third party manages his stock portfolio, absent a monitor tracking Inhofe 24/7: He could make a phone call or send a message to direct a trade at anytime. But it’s clear that Inhofe is trading millions of dollars worth of stock a year, while voting on legislation that affects public companies.
It’s clear that Inhofe is trading millions of dollars worth of stock a year, while voting on legislation that affects public companies.In fact, over the course of 2018, Inhofe has made 57 individual stock trades, according to Senate disclosure forms. The value of these trades totaled somewhere between $1.72 million and $4.11 million. In 2017, according to Inhofe’s annual report, he made another 52 trades.
Congress attempted to prevent legislators from insider trading with the 2012 STOCK Act, which prohibits members and their staffs from exploiting insider information discovered in the course of policy deliberations. But unlike corporate “insiders,” members of Congress are not required to establish arms-length trading plans — nor has the House fully cooperated with efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate potential wrongdoing.
When compared to corporate insiders, members of Congress are exposed to a much broader array of insider information which implicates a wide range of companies. Given that members of Congress hold a unique position of public trust, Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, both potential Democratic presidential candidates, want to put a stop to all the trading. Last week, they introduced legislation that would permanently ban members of Congress and senior staff from trading individual stocks.
“We should not be in the position of thinking about legislation in the context of personal investment,” Merkley told The Intercept in an interview. “As long as you own stocks, it’s hard to rule out of your mind. And the public sees it as a conflict of interest.”
“We should not be in the position of thinking about legislation in the context of personal investment.”Under the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, all members would have six months after enactment to divest their shares. New members would get six months from their entry into Congress to divest. Members and senior staff could also opt to transfer stocks to an independent blind trust, or hold them for as long as they served in government, as long as they do not sell or buy more stocks. Diversified mutual funds or exchange-traded funds would still be allowed.
Merkley questioned whether the Inhofe situation represented a true blind trust. Without assurance that a lawmaker has no role in stock-picking, public cynicism over their trading will remain. “You would have to be legitimately, 100 percent blind,” he said.
Another section of the bill prohibits members from serving as officers on corporate boards, which amazingly is not already disallowed. Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., was indicted earlier this year for advising friends and family to dump shares of the biopharmaceutical company Innate Immunotherapeutic after learning that a clinical trial for the company’s key multiple sclerosis drug failed. Collins knew about the failure before it was public, because he sat on the company’s board.
Currently, Senate ethics rules ban members and staff from serving as board members of publicly traded companies, but House rules do not. Even the Senate rules permit board membership of tax-exempt organizations. Merkley believes codifying into law a full prohibition on members of the House or Senate serving on corporate boards would be beneficial.
The Collins indictment, incidentally, was the one and only instance of a prosecution under the 2012 STOCK Act. While a 2017 Public Citizen report did show that the STOCK Act has reduced market trading activity among members of Congress, it still found between $104 million and $337 million in trades by U.S. senators in 2015, which was the last year studied.
Individual incidents continue to dog the reputation of Congress. In 2017, former Congressperson Tom Price’s confirmation hearing for secretary of health and human services was dominated by questions about his numerous stock holdings in health-related companies. Price made several pharmaceutical stock trades on the same day that he pressured regulators to repeal a rule that would harm drug company profits.
In addition, there are numerous instances of senators trading stocks of companies they nominally oversee through committee work, as the Public Citizen report indicates: Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has recently traded hundreds of thousands worth of stock in energy infrastructure businesses while sitting on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., is also a busy player in energy stocks while sitting on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., actively trade in health care stocks while serving on health care subcommittees. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., trades in natural resources and precious metals stock while on subcommittees that oversee these industries.
(Cochran is no longer in the Senate, having resigned due to health concerns in April.)
“We really have to establish a public trust of behavior.”“We really have to establish a public trust of behavior,” Merkley said. “As public officials, there are a lot of impositions on our lives. This is not one of them. Having a diversified portfolio is an easy thing.”
Banning congressional stock trading could also make it easier to pass a 0.1 percent tax on stock trades, which the Congressional Budget Office this week estimated would raise $777 billion over 10 years.
Under the bill, if members or senior staff are found to have traded stocks while in office, the congressional Ethics Committees would be empowered to fine them no less than 10 percent of the value of the investment. Of course, congressional Ethics Committees are made up of members of Congress, and they have historically been rather lax in enforcing rules against fellow members. It will also be a challenge for the Merkley bill to pass the Republican-controlled Senate in the first place.
Separate from Merkley’s proposed legislation, Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra has called for an independent Public Integrity Protection Agency, which would consolidate enforcement capability that is currently spread around the government and would have the ability to investigate and penalize government officials and those seeking influence. Asked about the idea, Merkley responded, “My first impression is that an office dedicated to the mission of transparency and accountability sounds great.”
Democrats in the House have prepared a broad anti-corruption bill for their first act when they take over Congress next year, but while it beefs up some restrictions on members and provides new enforcement powers to the Office of Government Ethics, it does not include anything on congressional stock trading.
Merkley’s choice to spearhead anti-corruption efforts might be read as part of his efforts to distinguish himself in a crowded 2020 primary field. When asked about his presidential ambitions, Merkley told The Intercept, “I’m exploring it and will decide within the first quarter [of next year].”
The post Sen. Jeff Merkley Wants to Stop Congress Members From Insider Trading By Banning Them From Owning Stocks appeared first on The Intercept.
Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.
The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.
The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
The Beijing-based website, 265.com, is a Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be “China’s most used homepage.” Google purchased the site in 2008 from Cai Wensheng, a billionaire Chinese entrepreneur. 265.com provides its Chinese visitors with news updates, information about financial markets, horoscopes, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, and videos. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main competitor in the country. As The Intercept reported in August, it appears that Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu.
According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an “application programming interface,” or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google’s privacy team, however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com.
Several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely and told to shift their attention away from China.
The engineers used the data they pulled from 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC.
Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source. Members of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing Dragonfly. Following a series of discussions, two sources said, Google engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the 265.com data to help develop Dragonfly, which has since had severe consequences for the project.
“The 265 data was integral to Dragonfly,” said one source. “Access to the data has been suspended now, which has stopped progress.”
In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia; those queries are qualitatively different from searches originating from within China itself, making it virtually impossible for the Dragonfly team to hone the accuracy of results. Significantly, several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely, and told to shift their attention away from China to instead work on projects related to India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East and Brazil.
Records show that 265.com is still hosted on Google servers, but its physical address is listed under the name of the “Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co.,” which has an office space on the third floor of a tower building in northwest Beijing’s Haidian district. 265.com is operated as a Google subsidiary, but unlike most Google-owned websites — such as YouTube and Google.com — it is not blocked in China and can be freely accessed by people in the country using any standard internet browser.
The internal dispute at Google over the 265.com data access is not the first time important information related to Dragonfly has been withheld from the company’s privacy team. The Intercept reported in November that privacy and security employees working on the project had been shut out of key meetings and felt that senior executives had sidelined them. Yonatan Zunger, formerly a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, worked on Dragonfly for several months last year and said the project was shrouded in extreme secrecy and handled in a “highly unusual” way from the outset. Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,” according to Zunger, “and maintained an openly adversarial relationship with them — quite outside the Google norm.”
Last week, Pichai, Google’s CEO, appeared before Congress, where he faced questions on Dragonfly. Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term, two sources familiar with the project said.
Google did not respond to requests for comment.
The post Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation appeared first on The Intercept.
Former Vice President Joe Biden believes that “anybody can beat” President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
While speaking at a recent event promoting his new book, “American Promise,” Biden said, “I think I’m the most qualified person in the country to be president.”
After delivering an address at the Lantos Foundation’s 10th anniversary gala, where he was recognized with a legacy award, Biden was asked specifically by The Intercept why he thinks he’s the most qualified person to take on Trump.
“You don’t run for president unless you think you are qualified,” Biden replied.
“Why do you think you could beat President Trump? Why is this your time?” the former Delaware senator was asked.
“I think anybody can beat him,” Biden responded.
Biden has said that he expects to make a decision on entering the 2020 race within the next two months. Polls have been consistently showing Biden as a frontrunner should he jump in, but that strong showing may be due to universal name identification and lingering good feelings from some Democratic voters toward the Obama administration. Biden ran twice for president previously, in 1988 and 2008, faring terribly both times.
The Lantos Foundation honored Biden as Inaugural Recipient of the Decennial Lantos Legacy Award. According to its official website, the foundation “was established to continue Tom Lantos’ proud legacy as an ardent champion for human rights by carrying, in his words, ‘the noble banner of human rights to every corner of the world.’”
The post Joe Biden on Donald Trump: “I Think Anybody Can Beat Him” appeared first on The Intercept.
A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.
The child language specialist, Bahia Amawi, is a U.S. citizen who received a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999 and, since then, has specialized in evaluations for young children with language difficulties (see video below). Amawi was born in Austria and has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, fluently speaks three languages (English, German, and Arabic), and has four U.S.-born American children of her own.
Amawi began working in 2009 on a contract basis with the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes Austin, to provide assessments and support for school children from the county’s growing Arabic-speaking immigrant community. The children with whom she has worked span the ages of 3 to 11. Ever since her work for the school district began in 2009, her contract was renewed each year with no controversy or problem.
But this year, all of that changed. On August 13, the school district once again offered to extend her contract for another year by sending her essentially the same contract and set of certifications she has received and signed at the end of each year since 2009.
She was prepared to sign her contract renewal until she noticed one new, and extremely significant, addition: a certification she was required to sign pledging that she “does not currently boycott Israel,” that she “will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and that she shall refrain from any action “that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israeli or in an Israel-controlled territory.”
The language of the affirmation Amawi was told she must sign reads like Orwellian — or McCarthyite — self-parody, the classic political loyalty oath that every American should instinctively shudder upon reading:
That language would bar Amawi not only from refraining from buying goods from companies located within Israel, but also from any Israeli companies operating in the occupied West Bank (“an Israeli-controlled territory”). The oath given to Amawi would also likely prohibit her even from advocating such a boycott given that such speech could be seen as “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel.”
Whatever one’s own views are, boycotting Israel to stop its occupation is a global political movement modeled on the 1980s boycott aimed at South Africa that helped end that country’s system of racial apartheid. It has become so mainstream that two newly elected members of the U.S. Congress explicitly support it, while boycotting Israeli companies in the occupied territories has long been advocated in mainstream venues by Jewish Zionist groups such as Peace Now and the Jewish-American Zionist writer Peter Beinart.
This required certification about Israel was the only one in the contract sent to Amawi that pertained to political opinions and activism. There were no similar clauses relating to children (such as a vow not to advocate for pedophiles or child abusers), nor were there any required political oaths that pertained to the country of which she is a citizen and where she lives and works: the United States.
In order to obtain contracts in Texas, then, a citizen is free to denounce and work against the United States, to advocate for causes that directly harm American children, and even to support a boycott of particular U.S. states, such as was done in 2017 to North Carolina in protest of its anti-LGBT law. In order to continue to work, Amawi would be perfectly free to engage in any political activism against her own country, participate in an economic boycott of any state or city within the U.S., or work against the policies of any other government in the world — except Israel.
That’s one extraordinary aspect of this story: The sole political affirmation Texans like Amawi are required to sign in order to work with the school district’s children is one designed to protect not the United States or the children of Texas, but the economic interests of Israel. As Amawi put it to The Intercept: “It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protecting our constitutional rights.”
Amawi concluded that she could not truthfully or in good faith sign the oath because, in conjunction with her family, she has made the household decision to refrain from purchasing goods from Israeli companies in support of the global boycott to end Israel’s decadeslong occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Amawi, as the mother of four young children and a professional speech pathologist, is not a leader of any political movements: She has simply made the consumer choice to support the boycott by avoiding the purchase of products from Israeli companies in Israel or the occupied West Bank. She also occasionally participates in peaceful activism in defense of Palestinian self-determination that includes advocacy of the global boycott to end the Israeli occupation.
Watch The Intercept’s three-minute video of Amawi, as she tells her story, here:
Video by Kelly West
When asked if she considered signing the pledge to preserve her ability to work, Amawi told The Intercept: “Absolutely not. I couldn’t in good conscience do that. If I did, I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus, become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.”
As a result, Amawi informed her school district supervisor that she could not sign the oath. As her complaint against the school district explains, she “ask[ed] why her personal political stances [about Israel and Palestine] impacted her work as a speech language pathologist.”
In response, Amawi’s supervisor promised that she would investigate whether there were any ways around this barrier. But the supervisor ultimately told Amawi that there were no alternatives: Either she would have to sign the oath, or the district would be legally barred from paying her under any type of contract.
Because Amawi, to her knowledge, is the only certified Arabic-speaking child’s speech pathologist in the district, it is quite possible that the refusal to renew her contract will leave dozens of young children with speech pathologies without any competent expert to evaluate their conditions and treatment needs.
“I got my master’s in this field and devoted myself to this work because I always wanted to do service for children,” Amawi said. “It’s vital that early-age assessments of possible speech impairments or psychological conditions be administered by those who understand the child’s first language.”
In other words, Texas’s Israel loyalty oath requirement victimizes not just Amawi, an American who is barred from working in the professional field to which she has devoted her adult life, but also the young children in need of her expertise and experience that she has spent years developing.
The anti-BDS Israel oath was included in Amawi’s contract papers due to an Israel-specific state law enacted on May 2, 2017, by the Texas State Legislature and signed into law two days later by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott. The bill unanimously passed the lower House by a vote of 131-0, and then the Senate by a vote of 25-4.
When Abbott signed the bill in a ceremony held at the Austin Jewish Community Center, he proclaimed: “Any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy.”
The bill’s language is so sweeping that some victims of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Southwest Texas in late 2017, were told that they could only receive state disaster relief if they first signed a pledge never to boycott Israel. That demand was deeply confusing to those hurricane victims in desperate need of help but who could not understand what their views of Israel and Palestine had to do with their ability to receive assistance from their state government.
The evangelical author of the Israel bill, Republican Texas state Rep. Phil King, said at the time that its application to hurricane relief was a “misunderstanding,” but nonetheless emphasized that the bill’s purpose was indeed to ensure that no public funds ever go to anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.
At the time that Texas enacted the law barring contractors from supporting a boycott of Israel, it was the 17th state in the country to do so. As of now, 26 states have enacted such laws — including blue states run by Democrats such as New York, California, and New Jersey — while similar bills are pending in another 13 states.
This map compiled by Palestine Legal shows how pervasive various forms of Israel loyalty oath requirements have become in the U.S.; the states in red are ones where such laws are already enacted, while the states in the darker shade are ones where such bills are pending:
Map: Palestine Legal
The vast majority of American citizens are therefore now officially barred from supporting a boycott of Israel without incurring some form of sanction or limitation imposed by their state. And the relatively few Americans who are still free to form views on this hotly contested political debate without being officially punished are in danger of losing that freedom, as more and more states are poised to enact similar censorship schemes.
One of the first states to impose such repressive restrictions on free expression was New York. In 2016, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing all agencies under his control to terminate any and all business with companies or organizations that support a boycott of Israel. “If you boycott Israel, New York State will boycott you,” Cuomo proudly tweeted, referring to a Washington Post op-ed he wrote that touted that threat in its headline.
As The Intercept reported at the time, Cuomo’s order “requires that one of his commissioners compile ‘a list of institutions and companies’ that — ‘either directly or through a parent or subsidiary’ — support a boycott. That government list is then posted publicly, and the burden falls on [the accused boycotters] to prove to the state that they do not, in fact, support such a boycott.”
Like the Texas law, Cuomo’s Israel order reads like a parody of the McCarthy era:
What made Cuomo’s censorship directive particularly stunning was that, just two months prior to issuing this decree, he ordered New York state agencies to boycott North Carolina in protest of that state’s anti-LGBT law. Two years earlier, Cuomo banned New York state employees from all nonessential travel to Indiana to boycott that state’s enactment of an anti-LGBT law.
So Cuomo mandated that his own state employees boycott two other states within his own country, a boycott that by design would harm U.S. businesses, while prohibiting New York’s private citizens from supporting a similar boycott of a foreign nation upon pain of being barred from receiving contracts from the state of New York. That such a priority scheme is so pervasive — whereby boycotts aimed at U.S. businesses are permitted or even encouraged, but boycotts aimed at Israeli businesses are outlawed — speaks volumes about the state of U.S. politics and free expression, none of it good.
Following Cuomo, Texas’s GOP-dominated state legislature, and numerous other state governments controlled by both parties, the U.S. Congress, prodded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, began planning its own national bills to use the force of law to punish Americans for the crime of supporting a boycott of Israel. In July of last year, a group of 43 senators — 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats — supported a law, called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720), introduced by Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, that would criminalize participation in any international boycott of Israel.
After the American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement vehemently condemning Cardin’s bill as an attack on core free speech rights, one which “would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs,” numerous senators announced that they were re-considering their support.
But now, as The Intercept reported last week, a modified version of the bill is back and pending in the lame-duck session: “Cardin is making a behind-the-scenes push to slip an anti-boycott law into a last-minute spending bill being finalized during the lame-duck session.”
The ACLU has also condemned this latest bill because “its intent and the intent of the underlying state laws it purports to uphold are contrary to the spirit and letter of the First Amendment guarantee of freedoms of speech and association.” As the ACLU warned in a recent action advisory:
More dangerous attacks on free expression are difficult to imagine. Nobody who claims to be a defender of free speech or free expression — on the right, the left, or anything in between — can possibly justify silence in the face of such a coordinated and pure assault on these most basic rights of free speech and association.
One common misconception is that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech only bars the state from imprisoning or otherwise punishing people for speaking, but does not bar the state from conditioning the receipt of discretionary benefits (such as state benefits or jobs) on refraining from expressing particular opinions. Aside from the fact that, with some rare and narrow exceptions, courts have repeatedly held that the government is constitutionally barred under the First Amendment from conditioning government benefits on speech requirements — such as, say, enacting a bill that states that only liberals, or only conservatives, shall be eligible for unemployment benefits — the unconstitutional nature of Texas’s actions toward Bahia Amawi should be self-evident.
Imagine if, instead of being forced by the state to vow never to boycott Israel as a condition for continuing to work as a speech pathologist, Amawi was instead forced to pledge that she would never advocate for LGBT equality or engage in activism in support of or opposition to gun rights or abortion restrictions (by joining the National Rifle Association or Planned Parenthood), or never subscribe to Vox or the Daily Caller, or never participate in a boycott of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, or Russia due to vehement disagreement with those governments’ policies.
The tyrannical free speech denial would be self-evident and, in many of those comparable cases, the trans-ideological uproar would be instantaneous. As Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, warned: “[T]his template could be re-purposed to bar contracts with individuals or groups affiliated with or supportive of any political cause or organization — from the political Left or Right — that the majority in a legislature or the occupant of a governor’s office deemed undesirable.”
Recall that in 2012, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to block zoning permits allowing Chick-fil-A to expand, due to his personal disagreement with the anti-LGBT activism of that company’s top executive. As I wrote at the time in condemning the unconstitutional nature of the mayor’s actions: “If you support what Emanuel is doing here, then you should be equally supportive of a Mayor in Texas or a Governor in Idaho who blocks businesses from opening if they are run by those who support same-sex marriage — or who oppose American wars, or who support reproductive rights, or who favor single-payer health care, or which donates to LGBT groups and Planned Parenthood, on the ground that such views are offensive to Christian or conservative residents.”
Those official efforts in Chicago (followed by mayors of other liberal cities) to punish Chick-fil-A due to its executive’s negative views on LGBT equality were widely condemned even by liberal commentators, who were horrified that mayors would abuse their power to condition zoning rights based on a private citizen’s political viewpoints on a controversial issue. Obviously, if a company discriminated against LGBT employees in violation of the law, it would be legitimate to act against them, but as Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum correctly noted, this was a case of pure censorship: “There’s really no excuse for Emanuel’s and [Boston Mayor Thomas] Menino’s actions. … You don’t hand out business licenses based on whether you agree with the political views of the executives. Not in America, anyway.”
The ACLU of Illinois also denounced the effort by Chicago against Chick-fil-A as “wrong and dangerous,” adding: “We oppose using the power and authority of government to retaliate against those who express messages that are controversial or averse to the views of current office holders.” That, by definition, is the only position that a genuine free speech defender can hold — regardless of agreement or disagreement with the specific political viewpoint being punished.
Last week, the ACLU’s Senior Legislative Counsel Kate Ruane explained why even the modified, watered-down, fully bipartisan version of the Israel oath bill pending in the U.S. Congress, and especially the already enacted bills in 26 states of the kind that just resulted in Amawi’s termination, are a direct violation of the most fundamental free speech rights:
This is a full-scale attack on Americans’ First Amendment freedoms. Political boycotts, including boycotts of foreign countries, have played a pivotal role in this nation’s history — from the boycotts of British goods during the American Revolution to the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa. And in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, the Supreme Court made clear that the First Amendment protects the right to participate in political boycotts.
The lawsuit which Amawi filed similarly explains that “economic boycotts for the purposes of bringing about political change are entrenched in American history, beginning with colonial boycotts on British tea. Later, the Civil Rights Movement relied heavily on boycotts to combat racism and spur societal change. The Supreme Court has recognized [in Claiborne] that non-violent boycotts intended to advance civil rights constitute ‘form[s] of speech or conduct that [are] ordinarily entitled to protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.'”
Who can justify that — as a condition for working with speech-impaired and developmentally disabled children — Amawi is forced by the state to violate her conscience and renounce her political beliefs by buying products from a country that she believes (in accordance with the U.N.) is illegally and brutally occupying land that does not belong to it? Whether or not you agree with her political view about Israel and Palestine, every American with an even minimal belief in the value of free speech should be vocally denouncing the attack on Amawi’s free speech rights and other Americans who are being similarly oppressed by these Israel-protecting censorship laws in the U.S.
As these Israel oath laws have proliferated, some commentators from across the ideological spectrum have noted what a profound threat to free speech they pose. The Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Friedman, for instance, explained that “it requires little imagination to see how criminalizing Americans’ participation in political boycotts of Israel could pave the way for further infringements to Americans’ right to support or join internationally-backed protests on other issues.” She correctly described such laws as “a free speech exception for Israel.”
The libertarian lawyer Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, similarly warned: “It is not a proper function of law to force Americans into carrying on foreign commerce they personally find politically objectionable, whether their reasons for reluctance be good, bad, or arbitrary.”
National Review’s Noah Daponte-Smith last year denounced the Cardin bill seeking to criminalize advocacy of the Israel boycott as “so mind-bogglingly stupid that it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it,” adding that the bill “penalizes political beliefs and so is both unconstitutional and unconscionable.” The conservative writer continued: “The senators who currently support it should be, quite frankly, ashamed of themselves; they have lost sight of one of the founding principles of American government, allowing it to be overshadowed by the spectral world of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute.”
Meanwhile, though, there is an entire pundit class that has made very lucrative careers from posing as defenders and crusaders for free speech — from Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, and Bari Weiss to the glittering renegades of the intellectual dark web — who fall notoriously silent whenever censorship is aimed at critics of Israel (there are some rare exceptions, such as when Chait tweeted about Cardin’s bill: “BDS is awful, but this bill criminalizing it sounds insane and unconstitutional,” and when Weiss criticized Israel for barring a Jewish-American boycott advocate from entering).
CNN’s recent firing of Marc Lamont Hill due to his pro-Palestine speech, and the threats from the chair of Temple University’s Board of Trustees to fire Hill from his tenured position over his contempt for the views expressed in that speech, produced not a word of protest from this crowd. The same was true of the University of Illinois’s costly decision to rescind a teaching offer to Palestinian-American professor Steven Salaita for the thought crime of condemning Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
But as The Intercept has repeatedly documented, the most frequent victims of official campus censorship are not conservative polemicists but pro-Palestinian activists, and the greatest and most severe threat posed to free speech throughout the west is aimed at Israel critics — from the arresting of French citizens for the “crime” of wearing “Boycott Israel” T-shirts to Canadian boycott activists being overtly threatened with prosecution to the partial British criminalization of the boycott of Israel.
Put simply, it is impossible to be a credible, effective, genuine advocate of free speech and free discourse without objecting to the organized, orchestrated, sustained onslaught of attacks on the free speech and free association rights undertaken specifically to protect the Israeli government from criticism and activism. Self-professed free speech defenders who only invoke that principle when their political allies are targeted are, by definition, charlatans and frauds. Genuine free speech advocates object to censorship even when, arguably especially when, the free speech rights of their political adversaries are assaulted.
Anyone who stands by silently while Bahia Amawi is forced out of the profession she has worked so hard to construct all because of her refusal to renounce her political views and activism — while the young children she helps are denied the professional support they need and deserve — can legitimately and accurately call themselves many things. “Free speech supporter” is most definitely not one of them.
The post A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — so She Lost Her Job appeared first on The Intercept.
Threat Report: The Senate Intelligence Committee released two new commissioned reports that illustrate just how heavily Russian disinformation efforts targeted African-American voters in the 2016 presidential election—using strategies similar to the Trump campaign’s, writes David A. Graham. An unrelated report released Monday by foreign-policy experts says that though the current administration is lucky that it hasn’t yet faced a large-scale international crisis, a cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure and networks by a state actor ranks as one of its highest risks for 2019.
Legal Lurch: A federal judge in Texas ruled last Friday that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The case faces another trip through the courts, and even if higher courts don’t sustain the Texas ruling, uncertainty around the future of the health law will still cause turmoil for many people. But “for now, if only through inertia, Obamacare persists,” Vann R. Newkirk II writes. In other legal matters, Garrett Epps explains the issues around President Donald Trump’s confidence in a presidential self-pardon.
A Heavy Truth: Looking forward to unwrapping a weighted blanket this holiday season, but unfamiliar with the origins of the fad? Weighted blankets were first designed to help children with autism-spectrum disorders cope with sensory processing challenges, writes Ashley Fetters, and the wildly popular comfort item remains a necessary clinical tool for many.
—Haley Weiss and Shan Wang
Snapshot
What happens after a U.S. president declares a “national emergency,” and what new powers are uncovered for the president after such a declaration? Elizabeth Goitein examines the possibilities, from martial law to the control of all American internet traffic. (Illustration by The Voorhes)Evening ReadFranklin Foer sat down with the New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (and likely 2020 presidential hopeful), a conversation that got at the root of Booker’s political philosophy: it’s all about love, including love for President Donald Trump.
Foer: To pose the obvious and vexing question, can you find love for Donald Trump?
Booker: When I gave a speech at the convention, Trump tweeted something really mean about me, veiledly dark. You know, almost a weird kind of attack on me.
Foer: Who would expect that from a Trump tweet?
Booker: Then next morning, I’m out with Chris Cuomo on CNN and he puts up the tweet. I think he was trying to get a rise out of me. He goes, “What do you have to say to Donald Trump?” I said, “I love you Donald Trump. I don’t want you to be my president; I’m going to work very hard against you. But I’m never going to let you twist me and drag me down so low as to hate you.”
Foer: But not hating Donald Trump is different than actually finding love for Donald Trump.
Booker: My faith tradition is love your enemies. It’s not complicated for me, if I aspire to be who I say I am. I am a Christian American. Literally written in the ideals of my faith is to love those who hate you. I don’t see why that’s so shocking. But that doesn’t mean that I will be complicit in oppression. That doesn’t mean I will be tolerant of hatred.
Something I talked about in my New Hampshire speeches and New Hampshire house parties is the example of Lindsey Graham and what he said during the [Brett] Kavanaugh hearings. One side might call it a rant, one side might call it a noble exposition. But I have to say, I was not happy about it. Obviously he made me angry; obviously I disagreed with what he was saying. But just a few weeks later, he and I are on the phone to the White House. He is defending one of the provisions I want in the criminal-justice-reform bill that’s heading to the floor now, effectively ending juvenile solitary confinement. He was a partner with me.
What Do You Know … About Education?1. Last month, the Stevens Point branch of this U.S. university announced plans to stop offering six liberal-arts majors: geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art, and history.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. In a worrying higher-education phenomenon known as this, high-achieving high-school students do not attend the most selective colleges their qualifications suggest they could.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Now 20 years old, the book The Care and Keeping of You, published by American Girl, is a beloved head-to-toe guide for girls about what topic?
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: University of Wisconsin / Undermatching / Puberty
Dear TherapistEvery week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. This week, an anonymous reader from New Jersey writes in:
A few years ago, my sister stopped giving my children and me birthday gifts. I continued to send her and her children gifts. For their 14th and 16th birthdays, however, I stopped in response. The gifts themselves are not the issue—it’s totally fine to stop sending gifts (and none of us really needs anything anyway), but I'm wondering what prompted this change since she still sends gifts to my other sister’s kids. She’s never said anything about it.
We did have an argument four years ago, but that was resolved and everything has seemingly been fine for years. But I wonder if she has some issue with me that I’m not aware of. Should I ask her about it? I don’t want her to think she needs to send my kids gifts. That's beside the point. I'm just wondering if there was some message I missed that I should address. Or should I just let it go?
Read Lori’s response, and write to her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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Written by Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal) and Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)
Today in 5 LinesRepublican Senator Lamar Alexander announced that he would not seek reelection in 2020, setting up Tennessee for its second Senate election in two years after Republican Marsha Blackburn won her seat in November.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explicitly said for the first time that he supports legalizing recreational marijuana in New York and announced that it would be one of his legislative priorities in early 2019.
Two new reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee detail how Russian trolls attempted to depress voter turnout among African Americans in the 2016 campaign.
Former FBI Director James Comey testified in a closed-door hearing in front of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, after already testifying for six hours earlier this month.
A former business partner of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national-security adviser, was charged with conspiracy and acting as an agent of a foreign country after lobbying to have a Turkish cleric extradited from the U.S.
Today on The AtlanticThe World in 2019: According to foreign-policy experts, this is what lies in wait for the United States—and the world—in the year to come. (Uri Friedman)
The Future of Obamacare: The landmark health-care legislation was struck down in a Texas court this weekend. Here’s what comes next. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
Love Language: In an interview with Franklin Foer, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker talks about his faith, his potential run for president, and why he’s “leaning even more into” love—even for Trump.
Pardon Me, Sir: What would happen if Trump tried to pardon himself? Garrett Epps breaks down the possible scenarios.
The Future of Farming: A small-dollar provision in the new farm bill strengthens programs for farmers outside the current dominant, aging, white demographic. (Olivia Paschal)
Snapshot
Furniture to be moved sits in the hall outside congressional offices weeks before the end of the term, as dozens of outgoing and incoming members of Congress move into and out of Washington. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)What We’re ReadingHow to Win in 2020: The Democrats’ best chance to take the White House is to put forward an economic populist, argues David Leonhardt. (The New York Times)
‘A Trump Personality Cult’: The death of The Weekly Standard marks a turning point in not only conservative media, but also conservative ideology. (Seth Masket, Pacific Standard)
Testing the Waters: Julian Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development, is thinking about running for president. Could he have a shot at turning Texas blue? (Ryan C. Brooks, BuzzFeed News)
Who’s to Blame?: Paul Ryan is on the conservative speaking circuit blaming everybody but himself for the current state of American politics, writes Tara Golshan. (Vox)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
As the border between the United States and Mexico began to figure more and more prominently in the news cycle, the filmmaker David Freid noticed a consistent blind spot: No one, it seemed, was talking to the people who actually lived there.
He decided to pay a visit to Big Bend National Park, which composes 13 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. There, he encountered Mike Davidson, the captain of the Rio Grande’s only international ferry.
“But we discovered that the international ferry was a rowboat,” Freid told The Atlantic.
Though no hulking vessel, the modest boat transports 11,000 annual visitors—a feat for which Davidson, whom Freid describes as “a good ambassador between Mexico and the United States,” has been responsible for more than 40 years.
Freid’s short documentary Ferryman at the Wall is the story of two countries that, for the most part, peacefully coexist where it matters most: at the dividing line. “When there’s a fire in Big Bend National Park, residents from Boquillas, Mexico, come up to help fight it,” Freid said. Davidson, an American, has homes in both Texas and Mexico; he speaks Spanish and English fluently. Freid found that this cultural melding was commonplace in the towns adjacent to Big Bend.
“There isn’t just a straight line where one country ends and the other begins,” Freid said. “People’s family and friends extend in both directions. The land on either side of the Rio Grande is identical, and the people are close to identical as well. The two countries bleed into each other.”
Davidson echoes that sentiment in the film. “These countries are entwined more than people could ever imagine,” he says. “Politicians get a lot of mileage talking hard about the border when they absolutely don’t have a clue.”
A man rejected by a woman pops up unannounced at her workplace with roses, asking her to reconsider. Adorable or creepy? The case for creepy would seem easy to make, what with the guy’s violation of space, forcing of a private matter into a communal spectacle, and implication that love can be bought with gifts. In some cases, such a stunt can even be a tell for something more dangerous: “Showing up unannounced” is one of four things listed in an article titled “It’s Not Cute, It’s Stalking: The Warning Signs” on the website of One Love, a nonprofit “working to ensure everyone understands the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship.”
Popular culture has other ideas about such gestures, though. Romantic comedies regularly broadcast the desperate-love gambit—Love Actually’s sign at the door, Say Anything...’s boom box over the head—as a rite of passage on the way to a happy ending. Usually, it is men who make the supposedly noble overture; the idea that the story might be flipped led to the subversive TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
A 2015 study at the University of Michigan found that such works really do influence viewer attitudes on how men should act. Its author, Julia Lippman, explained her findings to The Atlantic’s Julie Beck: “Maybe you’d be slightly more likely to think, ‘Oh, he showed up at my workplace with flowers, when I told him I wasn’t interested already. I’m probably just overreacting; I’m sure he was just trying to be nice.’”
This weekend at the Rolling Loud Festival in L.A., Cardi B’s headlining set was interrupted by Migos’s Offset, her estranged husband, flanked by roses spelling out TAKE ME BACK CARDI. The two rappers had separated weeks earlier, months after the birth of a daughter, and early Saturday morning he’d posted an Instagram apology for cheating on her and a plea to reconcile. He reiterated that message at Rolling Loud, saying into a mic, “I’m sorry, bruh.” Her response was inaudible, but her body language read as go away.
The public reactions to these incidents have sorted into two kinds. Some male rappers, including 50 Cent and T.I., have cheered Offset and urged Cardi to make amends with him. “Now I don’t know all the dynamics between you two nor does anyone else on the internet,” said The Game on Instagram in a since-deleted post, “but what I do know is you guys look great together & with the marriage & addition of your beautiful baby girl … it’s only right you guys re-unite immediately for the good of you guys family unit.”
Other commentators, many of them women, find Offset’s wooing unsettling—and reminiscent of nightmares from their own lives. “The thing that stands out the most is how many women have been there,” tweeted Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement. “So many of us have ‘crazy ex’ stories that were a ‘little scary’ but ended up ok - kinda.” She then listed some of those stories, which included instances of men threatening and committing violence. “Few things are more scary than a rejected man with a bruised ego,” she wrote. “We are literally watching this slow moving train and regardless of how Cardi responds moving forward we can’t let this kind of behavior go unchecked.”
Cardi has said she just wants the situation to “die down” and has asked that the public not attack Offset. “Unfortunately, we going through some things, it’s not private,” she said in an Instagram video emphasizing that he was still family. “I’m not saying that I’m gonna get back together with him. I just don’t like that bashing online thing.” She also invoked the comedian Pete Davidson, who this weekend responded to controversy about him, Ariana Grande, and Kanye West with statements that appeared suicidal (police found him safe). Said Cardi, “I wouldn’t want my baby father to have that feeling because millions of people be bashing him every day.”
That’s a graceful reaction on her part, given that Offset taking his case to the court of public opinion could be considered an act of aggression: Cardi, presumably, did not have a choice in whether to negotiate her potential divorce on the world’s stage. Yet it’s her, not him, who’s trying to mitigate the blowback to Offset. This is not necessarily only out of the goodness of her heart. She’s trapped: He’s the father of their child, and he’s going to be in her life one way or another. He has leverage, and he’s using it.
On a few levels, it’s a story familiar in relationships famous and civilian. Women are so often tasked with making decisions for the good of the children and at the expense of their own autonomy. Men, statistically, are more likely to cheat. There will be comparisons to the saga of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, whose music has chronicled his betrayals and her forgiveness. But however Bey and Jay reconciled, it was in private before it was in public. The better comparison for Offset is with Robin Thicke, whose officious 2014 album pleaded for the love of his ex, Paula Patton. (Not long after the album’s debut, she filed for divorce and accused him of domestic abuse.)
In going the public route, Offset is extending the logic of the spectacular marriage proposal—which puts a woman on the spot before the jury of society, intensifying a personal decision with the weight of cultural pressures to form families—to a new place, placing an even greater burden on the woman. She’s expected to save not only her own marriage, but also the entire institution of marriage. This is explicit: In his appeal to Cardi, The Game wrote that she needs to help set “super dope examples for this new generation of growing couples to remain solid and really stay true to those wedding vows.”
If anyone can navigate this sort of scrutiny, it’s Cardi B, an auteur of living in culture’s eye, who seems to have no trouble asserting herself. Then again, being a celebrity brings special perils. The organizers of the Rolling Loud Festival say that Offset could not have gotten onstage without the artist’s approval, so it is possible that someone in Cardi’s camp was in on his stunt. Some have even speculated that she herself conspired with him as part of a long ploy to build profitable buzz through scandal.(Cardi has denied that the Rolling Loud incident was staged.) It’s quite the accusation, one that would—among other things—make her complicit in broadcasting dangerous ideas about men and women. For now, though, she simply appears to be the target of those ideas.
Donna Chambers first heard about weighted blankets when her grandson was diagnosed with autism. It was just before his third birthday, and someone Chambers knew recommended giving him a heavy quilt with plastic pellets sewn in to help him relax and fall asleep. “It was like somebody’s grandma was making them,” Chambers remembers. “They said, ‘You can talk to this lady, and she can make you one.’” She looked online and found a few other options; mostly, though, she saw an opportunity. She contacted a friend from her church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who could sew: “I was like, ‘I want to make one of these blankets. Do you think you could help me?’”
So when Chambers started her weighted-blanket company, SensaCalm, in 2008, she knew she hadn’t invented the device. Rather, she’d joined a tiny cottage industry of weighted-blanket makers—many of them small companies with names such as Therapy Shoppe, DreamCatcher, and Salt of the Earth Weighted Gear that sold blankets alongside products such as weighted vests, shoulder wraps, and lap pads. Research suggests that deep pressure on the body can calm the nervous system. One parent of a 12-year-old with Asperger’s wrote in a heartfelt product testimonial that her son’s first night with a weighted blanket was his best night of sleep ever.
In the past decade, most of Chambers’s business has come from word-of-mouth evangelism between parents of kids with special needs. SensaCalm grew from just Chambers and her friend to a staff of 30, and the company’s year-end order total has doubled every year of its existence—except for this year. Now, for the first time, SensaCalm is looking at smaller sales than expected. Similarly, the Nebraska-based Salt of the Earth has had to reduce its workforce from eight women who worked at home, some while homeschooling their kids, to just two. Chambers and Salt of the Earth’s owner, Annie Peters, both know why: Starting in late 2017, “you couldn’t go on the internet or turn on the TV without seeing those beautiful ads,” Peters says.
Last year, the best-selling Gravity Blanket parlayed a mega-successful Kickstarter campaign into a wildly popular product: one of the first weighted blankets marketed to the general public. Made in Shenzhen, China, and sold for $249 by the products wing of the New York–based Futurism media company, Gravity Blankets had grossed some $15 million in sales by May 2018. Last month, Time magazine named “blankets that ease anxiety”—the Gravity Blanket and other popular models that have hit the market since—one of the best inventions of 2018.
When I asked Chambers what reading that felt like for her, she laughed politely. “Frankly, it was a little bit infuriating,” she admits. Not all weighted-blanket companies have been hurt by the sudden influx of competitors; Mosaic Weighted Blankets, for example, founded in 2012, has seen its sales increase this year. But to people like Chambers, the triumphant story of the Gravity Blanket and many of its new contemporaries sounds more like a story of appropriation—a story about the sale of the special-needs community’s promise of life-changing comfort to the meditation-app-using, Instagram-shopping masses.
Weighted blankets have been used as sleep aids and calming aids in special-needs communities for years. Some of the earliest implementations date back to 1999, when the occupational therapist Tina Champagne began using weighted blankets to help some mental-health patients. Autism researchers such as Amanda Richdale at La Trobe University in Australia estimate that up to 80 percent of children with autism-spectrum disorders have sleep problems—which often stem from sensory issues, such as sensitivity to particular textures grazing the skin, according to Lindsey Biel, the author of Sensory Processing Challenges: Effective Clinical Work With Kids and Teens. Weighted blankets tend to decrease movement and thus friction. Many special-needs individuals also tend to experience overarousal of the nervous system, Biel says, and in recent years, the blankets have been implemented to help veterans with PTSD symptoms sleep through the night without panic attacks or night terrors.
[Read: Why do we need to sleep?]
Peters told me that in her 15 years making weighted blankets, “I’ve had people call me and just go on and on about what a difference it makes to have their child sleep all night. Because then the parent can sleep all night. Then they can cut back on meds. The kids don’t go to school under [the influence of] drugs or groggy.”
But companies such as SensaCalm and Salt of the Earth have largely been relegated to footnotes in the sensational success story of the Gravity Blanket and the new generation of mass-market weighted blankets it has spawned. They get mentioned only passingly, and rarely by name, as a brief nod to the blanket’s origins.
I first encountered a weighted blanket out in the world sometime around 2011. A close friend of mine in college got one as a gift from her boyfriend—still, in my opinion, the greatest boyfriend gift I have ever witnessed—and soon all of our friends had tried it out. We were dazzled. What was this heavenly object, and how did being under it make us feel so sleepy, so fast?
I thought about the blanket on and off for the next five years, fondly, the way you might think about someone you met just once who enchanted you and then vanished into your past. Finally, in the late months of 2016, at the low point of a bout of wintertime loneliness, I decided to buy my own from the company my friend had recommended—SensaCalm. But when I looked at the website and read the glowing testimonials from parents of kids with autism-spectrum disorders, I got a weird feeling. I don’t have autism or a sensory disorder. This product was not marketed to me—and if I were to buy one of these blankets and then inevitably preach the gospel of weighted blankets to my non-special-needs friends, would we be hijacking their purpose? Worse, would our custom-blanket orders knock theirs further down the list and make their wait time longer?
It’s hard to argue that the proliferation of weighted blankets is a bad thing, from an overall well-being standpoint—the feeling of being held or swaddled is, after all, known to have a calming effect on all types of people throughout life. One could even argue that the weighted-blanket craze has helped normalize needing help getting to sleep at night or feeling calm. Biel, the occupational therapist, says it was “no surprise to see this wonderful and potentially powerful calming tool reach the general population.” Peters, the Salt of the Earth owner, agrees: “They’re an amazing thing, and I’m just glad they’re out there.”
Read: The exceptional cruelty of a no-hugging policy
Still, the mainstreaming of the weighted blanket seems to imply a conflating of chronic anxiety or sensory issues with feelings of stress—or, perhaps more ominously, the repackaging of a coping strategy that originated in a marginalized community as a profitable relaxation fad at a moment when people feel particularly stressed.
The economic story line in the weighted blanket’s rise to mass-market popularity is, all told, an unremarkable one, and these small-business owners know it: That a company with ample resources (and savvy branding strategies) might shift profit away from its rivals with less and flood the market with even more competition should surprise nobody.
But the precise moment of the Gravity Blanket’s arrival may have also had something to do with its success. Mike Grillo, the co-founder of the Gravity Blanket, told Time that while he was aware that he didn’t invent the weighted blanket, he credited his product’s success to its look and feel (more luxurious than some of its predecessors, Time explained) and to good timing. “The 2016 election was still fresh in people’s minds,” he told the magazine. People were anxious and looking for relief.
Indeed, it’s not uncommon to attribute the new popularity of weighted blankets to a rise in feelings of stress and worry in the United States. In early 2018, Jia Tolentino wrote in a New Yorker essay titled “The Seductive Confinement of a Weighted Blanket in an Anxious Time” that “it struck me as not coincidental that Gravity’s Kickstarter success arrived deep into a period when many Americans were beginning their e-mails with reflexive, panicked condolences about the news.”
When I spoke to Grillo for this story, he characterized the surging popularity of weighted blankets as just one piece of the recent cultural obsession with sleep and its role in a wholesome, healthy lifestyle. At Futurism, he says, “a lot of the stuff the readers were gravitating toward were like the science of sleep and the science of meditation and mindfulness. So we started thinking of things we could build in that space.”
Grillo says he was aware that weighted blankets had been popular tools in populations with specialized needs. If it helps these populations, he figured, maybe it can help the rest of us, too. The research they drew on, he says, “was conducted in these smaller patient populations—kids with autism, adults with PTSD, [people] in psychiatric hospitals going through very acute bouts of anxiety or psychosis.” But while he likes to emphasize that there’s science to support the benefits of weighted blankets, the company also wanted to make a few changes from the existing models (a few of which it bought and tested, and found to be “really dope”) to appeal to a broader customer base: “We don’t want to make it feel too clinical for our customer.”
There are moments, though, when the mass-market weighted blanket seems to emphasize its clinical pedigree. While the most popular way for newer manufacturers to describe the appeal of their product is something along the lines of “It feels like getting a hug,” the more sciencey-sounding benefits are a close second: The Kickstarter campaign for the Reviv Blanket explains to readers that that feeling of being hugged “increases serotonin and melatonin, while decreasing the stress hormone cortisol.” Baloo Living writes on its website that “the deep pressure touch soothes the nervous system, alleviates stress and anxiety, and increases serotonin production.” Other brands, meanwhile, like to claim that their products can flat-out “reduce anxiety,” as the Amazon-selling brand YnM does in a graphic.
As The New Yorker noted, Gravity got “busted” early in its Kickstarter campaign by the health-news website Stat for claiming that it could “treat a variety of ailments,” such as insomnia, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ADHD. The language on the Kickstarter page was changed to say that it could be “used” for those ailments, and then was removed altogether. The Gravity Blanket website still claims that the blanket “increases serotonin and melatonin levels and decreases cortisol levels—improving your mood and promoting restful sleep at the same time. All without ever filling a prescription.”
Chambers reassures me that she’s always had customers who didn’t have special needs but who caught on to how nice a weighted blanket could feel; she doesn’t seem to believe any person or any kind of person necessarily deserves the benefits of a weighted blanket more than anyone else. Still, she says the current weighted-blanket fad has altered the longer-established weighted-blanket industry, and maybe permanently. “We’ve always had competitors,” she says. “There’s always been room for all of us. But Gravity Blanket was kind of a whole different thing.”
With a bit more than a week left until Christmas, lighted displays, colorful markets, and Santa’s helpers are out in force. From Europe to the Americas and Asia, gathered here as an early gift, is a collection of holiday cheer and light wrapped up in 35 photographs.
Federal open-enrollment season rarely, if ever, seems to go smoothly. In 2017, President Donald Trump’s administration cut the budget for Affordable Care Act advertisement by 90 percent, and slashed the window to sign up for new health-insurance plans by 15 days. In a scramble to counter those rollbacks, former President Barack Obama himself had to cut an ad promoting his signature policy achievement.
The year before that, misinformation and anxiety proliferated in advance of then-President-elect Trump’s promises to repeal Obamacare. And even before that, the annual sign-up season wasn’t too far removed from catastrophic glitches and poor recruitment among young adults. All those disturbances are reminders that while the bulk of the massive Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, it is still a rather delicate experiment.
This year’s open enrollment was no different. The window, which ended at midnight Pacific time on the night of December 15 for most states, was marked by the same old disorder, as well as by the loss of the individual requirement to purchase insurance—which Congress essentially repealed in 2017, effective in 2019. But the biggest disturbance came right at the end, when on December 14 a federal judge ruled that the entire law was unconstitutional. Anybody still considering signing up for insurance during open enrollment was faced with a number of uncertainties. What does the ruling mean, and will Obamacare even still be around to cover people in the future?
The ruling probably comes as a shock to voters, who just experienced the first election cycle in almost a decade when Republicans didn’t necessarily run with a promise to repeal Obamacare. In fact, Republicans often ran on vague promises to “protect” preexisting conditions, and ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid picked up traction across the country, even in deep red states. In 2018, across the political spectrum, voters came out in favor of the law.
Yet even as the GOP campaigned on a more ambivalent position regarding the substance of the Affordable Care Act, much of the Republican brain trust and the Trump administration were involved in another concerted effort to dismantle the entire law. In a lawsuit joined by 19 Republican-led state governments, Texas prosecutors argued that because Congress removed the penalty for failure to purchase insurance—in essence, voiding one of the pivotal pieces of the Affordable Care Act—the rest of the intricate pieces of policy in the law that depend on that provision must also be voided.
Instead of defending the law, the Trump Justice Department agreed with a good portion of that analysis in briefs. On Friday, district court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument, saying that the act “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power,” and that since he could not go through the bill and find out which pieces could be severed safely, the entire law must be thrown out.
That argument was always considered far-fetched, and for both people seeking insurance and those keeping score on the political side, the upshot is: It still probably is. O’Connor’s decision rests on three fundamentally controversial and perhaps tenuous interpretations of the law that may be rejected as the case is considered in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, or by the Supreme Court, should it get that far.
The first is whether the plaintiffs even had standing to file a suit. According to a press release from the American Medical Association, which filed a brief in favor of the ACA, “The plaintiffs do not have standing because they have not suffered any real, concrete injury. They do not have to pay a penny in tax if they choose not to obtain health insurance. That unavoidable fact makes clear that the plaintiffs simply seek to change the federal government’s health care policy through the courts, rather than through the legislature.”
The second issue is whether Congress even repealed the individual mandate provision at all. Since Republicans in the Senate this year could not put together a filibuster-proof majority, they used a procedural move related to Congress’s tax powers to zero out the tax penalty for the individual mandate, a move that required only a majority vote. Under that “reconciliation” provision, Congress cannot make major policy changes, but can change items that relate to the budget. The ACA’s defenders claim that this move did not actually remove the mandate, but just made the penalty zero dollars.
The third issue before Judge O’Connor was the matter of whether the constituent pieces of the Affordable Care Act are “severable,” even if Congress did invalidate one piece of it. The principle of severability dictates whether courts can strike down whole laws if pieces of them are removed by legislation. According to Jonathan H. Adler and Abbe R. Gluck, two law professors, in an op-ed in The New York Times, “The principle presumes that, out of respect for the separation of powers, courts will leave the rest of the statute standing unless Congress makes clear it did not intend for the law to exist without the challenged provision.” In the view of pro-ACA lawyers, Congress’s very choice to pursue reconciliation indicates that the body did not intend to strike down the entire ACA at all.
For the immediate and near-term future, all this means that nothing much is changing for Obamacare. O’Connor did not issue an injunction against any part of the law, likely expecting an appeal and stay from the Democratic state attorneys general defending the ACA. Really, as the lawsuit barrels toward the higher courts and as partisan battle lines are drawn around it, the resolution to this drama could be far off, meaning most of the uncertainty is in the future.
But as the past few years have illustrated, future uncertainty is a key shaping agent of how such a complicated law plays out today. As predicted, open enrollment this year started out weak, with the federal healthcare.gov portal reporting a 12 percent drop-off in sign-ups through December 8.
While some of that drop-off is likely good news to some ACA advocates, since it reflects the spread of the Medicaid expansion to several states, part of the drop-off is undeniably connected to the loss of the individual mandate and the atmosphere of confusion that emanates from the White House. Especially for younger, healthier participants, Obamacare marketplaces rely on late surges to make a good deal of the final volume of sign-ups. With an adverse, complicated decision coming on the eve of the deadline, it’s unclear whether that traditional surge came through.
As a consequence, some Democratic officials are lobbying for an expansion of open enrollment. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on “the Trump administration to extend this year’s enrollment period to allow us the chance to do just that, and to make it clear that the Affordable Care Act and its protections remain the law,” citing “disarray” from O’Connor’s decision as a reason.
Of course, the “disarray” suits President Trump, who has made it clear since his inauguration that both official attempts to repeal the law and bureaucratic efforts to derail it are wins for his priorities. In the wake of the loss of the individual mandate and chilled open-enrollment numbers, O’Connor’s decision itself—regardless of its chances in higher courts—is a victory for Trump. In the absence of the legislative or even popular will to repeal Obamacare, maximizing chaos will do just fine for Trump’s agenda.
The evidence available indicates that the chaos is degrading Obamacare and is negatively affecting people’s ability to find affordable coverage. Despite a strong economy that has buoyed Trump politically and reduced poverty, in 2018 the number of uninsured children rose. That’s not a small deal. Even beyond the Affordable Care Act, one of the less ambiguous public-policy triumphs of the past 50 years has been the precipitous and steady decline in uninsured children, a decline essentially broken only by the Great Recession of the past decade. This spike is an omen that could shape the health-policy landscape in years to come.
For now, if only through inertia, Obamacare persists. It is a true policy juggernaut, one that has survived a concerted effort to repeal it that spawned one of the strongest Republican-wave elections in history and two years of spear-brandishing from conservatives when they seized control of every lever of federal power in 2016.
It has grown from a controversial law that broke up dinner parties and bipartisan friendships to a background feature of American life that most people just accept as an overall positive layer of the bureaucracy. The ACA, at this point, is perhaps too big to be taken down in a single blow, as the GOP intends to do in Texas v. Azar. But, as Trump knows, with enough effort it is certainly not too big to fail.
Perhaps the most striking takeaway from a pair of new reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is the consistency and persistence with which Russian trolls sought to depress the black vote in the 2016 election.
That workers for the Internet Research Agency—a “troll farm” with close ties to the Kremlin—targeted African Americans has been clear for more than a year, emerging in a series of reports in fall 2017, and then receiving new attention in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA and several associated individuals.
But the two reports, commissioned from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and New Knowledge, provide an overwhelming amount of detail and information. There’s a remarkable amount of crossover between the Russians’ tactics and what the Donald Trump campaign said it was doing late in the 2016 race.
[Read: Trump’s ‘voter suppression operation’ targets black voters]
According to the Oxford team, African Americans were the single group targeted most heavily by the IRA—and it wasn’t even a close margin.
“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans,” the report states. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead.”
Many of these messages were explicit, talking at length about how not voting was the right step, and attacking Hillary Clinton for past statements, such as a 1990s comment about “superpredators.”
The New Knowledge report concurs, noting that “the most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities.” A sprawling visualization in the report shows the extent and interlinkage between various parts of the push—the graphic is such a mess of spaghetti ties that it’s almost impossible to track individual connections, which seems like the point. New Knowledge, too, highlights the extensive voter-suppression efforts.
Persuading African Americans to stay home was a staple of the Trump campaign’s approach, too. Barack Obama had twice won the presidency by motivating black turnout. Trump’s path to victory hinged on getting as many white voters to come out as possible while hoping the Obama coalition stayed home—or persuading them to do so.
Trump enacted a crude version of this from the stump, attacking Clinton and Democrats for their treatment of black voters, but making only peremptory, sloppy attempts at outreach (“What the hell do you have to lose?”), while continually treating minorities as an other. Meanwhile, his campaign was conducting a more elaborate version electronically, as Businessweek reported in late October 2016:
Instead of expanding the electorate, [the campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.
The reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg described an animation that a staffer had produced with cartoonish characters, reenacting Clinton’s “superpredator” remark. As officials told them, this was part of the attempt to persuade black voters to stay home.
At the time of the story, this seemed amateurish to many observers—the Clinton campaign was believed to possess a fearsome data machine, while the Trump team was messing around with memes. Then came the election results, with Clinton’s shocking loss. In retrospect, it’s clear just how powerful this kind of lo-fi influence operation can be, even if it’s impossible to calculate the specific impact it had on the election.
The new reports don’t just show the scale of the Russian efforts—they also show how similar the content and techniques of the IRA and the Trump campaign were. Trump’s critics have speculated about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian trolls, but so far—despite the many Trump associates who had contacts with Russian officials, no evidence has appeared connecting the campaign to the IRA.
[Read: The history of Russian involvement in America’s race wars]
In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the Russians were simply making informed choices based on what the Trump campaign was doing publicly. As any independent expenditure group can attest, being banned from communicating with a campaign doesn’t even begin to prevent you from discerning that campaign’s message and amplifying. Moreover, the Russians wouldn’t have needed much originality to hit on exploiting racial divisions within America, because, as Julia Ioffe has written, that was a well-established Soviet tactic long before Trump or Facebook.
But the congruency of the Trump and Russian efforts is notable, even in the absence of any coordination, because the president continues to deny—contra most members of his own administration—that the Russians even intervened in the 2016 election at all, much less to aid him. His denials are incredible, in the literal sense of the word, but the new evidence of how closely Russian tactics mirrored his own makes the way Moscow tried to help elect Trump even clearer.
The help could have had a powerful influence on the election results, too. New Knowledge concludes that Russian operations were more successful in penetrating the black community than any other group that was targeted. And prior analyses have found that declining black turnout in key states that Trump narrowly won, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, could have made the difference. Clinton would likely have struggled with black voters even without the IRA and the Trump campaign helping to depress turnout, but it turns out those memes weren’t nearly as childish, or as low-tech, as they seemed.
Comedy often thrives in specificity, and a sketch that came late in the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live was the perfect example, mining laugh after laugh from the minutiae of the band Weezer’s discography. Three couples, all neighbors, get together for dinner, and Weezer’s recent cover of Toto’s “Africa” randomly comes on the playlist. Two guests, played by Leslie Jones and the episode’s host, Matt Damon, have very strong opinions about the song, and about Weezer in general. The four others barely care about the disagreement that ensues, but they are suddenly a captive audience to a screaming argument.
Damon, wearing black-framed glasses, gives a spot-on performance as the self-satisfied nerd whose opinions are absolute, whether people like it or not. The equally brilliant Jones initially entertains his defense of the band’s more recent output, before hitting him with: “Real Weezer fans know that they haven’t had a good album since Pinkerton in ’96!” Their purist-versus-completist showdown continues, first in good fun, before descending into charged personal insults. “Oh, I’m sorry! You’re dumb!” Jones yells. “No offense, but burn in hell,” Damon shoots.
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible. “No offense … but drink my blood,” Damon tells Cecily Strong, playing another of the guests, when she tries to intervene.
The biggest joke of all? Weezer is, at this point, the epitome of Gen X dad rock, a pleasant-enough group that has been plugging away for 26 years to mostly middling critical returns. Most people, like the four other dinner guests in the sketch, would be hard-pressed to summon anything but the gentlest opinion on the band. But once Damon and Jones’s critical discourse begins, it quickly descends into polarized hot takes and name-calling. “Weezer? I didn’t even know they were still a band,” muses Beck Bennett. “Is this a thing people care about?” asks Heidi Gardner. “No. No, it isn’t,” replies Kenan Thompson.
The sketch tapped into Matt Damon’s skill for exhibiting a particularly privileged, white-bread kind of aggression, which SNL also deployed to start this season by casting Damon as Brett Kavanaugh. Damon returned, briefly, to that role in the show’s political “cold open” sketch, which imagined a world where Donald Trump wasn’t president, à la It’s a Wonderful Life. But some of the best sketches in Damon’s episode tapped into something warmer and more empathetic, a nice balance to the cartoonish fury of the Weezer showdown.
A digital short titled “Best Christmas Ever” mocked the typical chaos of the holiday by juxtaposing scenes of Damon and Strong as a happy couple saluting the day with scenes of the stressful reality that came with hosting their family. “Cop Christmas” took the tradition of hard-drinking fellas busting one another’s chops at the bar to wince-inducing extremes, but the underlying gag was how much the assembled characters wanted to declare their love for one another. Damon’s opening monologue was surprisingly heartfelt and lovely without sacrificing jokes, recollecting his experiences watching the show as a kid with his dad, who passed away a year ago.
If you just looked at the political sketches of Saturday Night Live in 2018, you might get the impression that the show was a step behind the times, struggling to find angles on President Trump beyond simple buffoonery and stunt casting of celebrities such as Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro. The show has also been somewhat overshadowed by the uneasy tabloid drama of Pete Davidson’s personal life and his penchant for tasteless jokes. But its nonpolitical sketch writing has been strong this year, and some of its newer cast members, such as Gardner and Chris Redd, show tremendous promise as potential stars going forward. This Christmas episode thrived when it was tapping into absurd humor and gentler, more humanistic slice-of-life material. Given the daily fury of the real world, it might be a smart direction for the show to lean into in 2019.
Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s 33-year-old speechwriter and senior adviser, is a true believer. He was an immigration hard-liner before Trump descended the golden escalator and made anti-immigration sentiment the hallmark of his campaign and his presidency. Miller has been a right-wing provocateur since high school, according to a profile from earlier this year in The Atlantic.
He’s made appearances on national television since his college years at Duke University, where he was an early defender of the lacrosse players accused of rape in an incident that divided the campus, and the nation, before the case fell apart. Yet he’s rarely seen on TV anymore. This weekend, in his first Sunday-show appearance in nearly a year, he reminded viewers why: The id of “Make America Great Again” is just too angry.
[Read: ]Trump’s right-hand troll
The last time Miller went on a Sunday show was in January, when he fought with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was trying to ask him about episodes from Michael Wolff’s factually challenged book. Miller wanted to talk only about what a “political genius” his boss was, rehashing his 2016 election win. When Tapper interrupted Miller’s musings with the comment that the president was probably watching and liked what Miller said, Miller objected to Tapper’s “snide remark” and launched an attack on CNN as “condescending.” Miller tried to tell a story about Trump spontaneously coming up with brilliant lines for a speech, but he had already told that story. Tapper said he had “wasted enough of my viewers’ time” and cut off the interview as Miller tried to extend an argument. During the commercial break, Miller kept berating Tapper. The host retorted, “This is the reason they don’t put you on TV, okay? This is the reason.” Miller reportedly refused to leave the set and was escorted out by security personnel.
On Sunday, he started with an emphatic “Merry Christmas” to the host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation. Miller is Jewish, but his firm greeting makes sense in light of his college opinion columns about anti-Christmas bias, including a 2006 piece titled “Attack of the Secularist Scrooges.” He tapped his fingers against his other hand, as if impatient for the conversation’s end before it had begun.
[Read: Stephen Miller’s biggest gamble yet]
Brennan asked first about a Texas judge’s ruling that found Obamacare unconstitutional, given changes in last year’s tax law. Miller delivered the key GOP talking point first, emphasizing that “there’s no change immediately in Obamacare.” He pivoted to asking whether Democrats would work with Republicans on a plan to replace their party’s crown jewel. Echoing another talking point, he accurately pointed out that 80 percent of people who paid a fine under Obamacare’s individual mandate made $50,000 a year or less. He spoke in a monotone of long sentences, as if reading from a script.
Then, with a spin that defied common sense, he blamed the Affordable Care Act for “the 28 million Americans who because of Obamacare still don’t have access to health insurance.” He was criticizing a Democratic law that helped reduce the number of uninsured from 44 million in 2013 to 27 million three years later, because it didn’t achieve total coverage.
Still, he was staying calm. When he said that “Obamacare has always been unconstitutional,” he let Brennan interrupt him to clarify that the judge’s ruling last week hinged on the GOP tax-cut law’s elimination of the fine for the uninsured. In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare in a narrow decision written by the Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts that classified the fine as a tax and found the law constitutional because of Congress’s taxing authority; with the fine removed, the federal judge in Texas ruled that the rest of the law cannot stand alone.
But when Brennan tried to ask a follow-up question about a potential Obamacare replacement, Miller talked over her. The transcript starts to look like a script for Whose Line Is It Anyway? as he interrupts her.
Brennan then turned to Miller’s passion, immigration. She asked who bears responsibility for the death of Jakelin Caal, the 7-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who died in U.S. Border Patrol custody about nine hours after she and her father were detained in the New Mexico desert. Miller began with an expression of sympathy before calling her death “a painful reminder of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy that is illegal immigration and the misery that it spreads.”
He blamed the large number of migrant families on “left-wing, activist judicial rulings that incentivize the most vulnerable populations to come to our country.” He was apparently referring to the 1997 Flores settlement, which sets limits on how long the government can detain migrant children, and a related 2015 ruling. He deployed the dark, dramatic language for which he is known, as in Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural speech: “Smuggling organizations profit off death and misery … vicious, vile organizations … grotesque … heinous, smuggling organizations.”
Miller’s volume grew louder, his voice deeper, and his tone more aggressive. He nearly shouted at Brennan about “a reckless nationwide injunction on the president’s order putting thousands of lives at risk.” To get in a question about the border wall, Brennan had to interject repeatedly and lean across the table. Once Miller trailed off, she asked whether Trump would allow a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t give him enough funding for the wall. Miller said the president is “absolutely” willing, as Trump himself made clear last week in his televised Oval Office argument with top congressional Democrats.
[Read: ]A brawl with the president on live TV
“This is a very fundamental issue,” Miller thundered. “At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country.” As he lectured Brennan on the costs of heroin smuggled into the country, he held up his hand to chop the air for emphasis. When Brennan seized the opening and tried to ask whether there will be a government shutdown over Christmas, he repeatedly talked over her as she finished her question:
Miller: As you yourself acknowledged, the largest increases in illegal immigration are categories that are incentivized by loopholes in our laws and loopholes created by activist, left-wing judges including—
Brennan: I didn’t say that.
Miller: —the district-court judge who enjoined—
Brennan: I said there are a record number happening right now in the Trump administration.
Miller: —in the categories that correspond with these loopholes.
“Stephen,” Brennan said, announcing the interview’s end, “it’s good to have you in studio.”
He’d spoken in long, scripted paragraphs, as though he were reading from a teleprompter. He’d practically shouted his answers in a one-on-one interview, as if he were plowing ahead with a speech despite a noisy heckler, rather than engaging in a conversation. He’d come across as furious, rather than passionate. But then again, there was only one person watching who really mattered.
On Sunday, The New York Times published “Put Down the Golf Clubs, Visit the Troops,” an editorial calling on President Donald Trump to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and visit Americans in conflict zones, even if he is scared for his safety, or he is very busy, or he disagrees with the wars in question and doesn’t want to be associated with leading them.
Doing so is “about those who are close to the enemy and far from home, following orders and serving a cause greater than themselves,” the newspaper argues, adding that a visit “isn’t just about raising morale and smiling for a few photos, though that can mean more to a young grunt than most civilians may realize. Americans want a president who isn’t afraid to look at and reflect upon the consequences of his decisions,” hence presidential visits to wounded vets and military graves.
[Eliot Cohen: Trump needs to visit the troops]
The editorial’s conclusion:
“I’m here on behalf of your commander in chief and all of the American people to pay a debt of honor and respect and gratitude to each and every one of you for your service and your sacrifice,” Vice President Mike Pence told soldiers and airmen at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan during a surprise visit in late December last year.
This holiday, it would be heartening to see the president himself deliver the same sentiment to America’s troops on the front lines, in his own words.
I dissent. I’d rather that Pence go again, and that Trump stay far away from the military, for the following seven reasons:
Sadly, Donald Trump does not possess the moral credibility necessary to successfully discharge the ceremonial duties of the commander in chief. It might be valuable for a different president to show his high regard for self-sacrifice and service to a cause greater than oneself—but no American is a less-credible vessel for that message than a famously greedy egomaniac who holds no cause above himself and constantly sacrifices others for his own benefit. The farce would demean all forced to treat it seriously. Trump also does not possess the meager amount of self-discipline necessary to successfully discharge the commander in chief’s ceremonial duties. Perhaps he’d responsibly deliver scripted remarks. But think how frequently he proves incompetent—as in his phone call to the widow of an American killed in action—or unable to master himself. It would degrade the morale of deployed troops if he betrayed utter ignorance of their mission, or used his appearance to imply that they side with him in a political fight, or said he likes military men who don’t get captured, or indulged in unseemly self-aggrandizement, or impulsively offered offhand praise for one of the several murderous dictators whom he admires. Trump has neither the judgment nor the discipline to reliably avoid errors of that sort—his downside is much bigger than his upside. Insofar as Trump has sycophantic supporters within the military, his frequently irresponsible rhetoric and odious moral character might influence them to behave as he does. That is not to say the same for all his supporters. There are good men and women who supported his candidacy and still approve of his presidency. Some would get a thrill from having their photograph taken with the president. They are the strongest argument for him going. They’ll get a lesser thrill from a photo with the veep. But it will come free of the other downsides, and is less likely to be seen in a negative light a few years hence, when more people know more about Trump’s worst misdeeds. Americans may “want a president who isn’t afraid to look at and reflect upon the consequences of his decisions,” but we do not have a president of that sort. That isn’t going to change simply because he visits Bagram Airfield, especially if he does so under duress. To the degree that such a visit gives the impression of a reflective president, it will mislead Americans, undercutting the unease they ought to feel as long as the current occupant of the White House governs. Substantively, Trump has no idea what he is doing as commander in chief—and his disconcerting habits include an abiding faith in his own gut instincts, a penchant for acting on whims, and a habit of reacting to whatever it is that the folks on Fox News are focusing on. The last thing American troops need is Trump wandering around a conflict zone offering whatever instructions occur to him, or repeating to the troops whatever Sean Hannity reads off a teleprompter. I believe that many of the deployed troops ought to be brought home. So I’m conflicted about celebrating presidential visits over there, when what’s in their interest and ours is bringing them back here. President George W. Bush repeatedly visited the troops he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, did it help them? Did it advance victory? Watching lots of TV and golfing is much, much less expensive for taxpayers.The U.S. is saddled with an incapable president. Let’s not urge him to attempt tasks that are likely beyond him, in which success would require moral credibility, self-mastery, judgment, reflectiveness, and competence, and failure would do real harm.
On a family vacation last summer, driving along the empty highways of northern Idaho near the Canadian border, I saw an unlikely road sign—a relic. Diamond-shaped with a yellow background, the sign featured the familiar black silhouette of a deerlike animal. But unlike those on deer-crossing signs, the animal pictured had large antlers and appeared to be ambling toward the road, not leaping. It took me a moment to realize that it was a caribou.
Seeing a caribou wander onto an Idaho highway is about as likely as watching a UFO land there. The South Selkirk herd—the only remaining caribou herd that roamed the continental United States—has dwindled to just two animals, both female. “Not even Noah could save them,” a Canadian biologist told me. Last spring, scientists declared the herd functionally extinct.
Though that news barely registered with the American public, it was powerful: the imminent disappearance of a large mammal species from the Lower 48. And the Selkirk caribou are only the tip of the melting iceberg. Across a broad swath of Canada and Alaska, caribou populations have been plummeting for decades. The main cause: industrial development in their habitat. Today seeing caribou in their original Canadian range requires luck, patience, and often a helicopter.
One July afternoon in northeastern British Columbia, near where the Peace River flows out of the Canadian Rockies and toward the plains, I climbed into the back of a pickup truck. At the wheel was Line (pronounced Lynn) Giguere, a Francophone wildlife biologist. In the passenger seat was her husband, Scott McNay, an ecologist who has spent more than two decades trying to save caribou.
Here, in what’s called the South Peace region, on behalf of two local First Nations communities, Giguere and McNay have piloted a last-ditch effort to revive a different struggling caribou herd. It’s a remnant population of a much larger herd that once roamed the region’s forests. Trying to save this one small herd has been grueling at times—physically, emotionally, politically. Stemming the caribou declines on a larger scale, the couple say, could also take a personal toll.
Giguere and McNay live three hours away in Mackenzie, a town of about 3,500 people dominated by sawmills and pulp mills. McNay, who is tall with thinning hair and a bushy blond mustache, used to work as a biologist for the timber industry there. “Mackenzie is a small town,” he said. Saving the other herds in the South Peace region—six more, all in trouble—would require habitat protections that could shrink the area’s logging economy. Which would make the couple highly unpopular. “We might have to sell our house,” McNay said, half-joking.
Giguere, who exudes a cheerful, midwestern-style competence, agreed. “They’re gonna hate us,” she said in French-accented English.
We headed out of the tiny town of Hudson’s Hope into the mountains, and soon arrived at an active logging road. For about 60 miles, a two-hour ride, we bounced along dirt paths that grew steeper and rockier as we climbed. In the passenger seat, McNay, who hails from Prince Edward Island, dutifully called out our location over the truck’s radio every even-numbered kilometer, a protocol designed to avoid collisions. Trucks coming downhill called at the odd numbers, and soon one announced its location just uphill. “You should pull over soon,” McNay said. “Where? Shit,” Giguere replied. She found a narrow pullout and edged the Ford Super Duty out of harm’s way. A couple of minutes later, a truck loaded with logs came barreling past.
Up to 100 trucks a day carry timber down this road. About 20 years ago, timber companies carried out a series of big clear-cuts in this area, which impacted the caribou herds. “They’re just kind of getting back to it now,” McNay says of the logging, which has resumed on a large scale, in part to take away trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. “That’s what we’re up against in trying to protect habitat.”
A half hour or so later, as McNay called out our location—“36 up the Johnson, pickup”—a young deer pranced out of the woods. Giguere tapped the horn to coax it back into the forest. At the 42-kilometer mark, a lynx darted across the road. Further up, the road skirted a logging camp, with tents and RVs and piles of stacked timber. At 68 kilometers, a mother grouse and her chick appeared at the forest’s edge. We turned onto a bumpier dirt track, and then another, until we finally arrived at a flat clearing. A long, high fence covered in black fabric marked the edge of a caribou maternity pen—the centerpiece of an expensive, labor-intensive effort to revive the dwindling Klinse-Za herd.
Inside the fence was a 37-acre patch of woods and meadows, dense stands of pine and spruce opening onto sunny clearings, where a dozen female caribou and their nine babies were spending their summer. After being located by helicopter (many of the animals are radio-collared), the cows had been netted from the air, sedated, zipped into body bags, and flown to the enclosure, one at a time, back in snowy March. The pregnant cows had given birth inside the pen, where they and their babies were safe from wolves, bears, and other predators. In a couple of weeks, when the calves were two and a half months old—big enough to outrun a grizzly, if not a wolf—all the caribou would be released from the pen.
[Read: America’s wildlife corridors are in danger]
As a conservation measure, the maternity pen is a highly meddlesome intervention. But it’s one that McNay, Giguere, and members of local indigenous communities—who for millennia harvested caribou across their ancestral lands—feel is essential. “Because of where we are, we have to be a little heavy-handed until we can get things back into balance,” Roland Willson, the chief of the West Moberly First Nations, told me in his office on the shore of Moberly Lake. “The maternity pen is very obtrusive. Chasing caribou with helicopters, netting them—that’s not something you want to be doing. But because it’s an extreme situation, we have to take extreme measures.”
It’s becoming a familiar scenario, in North America and around the globe. As human activity pushes other species to the brink, the most feasible solutions seem more and more ludicrous. Yet meddling with nature in preposterous ways is often vastly easier than the alternative: fundamentally altering human behavior.
Caribou, a type of deer, live across a massive slice of the planet’s north, from the Arctic tundra south through the boreal, or northern, forest. They reproduce slowly: Females are pregnant for nearly eight months and give birth to just one baby at a time. They’re the only species on Earth in which both sexes grow antlers.
They are also what scientists call an “indicator species,” one whose own health shows the status of a whole ecosystem. And they’ve become unwitting sentinels, on some level, of life as we know it. The boreal forest, a vast band of spruce, fir, pine, and birch that covers one and a half billion acres of North America, stores roughly a third of the planet’s land-based carbon. It is a crucial source of Earth’s fresh water, and billions of birds from more than 300 species breed within it. The boreal is still the largest unbroken forest on Earth, representing a quarter of all remaining intact forest. But nearly a third of Canada’s boreal has already been carved up or earmarked for industrial use.
The starkest casualty so far has been the caribou. Though they belong to the same species as reindeer, rangifer tarandus, unlike reindeer they have never been domesticated. Perhaps that’s why they’re often used as symbols of wildness and freedom, and subtly tied to Canada’s national identity. Or not so subtly: They’re featured on Canadian quarters. In that sense, their story parallels that of bison in the United States—an animal that was immensely important to indigenous people, and which white Americans clung to as an icon even as they nearly let it vanish.
Canada’s woodland caribou, a subspecies, are most at risk. They live in old-growth forests, where they feed largely on lichens that grow on the ground and on trees. The reasons for their decline are not especially complex or mysterious. Cutting down forests wipes out their habitat. Building roads across forests provides easy access for animals that eat them. And because caribou reproduce so slowly, the problem boils down to simple math: Too many are dying, and not enough are surviving to reproduce.
In the South Peace region, where West Moberly lies, the Klinse-Za herd had dwindled to just 16 animals by 2013, down from around 180 in the 1990s. In the past, the herd would migrate in the wintertime to high in the mountains, where snow would act as a buffer from wolves. But the roads that now crisscross the region’s forests—and that continue to sprout like weeds—dealt a dual blow. They fragmented caribou habitat, slicing up interconnected herds into isolated groups. And they provided the wolves year-round access to tasty caribou flesh. Research suggests that wolves can travel up to three times faster along roads and trails than they can in unbroken forest.
Opening up the forest also brings in more of the animals wolves crave—deer, elk, moose. With more to eat, the wolves can proliferate, increasing the pressure on caribou. And because the wolves have so many species to feast on, their populations remain large even as caribou numbers shrink.
As of last year, 28 of the 57 distinct populations of woodland caribou across Canada were shrinking. In Alberta, all of the woodland caribou populations whose ranges overlap with oil-and-gas development “are in rapid decline,” according to a recent study, and they are shrinking by half every eight years. Scientists now predict that nearly a third of Canada’s boreal caribou could disappear within the next 15 years.
“It’s North America’s greatest terrestrial conservation problem,” says Robert Serrouya, the director of the Caribou Monitoring Unit at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. Unlike some endangered species that live in a discrete, fairly small area—a snail, say, that lives only in one hot spring—caribou naturally occur in relatively small populations but are broadly distributed across a massive landscape. And that landscape is irresistible to industry.
Although caribou were listed as threatened in 2003, under Canada’s nascent Species at Risk Act (SARA), it took almost a decade for the government to create a plan to save them. And though long awaited, that plan has so far had little impact. Not a single province met its federally mandated 2017 deadline to produce a recovery strategy.
For Willson and his community, that lack of action has been agonizing. The members of West Moberly, a small band of Dunne-Za people, historically ate caribou meat, made clothing from their skin, used their antlers for medicine, and even made tools from their bones; since childhood, Willson has listened to tribal elders reminisce about hunting caribou on their traditional lands. “Caribou were considered a convenient food because there were so many of them,” he said. “If you couldn’t get a moose or an elk, you could always go to the mountains and get a caribou.” Willson has hunted caribou, but to do so, he’s had to travel far to the north, where development is sparser and herds are faring much better. “But north of us is somebody else’s area. We’re going into their area and harvesting their caribou. And it’s not just us; it’s everybody that hunts. Everybody’s going to that area.” (West Moberly is one of 39 nations across four provinces that are signatories to Treaty 8, which governs tribal rights to hunting and fishing, among other things. Treaty 8 member nations can hunt and fish across the whole 325,000-square-mile territory covered by the treaty.)
The caribou crisis in the South Peace region began in the late 1960s, when construction of the W. A. C Bennett Dam flooded several nearby canyons and turned a long stretch of the river into the 680-square-mile Williston Lake. The new lake, the world’s seventh-largest reservoir, submerged the territorial home of two other First Nations, Kwadacha and Tsay Keh Dene. It sunk First Nations cemeteries, hunting grounds, fishing spots, and trapper cabins. It also slashed a large caribou herd’s migration route, stranding groups of animals on opposite sides of the lake. After the dam went in, the water rose far faster than engineers had predicted, sweeping timber down hillsides and drowning an unknown number of caribou and other animals.
With hydropower on hand, industrial development quickly followed: large-scale forestry, mining, oil, and gas. And not long afterward, local indigenous people “noticed this drastic decline” in caribou, Willson says. Local First Nations voluntarily imposed a moratorium on caribou hunting. Decades later, after SARA passed and caribou were listed as threatened, Willson waited for British Columbia to set some key areas off-limits to industry.
Instead, in 2008 West Moberly learned that a coal-mining company had applied for a permit in the core habitat of the Burnt Pine caribou herd, one of eight herds then remaining in the region, whose numbers had already dwindled down to nine. The nation filed an injunction to stop the mine, and in an important court ruling, West Moberly prevailed. But the decision came too late. Without permits, the mining company had been illegally clearing the forest. By the time West Moberly won its case, only two caribou—a male and a female—remained.
Cornelia LiA few days after the verdict, tragedy struck. The bull fell to his death in a pit the company had unlawfully dug. The cow wandered off in search of companionship. Scientists later found her radio collar, but her fate remains a mystery. Less mysterious is the fate of the Burnt Pine herd: It’s extinct.
Today British Columbia continues to allow open-pit coal mines and fracking wells in caribou habitat, and it is building yet another hydroelectric dam on the Peace River, just south of the oil-and-gas boomtown of Fort St. John. Most of the electricity the dam produces will be exported to the United States, and it has been sharply criticized by local and national activists.
At the visitor center next to the W. A. C. Bennett Dam, there is a monument to the reservoir’s impacts on First Nations. Walls are lined with personal accounts of loss, including Willson’s own. He tells of his grandmother catching fish, collecting wild plants, and passing the knowledge along to his mother. “Nowadays,” reads his statement on the wall, “what I get to do is teach my son how to throw contaminated fish back into the river.” (Fish in Williston Lake are contaminated with methylmercury from the decomposing forests beneath the surface.)
[Read: The re-beavering of the American West]
When the First Nations Impact Gallery opened two years ago, an official from BC Hydro, the dam’s operator, publicly acknowledged the harm done to both indigenous people and the environment. He pledged that the company would “not repeat the mistakes of the past.” Yet the new dam, known as Site C, would submerge both historic and contemporary tribal sites, and BC Hydro is already clearing forest and moving earth in preparation for construction. The week after I met Willson, he headed to court to testify in one final attempt to stop the project.
After the debacle with the Burnt Pine herd in 2008, Willson called McNay. “We were not going to run around the rose bush with the province,” Willson says. Across the country, many First Nations communities have reached a similar inflection point; unwilling to sit by as provincial governments allow territorial lands to fall to development and climate change, they are launching their own land-management plans—and beginning to set the agenda for conservation in Canada.
McNay, who has worked on caribou issues for both government and industry, was by then as fed up as Willson. “I’ve been involved in three different major pushes the province has initiated for caribou recovery,” McNay says. “They’ve all been about planning and research and collecting more data, instead of getting on the ground and doing stuff.” He told Willson: “I’m not going to work with you unless we do something action-oriented.”
Willson was thrilled. West Moberly joined forces with the neighboring Saulteau First Nations and formed a nonprofit caribou-conservation society. With McNay’s guidance, it hammered out a plan for the seven remaining nearby herds. But when McNay delved into the population data, he discovered that the Klinse-Za herd had already crashed. “We thought we were around 90 caribou there, but we were down below 20,” Willson recalls. “Something had to be done almost immediately in order to save that herd.”
Maternity pens had been tried in a handful of other areas, to varying degrees of success. But McNay believed a pen was the only way to give the herd a chance at survival. He says the First Nations communities mostly embraced the plan, viewing it as an unfortunate short-term necessity. (Other communities have been less receptive, put off by the severity of the meddling. McNay gave a presentation to one Alberta First Nations that was, he says, “appalled at what we were doing.”)
“Caribou were always an animal that if we ever needed something, we could go to them and they would help,” Willson says of West Moberly. “Now the caribou are in a struggle, and they need us. We have to at least try.”
British Columbia declined to fund the maternal pen, so the group sought money from industry and launched a crowdfunding campaign. It raised around $300,000 (almost entirely from industry; crowdfunding only scared up around $1,000), and during the first year in 2014 the group captured 10 females, each of which gave birth in an enclosure 30 miles from the town of Chetwynd. Nine calves survived and were released, yet only four were alive a year later. Two calves born outside the enclosure also survived that year.
In addition to the maternity pen, the program includes a substantial wolf cull and habitat restoration. The first restoration project decommissioned and reseeded a four-and-a-half-mile stretch of road through the forest. “Not even a month later, somebody went in behind us and reopened the road,” Willson told me. “They ruined everything we were doing there.”
In the six years since they began McNay’s program, indigenous trappers have killed 139 wolves on the ground. Over the past four years, the province has killed another 173 wolves by shooting them from helicopters. That’s an awfully bloody short-term fix—and the cull is growing contentious. Two conservation groups have petitioned the government to stop using tax dollars to slaughter wolves, which they call “inhumane” and “a morally bankrupt display.”
As of last year, the Klinse-Za caribou herd had grown to 66 animals.
Inside the maternity pen’s perimeter, behind the tall walls and an elaborate electric fence, McNay, Giguere, and I hiked to a rustic wooden observation platform built into a tree. Below us stretched a meadow, where several red metal troughs were filled with pellets made from vitamin-and-mineral-enriched barley, wheat, and corn, a supplemental diet for the caribou. (The fenced-in forest is too small to provide enough food for the animals.)
First Nations members patrol the pen in week-long shifts, bunking in a plywood shack they built outside the fence. These “guardians” walk the perimeter a few times a day, look for compromises in the fence line, keep watch for predators, and feed the caribou. In addition to the pellets, they feed the animals lichens, which are harvested by locals—including schoolkids and tribal elders—and hauled up the road in big mesh sacks.
As we stood on the platform and watched the far end of the meadow, where Battleship Mountain towered above the pine and spruce, two caribou slowly appeared like apparitions at the forest edge. Their fur was mottled in shades of gray and brown, and they sauntered through the field under bands of shadows cast by fast-moving clouds. Soon, more caribou joined them, including a few fuzzy calves, some of which lay down in the grass while their mothers browsed. The calves looked surprisingly small and fragile, considering they were just a couple of weeks from release. The scene—moms, babies, sun-dappled meadow—looked so peaceful, so primal, that I half-wished the animals could remain here in safety forever, though of course that was absurd.
The guardians had been tracking the whereabouts of four grizzlies they’d seen hanging around not far from the enclosure and which seemed “to have a little more interest in the pen than we’d like them to have,” as McNay put it. If the bears remained nearby, the caribou release might have to be postponed.
For the better part of an hour, we watched the caribou as they lolled about the field. And then, as the wind picked up, they vanished back into the trees.
Outside the enclosure, at the guardians’ hut, Steven Desjarlais had just arrived to join his cousin for a week-long shift. Both men are members of West Moberly, and they had spent months up here—building the pen, maintaining it, watching over the caribou, living in the forest. They lamented the looming end of the job, and said they would soon have to find new work, possibly on logging crews. Desjarlais said he saw the caribou as key to protecting the whole landscape; if the caribou die out, there’s no hope for saving the boreal forest. “Without them here, industry would run wild, and you’d never get them back,” he said. “The province would never put them back. They’d just build roads all over, go nuts.”
Under SARA, if provinces aren’t acting, the federal government can step in. That’s beginning to happen. Last May, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government declared an “imminent threat” to British Columbia’s caribou. Now, if the province doesn’t act, Ottawa can take control of its natural resources—making decisions about things such as logging and mining permits.
News of the possible federal intervention set off a panic, as British Columbians worried about economic calamity. Even in the outdoor-recreation mecca of Revelstoke, where you might expect sympathies to lie with the caribou, city leaders warned of financial doom. Protecting caribou habitat, they said, would spell ruin for the town’s heli-skiing businesses and destroy its backcountry-tourism economy, in addition to killing the local forestry industry. Instead of limiting human activity in caribou habitat, they suggested more research.
This kind of response drives McNay bonkers. There’s nothing more to research, he says. It’s time—past time—to act. He shook his head as he described the province’s decision last spring to spend the equivalent of 20 million U.S. dollars over five years to jump-start a new caribou-conservation effort. If you divide the money by the number of herds in trouble, and divide that by five years, you end up with less than $150,000 for each herd a year—a number, he said, that is essentially useless.
“If we want to do a serious job here,” McNay said, “it’s going to [have an] impact—socially, economically. The local-level municipal governments are pretty scared.”
As with so many at-risk species, the real obstacle for caribou-conservation efforts is socioeconomic. Recovering caribou broadly, across Canada, would require severely curtailing industrial activity across their habitat. Research has shown that woodland caribou avoid areas within 500 meters of human development—which means that the impact of, say, an oil well is far greater than just its footprint on the soil.
The energy sector accounts for a quarter of Alberta’s economy and about 13 percent of Canada’s total GDP. (Three-quarters of Alberta’s oil goes to the United States.) And Canada contains a tenth of the world’s proven oil reserves.
[Photos: The Alberta tar sands]
Which is the main reason no one has been willing to do the one thing that matters: protect the boreal forest from development.
“You could go across the boreal and see the exact same story playing out,” says Tim Burkhart, the Peace River coordinator for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “The response of government has been to try to save as many caribou as they can without impacting industry in any way.”
Over a seven-year period, in the nearly ruined range of a single caribou herd, Alberta killed 841 wolves. Yet during that same time, the province issued hundreds of permits for new oil-and-gas wells in the same area. Restoring caribou habitat in that area would require buying the energy leases from the companies that hold them. But purchasing those leases on the range of just one herd in Alberta’s oil-sands region would cost 33 billion U.S. dollars, according to a 2010 estimate. Mark Hebblewhite, an ungulate ecologist at the University of Montana, has calculated that “effective habitat protection” in Alberta alone would cost more than $112 billion.
Against this economic reality, trying to save Canada’s woodland caribou can seem like a lost cause. “Piecemeal solutions aren’t going to get to that broader threat of their habitat disappearing,” says Courtenay Lewis, the manager of ecosystems policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Canada Project.
It’s why Hebblewhite, who is Canadian, suggested last year that triage may be the only option—choosing some herds to protect, and letting others simply die off. “Pretending we can continue to conserve everything, and asking wolves to pay the price while energy development continues, is not only ethically and morally wrong, it is extremely poor conservation policy,” Hebblewhite wrote in a paper published last year.
It’s something British Columbia is discussing, especially as climate change presents yet another threat to the southerly herds. “We know we are going to have to make some of these tough calls,” says Chris Ritchie, the acting executive director of the Species at Risk recovery branch of the provincial agency in charge of forests and natural resources.
Meanwhile, though, the federal government’s imminent-threat order has required the province to negotiate a caribou-conservation plan in partnership with both Canada and the West Moberly and Salteau First Nations. The draft agreement, whose finalized details have not yet been released, proposes to set aside nearly 1 million acres in the South Peace region—more than 1,540 square miles—for caribou, closing much of it to logging, hunting, and snowmobiling. Some land might be set aside as provincial parks with no industrial activity permitted; other areas might allow some logging or mining but under “a more caribou-centric management regime,” Ritchie says.
As the outline of the agreement leaked, anger in the region grew. A petition on Change.org by a snowmobiler-backed group called Concerned Citizens for Caribou Recovery bears the headline “Your back country access is being seriously threatened right now” and warned that “our way of life in Northern BC is at risk.” It demands that “all negotiations halt immediately.” In less than a week, more than 13,500 people signed the petition—though it’s unclear how many of them are locals. The group appears, from its Facebook page, to be connected to the outdoor-recreation industry.
McNay says he’s beginning to see pushback from all sides. Snowmobilers are livid about potential trail closures. He’s gotten hate mail from environmentalists furious about the wolf killings. And he fears the opposition will only increase, given the economic turmoil that could follow large-scale conservation measures. How many sawmills will have to shut down? How many jobs will be lost? “It will come. I see the edge of it already,” Mcnay says. “Because we are talking massive, massive impacts. I really don’t know where it’s all going.”
Back in the Ford Super Duty headed down the logging road toward Hudson’s Hope, I asked what would qualify as successful recovery for the Klinse-Za herd. The federal recovery plan sets a threshold of 120 animals in a herd, but McNay says that number doesn’t mean much. For First Nations, recovery means a self-sustaining population that members can hunt on a limited basis. Right now, the Klinse-Za herd is growing by about 15 percent a year. At that rate, in another decade there would be maybe 350 animals, and the local First Nations communities could potentially harvest a few caribou a year. “Back of the envelope, I’m saying in 10 years we might be looking at something that you could kinda say is on its way,” McNay says. But that, he stressed, is just the beginning of real recovery. “I don’t want people to get the impression that in 10 years we’ll be able to take a few animals and then we’re done.”
A couple of weeks after my visit—right on schedule, with no other humans around—the caribou guardians opened a portion of the fence. Over the next few hours, the caribou ventured out, wandering uphill, into the alpine. In the four months since, one cow has been killed by a grizzly, probably while defending her calf, which survived. The rest of the caribou are still alive.
By this point in his presidency, George H. W. Bush was preparing for battle with Iraq, Bill Clinton had begun bombing Serb targets in the former Yugoslavia, George W. Bush had invaded Afghanistan, and Barack Obama was about to encounter the Arab Spring.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has been lucky.
That is the conclusion of a report released Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations ranking the conflicts that could most threaten the United States in the coming year. The study notes that the Trump administration “has yet to confront a serious international crisis in which the president has had to wrestle with the agonizing decision over whether to commit the United States to a new and potentially costly military intervention.”
“It is reasonable,” the report’s authors write, “to assume that it is only a matter of time before the Trump administration will face its first major crisis.”
Here are some of the study’s most striking conclusions:
Fortune Has Favored TrumpPaul Stares, who oversees CFR’s annual survey, acknowledged that Trump has faced some grave security challenges. Bashar al-Assad, for example, used chemical weapons multiple times against the Syrian people, while North Korea tested its most powerful nuclear device ever and ballistic missiles that for the first time could reach the United States.
But Stares noted that the president didn’t appear to seriously consider countering Assad’s atrocities with anything beyond limited air strikes and that while Trump’s bellicose rhetoric toward North Korea last year contributed to an atmosphere of crisis, it’s not clear he was really on the verge of taking military action. (Nikki Haley, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who was instrumental in executing the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea, recently told me that the president wasn’t planning to “instigate something” despite his bluster, but that he “totally would have” gone to war had Kim “launched something” that came “near the U.S.”)
Developments that might well trigger a substantial U.S. military response, like a large-scale attack on American citizens or Russian aggression against a European NATO ally, haven’t materialized, Stares pointed out. And the one time Trump deployed U.S. troops on a new military operation, it was to the border with Mexico to deter a migrant caravan ahead of the midterm elections—a move his critics dismissed as a political stunt.
The president has used force sparingly in part because he doesn’t share his predecessors’ expansive view of the United States as the guarantor of global stability. But, as Stares told me, “you could say he’s just been lucky, too.”
The CFR survey, in which about 500 American government officials and foreign-policy experts estimated the likelihood and impact on U.S. interests of 30 hypothetical incidents in 2019, points to a range of places where the luck could run out.
Great-Power Conflict Is More Cold Than Hot—for NowIn and outside the U.S. government, there’s a lot of talk about how fierce competition is getting between the world’s great powers, whether in the form of Russia interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or the United States waging a trade war with China. But the participants in CFR’s poll didn’t seem especially concerned about such political and economic skirmishes turning hot.
[Read: The Trump administration debates a cold war with China]
Only one contingency directly involving China or Russia—an armed conflict between China and one of America’s regional partners over disputed territory in the South China Sea—appeared in the report’s top tier of risks. That category includes situations judged either highly likely to occur next year or liable to inflict a high level of damage on U.S. interests.
Other scenarios might implicate the United States’ geopolitical rivals. One of the highest-ranked risks in the report—eclipsing a major act of terrorism against the U.S. homeland or an ally—was a cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure and networks, which might be carried out by a sophisticated state actor such as China or Russia. The Assad government’s violent reassertion of control in Syria, which respondents deemed very likely to happen, could place Washington and Moscow at odds.
Nevertheless, a high-impact, low-probability event does appear in the study for the first time in its 11-year history: a crisis between the United States and China over Taiwan ahead of the 2020 election on the island, which has friendly (unofficial) relations with the U.S. but which Beijing claims as its sovereign territory. While Trump briefly inflamed tensions as president-elect by taking a phone call from Taiwan’s leader, the dispute hasn’t reached crisis level since the Clinton administration, when China fired missiles into the waters surrounding the island.
If some aspect of Xi Jinping’s mounting-pressure campaign against Taiwan was to provoke the Trump administration, Chinese leaders might take actions “because they feel so strongly about Taiwan as part of China, and [their U.S. counterparts might] do things because this is now the real test of wills with China, and our credibility is on the line, and the future of the 21st century will hinge on how this particular crisis plays out,” Stares said.
We’re Not Out of the Woods on North KoreaRespondents were not as anxious as they were last year about a military conflict between North Korea and the United States. (In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, they remain just as alarmed about a military conflict erupting between Iran and the U.S. or one of its regional allies.) Still, the return of tensions on the Korean peninsula following the collapse of nuclear talks did emerge as a high-priority risk.
[Read: The beginning of the end of the Korean War]
The survey results indicate that “people don’t frankly believe Trump has solved this issue or that North Korea really is on the path to denuclearization, and that [they believe] it won’t take much for it to be reignited as a major flashpoint,” Stares observed. The respondents “more or less put it as an even chance that this thing is going to unravel.”
Trouble’s Afoot in the AmericasThough possible conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are most prevalent in the report, the latest survey featured more scenarios in Latin America than in any prior year, including a worsening economic crisis and political instability in Venezuela (a top-tier concern) and violence and turmoil in Nicaragua. Some respondents also wrote in the prospect of civil unrest in Brazil, which just elected the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro.
[Read: Can Brazil’s democracy withstand Jair Bolsonaro?]
It’s a reminder that even as the United States tends to troubles at home, it is navigating a neighborhood and a wider world in great flux.
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2018” coverage here.
I first encountered the food of Alon Shaya at an ostensibly Italian restaurant in a restored 1890s hotel in New Orleans’s central business district, in the form of a whole roasted cauliflower, served like a steamship round, with a demilune-shaped steak knife. I went back the next night for that dish and others that showed mastery of not just the pizza Shaya had practiced during several months in Italy, but also the Israeli food of which that whole roasted cauliflower is a well-known showpiece.
KnopfShaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel, written with Tina Antolini, traces Shaya’s emotional and culinary journey from Philadelphia, where he was a child of divorced Israeli immigrants, poor and out of place on the edge of a ritzy neighborhood (school friends would pick him up in Rolls-Royces for beachside weekends). He mostly encountered trouble, often with the law. But Shaya also found solace and vocation in cooking—an activity he had begun when his Bulgarian and Romanian grandparents would visit for a month at a time and provide the sense of family structure he lacked.
Because the book follows the contours of his development as a cook and a man, readers looking for a straightforward excursion into the Israeli food that took hold in the hands of Yotam Ottolenghi and Michael Solomonov, another Israeli-by-way-of-Philadelphia chef, will have to go along for the ride, stopping for the recipes on the way. You’ll find the salads and homey dishes Shaya made sure to record on what he knew would be his last visit to his Romanian grandmother; read about him starting a Jewish culture club at the Culinary Institute of America, not realizing how his fellow students would react when he suggested a festive whole roast pig (what Jewish identity he had, he’d learned mostly from Seinfeld reruns); and learn his version of red beans and rice as part of his bonding with his adopted city of New Orleans before and after Katrina. (Fans of Solomonov’s Zahav, with its redefining recipe for tahini, will be glad to know he’s back with Israeli Soul, which focuses on street food, with a five-minute hummus and many kinds of bread, including pita and Jerusalem bagels.)
Shaya’s recipes may be eclectic, but his sense of flavors is in tune with today’s tastes. You’ll likely want to try the pan-seared steak with za’atar chimichurri, and brussels sprouts with caraway and tahini, that Shaya says was inspired by the last meal he cooked for his grandfather. One particularly appealing recipe confirms a trend I find of special importance: Stuffed cabbage is back.
It’s very easy to fall in love with Persian food—and if you live in Los Angeles, with its sizable expat community, or Boston, with a surprisingly generous number of Iranian-themed restaurants, you can see why by simply consulting a menu. Za’atar, sweet spices, fresh herbs, yogurt, sour flavors all in the same dish—this is familiar in a post-Ottolenghi world. Persian cuisine adds pomegranates, olives, walnuts, garlic, and mint among the seductive flavors—and, in a bowl of pomegranate-marinated olives, adds them all at once.
Flatiron BooksFor Naz Deravian, the author of Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories, Persian food awakens her childhood in Tehran, Tabriz, and Rome. She’s the daughter of parents who summered in Italy, which—via the “lucky tiny apartment” that was passed along from one aspiring emigrant family to another because its occupants always seemed to procure entry papers to other countries—became the family’s launching pad for Canada after the 1978–79 revolution made life in Iran untenable. In their Vancouver kitchen, Deravian (whose essay on writing an Iranian cookbook in today’s political climate is featured on this website) would watch her mother make the then-hard-to-find unflavored yogurt, the essential medium for most dishes and afternoon snacks, and test the temperature of the milk with a trained pinky. “If she was able to keep her finger in there comfortably for five seconds without scalding it,” Deravian writes, “it meant the milk’s fever had broken, and who better to culture it than a university-professor-turned-resourceful-immigrant-mama?” The food Deravian has evolved as an adult and a mother of two is in line with her childhood: roast salmon with dill, and an easy butternut-squash soup I plan to make a winter staple, with sweet potato, cinnamon, cumin, sumac, and maple syrup.
Of course, there is rice. I myself have become lost in the enchantment of tahdig, the crunchy layer that gives Deravian’s book its name, hunting up bags of aged basmati rice and experimenting with all manner of clarified-butter-oil combinations to achieve the exact separation of every fluffy, properly moistened grain of rice above the crust and fragrant, caramelized grain in it. (I wrote an Atlantic piece on tahdig and the advantages of aged rice, and a column on Seductions of Rice, an excellent book by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.) The author gives patient and complete instruction on achieving that crust, starting with the right-size nonstick pot (don’t even think of trying to make it in stainless steel), and reveals a life-changing invention: a Persian rice cooker designed specifically to make no-fail, unmolds-in-one-piece tahdig. It vaults to the top of my wish list.
EccoRecipes from Lebanon, the native country of Anissa Helou, author of Feast: Food of the Islamic World, appear in plenty of books. Recipes from Morocco, Tunisia, India, even Indonesia? Those, too. But from Kuwait, Zanzibar, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar? They’re a lot rarer. Now Helou, an intrepid London-based scholar, cooking teacher, and traveler who leads sought-after food tours, has drawn them together in a big picture book that will serve as an inspiration to chefs and cooks looking to do cook’s tours to countries beyond their usual beats.
Some of Helou’s culinary descriptions might give you pause—for instance, when she devotes two pages to roasting a camel hump (“The market was too far … but I did want to see the slaughter.” So a baby camel is brought to her, “sitting quite placidly”). And the recipes have long lists of ingredients, many of them difficult to find (“Be sure to get the right date syrup”; both coconut milk and coconut cream for Zanzibari rice steeped in milk). You might try one of the many regional variations of the meatballs called kibbe. Or a Turkish bulgur salad with the out-of-fashion green bell pepper and in-fashion Aleppo pepper. Or harissa, which can be a new sort of weeknight stew, with chicken and wheat berries flavored with cinnamon sticks and seven Lebanese spices.
However much you do or don’t cook from the book, the unexpected groupings of similar dishes across borders and the many variations of, say, Afghani rice with vermicelli make it worth owning. You’ll also never say “Israeli couscous” again without hearing the author’s stern admonition: It’s actually moghrabieh, the Lebanese version of large-grain North African couscous.
My first assignment as incoming restaurant critic at Atlanta magazine was to review a sushi-and-barbecue restaurant—an odd combination, it struck me then and strikes me now. But sushi was beginning to appear as a kind of side attraction at non-Japanese restaurants, so I thought, Well, that’s how it is here. The chef, Todd Richards, is African American, and I certainly hoped that more often than not the chefs of the restaurants I’d be reviewing would reflect Atlanta’s diversity. But in my years reviewing Atlanta restaurants, I was dismayed to find more examples of African American heritage on menus than I found African American chefs in charge of the kitchens.
Time Inc. BooksAfter reading Soul: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes, I better understand sushi as part of Richards’s education: “Sure I could cook French, Chinese, and Japanese food,” he writes. “I could make the best matzo balls you have ever tasted, but what was my French food? After all, the foods of my people were not being highlighted on the menus of fine dining restaurants.”
So Richards set out on his own journey of discovery, going to his family—his grandparents and parents were accomplished cooks—and revisiting the dishes of his Chicago childhood, adapting the ingredients that were integral to his heritage to the style he evolved as a chef. That style is eclectic: curried lamb ribs with crawfish-butter boiled potatoes, smoked catfish dip with Parmesan tuiles, chicken thighs marinated in blueberry sweet tea with golden beet hash. But his takes on soul-food staples, such as collard greens with their own pickled stems and smoked ham hocks, or shrimp and grits with the grits as a crisped batter and shrimp butter for a sauce, will sate your eagerness for the food of the title. And Richards includes a recipe for the skillet-baked cornbread that made me his fan at that first dinner.
Little, Brown and CompanyThen there are books you just cook from, weeknight after weeknight. This year’s prime exemplar is Milk Street: Tuesday Nights by Christopher Kimball. Kimball is nothing if not an obsessive tester, so every recipe has an implicit guarantee. And at Milk Street, the new
media company he built after founding, and leaving, Cook’s Illustrated, he’s opened his world to Asian flavors and lightened his food and palate. As always, the book is practical (recipe notes flag the possible use of leftovers and call for frozen vegetables). But in this one it’s hard not to want to try what’s on any page you turn to: kimchi and bacon fried rice with frozen peas; frittata with leftover pasta, fresh herbs, and lots of garlic; milk-poached chicken breast with tarragon, garlic, and anchovy-parsley sauce; chile-rubbed pork with cucumber-melon salad; black-eyed-pea stew with chiles, ginger, and the season’s rediscovered secret, tomato paste; Korean chicken salad with green beans, pine nuts, and gochujang. Scanning the streamlined but explicit instructions, you think: easy, quick, works, boom.
Houghton MifflinDorie Greenspan knows how to make everything work. In her many baking books, she gives cooks the confidence they need to, as she says, “play around” with recipes usually considered black boxes. In Everyday Dorie, the chef’s savory new book, everything can be made out of the Stop & Shop near her Connecticut home, but bears the stamp of her longtime residences in New York City and Paris. So you’ll find a tart with lox, cream cheese, red onions, and dill (Greenspan likes it so much it’s on the cover), named for the Lower East Side; the easy French mini–cream puffs called gougères with cheese, mustard, and walnuts—a fail-safe, crowd-pleasing appetizer; stick-to-your-ribs beef stews such as her version of the Flemish carbonnade with beer, and another with cranberries, ginger, and star anise, among other sweet and peppery spices; plus this season’s must, stuffed cabbage. Of course, there are desserts, including Greenspan’s latest favorite chocolate-chip cookie, this one with oats she swears you won’t taste (but you’ll like the chew).
Knopf“I have a soft spot for the depressed, jilted single,” the very talented chef Anita Lo announces at the beginning of Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One, bragging in the first sentence about how many times she’s been “dumped” (“almost as many times as I’ve been in relationships”). Well, the hours and life of a professional chef who goes from restaurant to restaurant winning critical acclaim, and who competes on Iron Chef, are punishing. But they sure result in good and original food, all of it scaled for one. I’ve never understood why cooking for one isn’t a larger category: The late Judith Jones wrote a good and thoughtful book after she was widowed, and about the only real utility I saw for meal kits when I did a piece comparing several of them was giving single people access to ingredients they’d otherwise need to buy in bulk. Lo is a thrifty and thoughtful cook, and attempts dishes as ambitious as whole roasted porgy with grape leaves, bulgur, and lemon; Thai white curry with chicken, fish sauce, and mixed vegetables; and red-cooked duck leg over rice—but also as simple as kale salad with dates and tahini dressing, and penne with broccoli rabe and walnuts (with butter, but she studied in Paris, so forgive her). Nothing seems lonely or compromised about Solo. It seems bold and joyous.
ALONG the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, a treacherous landscape where yaks graze above the clouds, basketball hoops are everywhere: at the bases of cliffs; in the courtyards of centuries-old, golden-roofed monasteries; in nomadic villages tucked into the hills.
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It was within such a village, Zorge Ritoma, that Dugya Bum, a sheep and yak herder from the Golden Stone Clan, took up the sport. He’d played in school, but after dropping out at 16 he became a full-time nomad, the livelihood of his ancestors. During winter, his family lived in a mud-walled house about four miles from Zorge Ritoma’s center, grazing yaks and sheep at the foot of the mountains. In the summer, when the weather improved, they took the herds up to rich, high-altitude pastures and resided in temporary tents. In the fall, they would gradually make the journey back down.
As a teenager, Dugya Bum grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes. He avoided eye contact. His parents, all too familiar with the physical demands of a permanent nomadic existence, encouraged him to explore alternative life paths. So in 2011, he took a job at Norlha, a textile company that had opened in the village a few years earlier and was hiring nomads as yak-wool artisans. But the routines of office and factory work didn’t suit him.
Then, in 2015, a tall, gangly stranger arrived from the United States. The newcomer set about putting together a real basketball team, with practices and drills and tournaments and all the rest. Dugya Bum signed on to play after work. The sport became central to his life. The team generated excitement throughout the village, and in the nomadic communities beyond. Now, going on four years later, a semiprofessional sports program is flourishing and spreading hope, in a region better known for its reincarnated lamas than its athletes.
A few years ago, while living in Queens, I began to wonder whether any Buddhist monks played hoops. I’d loved the sport since childhood and had recently become fascinated by practitioners of Buddhism. And while the pairing may seem far-fetched, it made a certain sense to me. Devotion to the sport involves countless hours in the solitude of echoing, dimly lit places—rickety old gymnasiums, empty playgrounds, driveways late at night—where one undergoes a genuinely meditative sensory experience: the rhythmic bouncing of a ball; the mental focus and repetition essential for knocking down free throws; the visualizations, such as imagining oneself sinking a last-second shot. There’s a reason Phil Jackson—a.k.a. the Zen Master—didn’t coach football.
I visited a few Buddhist monasteries in the New York area, where I was met with a consistent response from the polite but puzzled residents: No, monks don’t play basketball. That seemed to be that.
But there’s always the internet. Late one evening in 2017, I Googled basketball and Buddhist monk and eventually found a Facebook page on which a grainy video had been posted. It showed a red-robed monk on an outdoor court effortlessly leaping up, grabbing the rim, and shattering the backboard. I initially suspected this was a hoax, but if so, it was an elaborate one. In one picture on the page, a man stood on a mountaintop amid rising smoke. “Team captain Jampa making offerings and passionate prayers to his village’s mountain gods before a basketball match,” the caption said. In another picture, a flock of sheep approached a basketball court beside a barren hill. “And the fans rush the court!” that caption said. I saw a picture of young nomadic women shooting baskets on a snowy, icy court, and a video of a young monk executing a pretty up-and-under move to evade a shot-blocker and put the ball in the hoop. This, it turned out, was Norlha basketball.
I contacted Willard “Bill” Johnson, the team coach and the moderator of the Facebook page. He told me, in a dreamy voice, that the people of Tibet were mad for hoops.
Johnson described to me the upcoming Norlha Basketball Invitational and Tibetan Hoop Exchange, featuring a tournament that he said would showcase the top teams—some composed of nomads, others of monks—in the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. (Gannan is part of China’s Gansu province and is located in the traditional Tibetan region of Amdo.) Johnson called it a “turning point” for his team—“our big test.” The tournament would gauge his players’ strength against tougher competition than they had yet seen. Excited, I made travel arrangements to attend the tournament. The next day, alas, it was postponed. The tournament would have coincided with the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, for which security was being tightened throughout the country. Local police from China’s Public Security Bureau, concerned about large gatherings, had asked Norlha for the postponement.
I decided to make the journey nonetheless.
Basketball first appeared in the Tibetan highlands about 100 years ago. At that time, the rugged, sparsely populated Tibetan plateau was ruled by warlords on its eastern frontier and in central and western Tibet by the Buddhist government of the Dalai Lama.
According to Chinese historical records, in 1935 central Tibet sent a basketball team to the Sixth National Games in Shanghai, more than 2,500 miles from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. But the team didn’t arrive until after the tournament was over. An overland trip would have taken several months on horseback, Tibet historians told me, with provisions carried by yaks or mules.
Sheep being herded in Zorge Ritoma. (An Rong Xu)In his book Seven Years in Tibet, the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer wrote that upon his arrival in Lhasa in 1946, the city “made no provision for games,” with one exception: “a small ground for basketball.” Particularly in eastern Tibet, the sport spread in part for topographic reasons: The uneven and rocky landscape encouraged basketball over soccer, which requires much more level ground.
In 1951, China’s People’s Liberation Army, including a military basketball team, marched into central Tibet and occupied—or “peacefully liberated,” in the Chinese view—the region. It would be another eight years before the Dalai Lama fled from Lhasa into exile in India. During the interim, championship basketball games were held in a large open space in front of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s enormous hillside residence. Dongak Tenzing, 83, a former Tibetan soldier who grew up in Lhasa and now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, described them to me. Thousands of people would attend: Tibetan townspeople, government and palace officials, uniformed Chinese military personnel, aristocrats, and monks. Food and drink stalls surrounded the manicured dirt court, and the score was displayed on a blackboard. The games—which were organized by the Chinese—were clean and disciplined, Dongak remembered. Rough play was prohibited, as were displays of emotion, which were considered rude.
Nomads have lived in the Zorge Ritoma area since at least the 17th century. Until the late 1950s, they lived in yak-wool tents year-round; by the 1960s, when they started building dwellings with mud walls to stay in during the winter, basketball was an important part of village life for young men, according to Dugya Bum’s grandfather Gonpo Tashi, who played as a child. The basketballs used at that time, he said, were made from the bladders and skin of freshly slaughtered animals; while lacking the bounce necessary for proper dribbling, they were adequate for passing and shooting.
In Zorge Ritoma, villagers played a rough, unusual variation of basketball using a wooden hoop, Jampa Dhundup, a point guard and leader for Norlha’s team, told me. According to the rules, the ball couldn’t touch players below the waist. And “whichever team fought the best won—no one thought about skill.”
In the late 1990s, television started trickling into remote areas. At the same time, basketball was becoming a favorite pastime of Tibetan monks. Johnson mentioned to me an old tradition of “big, strong monks who were athletes”—an apparent reference to the dobdobs, the physically aggressive monks who carried weapons, engaged in sporting competitions, and served as monastic police and bodyguards for important lamas and other travelers.
Alex McKay, a Tibetologist and sports historian of the Himalayan region, suggested to me that the macho image of the American basketball star likely appeals to eastern Tibetans because they have roots in a warrior culture. As one Tibetan player from Amdo told Chinese media during a tournament in March: “We don’t have professional coaches back home. All of us learned to play by watching NBA and CBA games on TV, by following the players’ movements. No one gave us any direction.”
Zorge Ritoma, known among locals simply as Ritoma, sits at the base of four sacred peaks. Its 275 families are scattered across several valleys in red- and pink-roofed houses, now mostly made of brick or stone. Much of the village’s food is derived from yaks—meat, cheese, butter, and yogurt—and religion is embedded in everyday life. “Sky burials,” in which the body is taken to a mountaintop and prepared for vultures, are performed on the dead.
In 2007, Kim Yeshi—a French American who studied anthropology and Tibetan Buddhism in college and married a Tibetan man in 1979—along with her daughter, Dechen Yeshi, co-founded the Norlha plant in Ritoma. The intent was both to preserve Tibetan culture and to offer a consistent source of income to the villagers. A year later, Kim decided to have a basketball court built to accommodate the community’s obsession with the game. It’s a paved surface adjacent to a workshop on a narrow, relatively flat stretch between Ritoma’s main road and a hill whose incline doubles as makeshift bleachers.
The employees played after work. Using one or two basketballs, they congregated around the hoop and heaved up shots. A regular at the court was Dugya Bum. As an eldest son, he would normally have been expected to carry on as the nomadic heir to the family’s herds and have a wife chosen for him. Instead, shortly after he dropped out of school, his grandfather approached Norlha’s executives and asked, “Do you have something he can do?” Norlha trained Dugya Bum to use an office computer, speak rudimentary English, and take photographs of models wearing the scarves the company manufactures from yak wool. He liked the photography, but didn’t excel at it; principally, he saw it as an opportunity to get closer to a particular model, Lhamo Tso, with whom he had fallen in love.
Dugya Bum, who is the best player on the Norlha basketball team. (An Rong Xu)Dugya Bum was a rebellious, immature employee. He ignored the no-smoking rule and routinely snuck into the guesthouse kitchen to take food. He was transferred to the factory workroom, where he eventually became a dyer. He complained about his pay.
In the felting section upstairs, a quiet, skinny man of 20 named Jamphel Dorjee was having his own troubles. Jamphel had grown up herding animals in a village down the road. He had married a woman in Ritoma, where he didn’t know anyone. His wife worked at Norlha, so he had gotten a job there too. Jamphel was shy, and his workstation was isolated from other employees’. After work, he had nothing to do. But he noticed that every evening, the other male employees played basketball. One night, he followed them to the court. Soon, he was trying to play. But neither he nor Dugya Bum knew that basketball would transform their lives.
Bill Johnson, 32, grew up in Everett, Washington, north of Seattle. In high school, he was into math and theater. But when he sprouted to 6 foot 8, he began to focus on basketball. He could shoot well, but because of his skinny frame, he struggled with rebounding and defense. He wasn’t recruited by any major basketball schools, so he enrolled at MIT. He worked hard at his game, and in 2009, when he was a senior and co-captain, MIT advanced to the Division III NCAA tournament—the first berth in its history.
Norlha coach Bill Johnson (left) and veteran point guard Jampa Dhundup (right). (An Rong Xu)When he wasn’t on the court, Johnson had a slightly offbeat vibe. He won a school talent show with an interpretive dance involving streamers and tight pink shorts. (“If you’ve seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite, it was almost like that,” Jimmy Bartolotta, an MIT teammate, told me.) Rather than spend spring break in Cancún with his friends, he volunteered to teach dental hygiene in Nicaragua.
After graduation, Johnson became an MIT assistant coach, then played in a league in Costa Rica. “I was nickel-and-diming it,” he says, “barely getting by.” While visiting Bartolotta, who played professionally in Iceland, Johnson partied and drank with fans; soon after, he signed a short-term contract to play there. After that, he went to play for six months in Australia.
In 2014, after a stint playing in Cape Verde, Johnson returned to the United States. His MIT friends were now neurosurgeons and engineers, real-estate investors and CEOs. Johnson—who had grown out his beard, and often bundled his hair into a man bun—had no real career plan. He was scrolling through Facebook when he noticed a post from a cousin in India about a former classmate, Dechen Yeshi, who was hiring a tutor for her young daughter in Ritoma. Johnson began researching Norlha online. When he saw a photo of its basketball court, that “sealed the deal,” Johnson says.
He applied for the job opening and was immediately rejected. Dechen considered him overqualified. Also, she was puzzled by the degree to which his application emphasized basketball. But over the next several months, he emailed repeatedly. Even after the tutor position was filled, Johnson told Dechen he was willing to help the company in any capacity.
Dechen, in turn, researched Johnson online. His persistence and academic credentials impressed her, as did his attitude. So she invited him to Ritoma to be a volunteer basketball coach for the Norlha team. The ragtag group of Norlha workers occasionally competed in ad hoc tournaments, and she thought Johnson could perhaps instill discipline and teamwork—values that might also benefit the company. Plus, he’d offered to pay his own way. “All I need is a bed,” he’d written.
Left: Dechen Yeshi (center), a co-founder of Norlha, inspects a new product in the company's workshop. (An Rong Xu)Johnson arrived in Ritoma in August 2015. The place felt empty: The nomads and their animals were off in the high summer pasture.
At the Norlha guesthouse, where he’d be staying, he met with Jampa, the team’s soft-spoken veteran guard. Jampa, now 30, is also a poet, whose work has been published as far off as Lhasa, some 1,400 miles away. “We want to be the best team in Gannan,” Jampa said. “We can start tomorrow. Tell us what to do.”
At the first practice, about 25 Norlha employees gathered on the court. To them, the moment was surreal: Here stood a professional player from the United States. (“We all thought, NBA,” Jampa recalls.)
For his part, Johnson saw a “hodgepodge of guys.” Most of the players were wearing jeans. One sported dress shoes; another, a worn business suit; and another, mittens. Moments before practice was to begin, there was a roar and a cloud of dust as a motorbike bearing another player screeched to a stop at mid-court. “Holy shit,” Johnson muttered to himself. “What is this?”
Johnson is careful to describe his coaching style as a collaborative effort between himself and the players. Still, he knew what he saw when practice began. Players hogged the ball. They made clumsy attempts at virtuoso dribbling. Shooting forms were askew. “Nothing was right,” Johnson says. “These guys just beat the crap out of each other.”
Johnson’s first impression of Dugya Bum was negative. He had an arrogant vibe, and off the court, he dressed in flashy clothes: big coral necklaces, orange bandannas, porcupine-style hair. His jump shot was herky-jerky, and his skills were underwhelming. But at 6-foot-1, Dugya Bum at least carried himself like a basketball player. He was fast and he was fluid.
Constantly following Dugya Bum to practice was Jamphel, who admired his co-worker’s athleticism. Unlike Dugya Bum, though, Jamphel, at 5-foot-10, was timid and constantly had the ball stolen from him. His shot resembled an overhead catapult, and was wildly inaccurate.
Still, Johnson was enthusiastic as he ran his new players through drills for the first time. Practices, which lasted from 5:30 p.m. until sundown, became must-see events. Villagers brought stools and thermoses of hot water. They laughed when shots were missed and clapped when they went in. They watched as Johnson shouted at his guys and occasionally played alongside them. Sometimes, to everyone’s delight, he would dunk the ball.
Johnson led the players on jogs through the village and sat with them to meditate. During lunch, he had them lift weights—mostly bricks and bags of flour or rice—in the factory courtyard. He showed them film of the San Antonio Spurs, whose style emphasized teamwork. The players called Johnson gegen, meaning “teacher.”
Jampa phoned representatives of rival teams to schedule games. Occasionally, local businessmen sponsored tournaments. Nomadic teams traveled to them by motorbike and camped out in tents. All-monk teams also joined the competitions. Across the region, Johnson noticed, were passionate players without coaches or “any concept of what we would consider organized play.”
At times, the most effective way to guide and motivate his team, Johnson realized, was to play himself. So he suited up for one tournament in August 2016, in a cavernous gym full of cigarette smoke in Maqu, 125 miles from Ritoma. Despite Johnson’s participation, Norlha was overwhelmed by a more aggressive, better-shooting team and lost in the first round of the playoffs. Dugya Bum had scored a few baskets, but he hadn’t played impressively. Johnson had forbidden him to shoot anything but layups because of his faulty jumper. As for Jamphel, “I wouldn’t even consider putting him in,” Johnson says.
With winter approaching, practice was put on hold until April. Nonetheless, Dugya Bum began messaging Johnson, requesting one-on-one instruction. They met at the court at 6:30 a.m., or during lunch, or before dusk, to run drills and lift weights. Johnson deconstructed Dugya Bum’s jump shot. Jamphel tagged along. Together, over the long, brutal winter, the two teammates worked on their game. Dugya Bum quit smoking. “I’d give up my life for basketball,” he told fellow Norlha employees.
By the summer of 2017, Dugya Bum was a different player. He blew past defenders for easy baskets. He dished the ball off to teammates for assists. His jump shot had improved; he got the green light to shoot from mid-range. With added muscle, he finished more easily at the rim, powering through contact with opposing players. There were moments, Johnson thought, when Dugya Bum could have held his own playing New York City street ball.
Norlha was also playing better as a team. Players no longer ignored their teammates to go one-on-one. Now they worked the ball around for an open shot. At summer’s end, Dugya Bum was selected as an all-star to play in Gannan’s annual tournament. Afterward, he was named one of Gannan’s top 10 players.
In the workroom, meanwhile, Dugya Bum’s attitude had improved. He made eye contact with co-workers and talked more openly. Basketball had helped him “find meaning,” Dechen Yeshi, who called him a “model employee,” told me. By this time he had also married Lhamo Tso, the Norlha model.
Jamphel had also progressed on the court, and was earning minutes. He was a more adept ball handler, had improved his court awareness, and made open shots. But what Johnson admired most were his intangibles: Whatever Johnson asked him to do, he did without hesitation.
Even more significant was Jamphel’s evolution off the court. The once-quiet young man was now opening up to teammates. “We’ve become best friends,” Jamphel recently said of them.
JaMPhEL’s wife, Jamyang Dolma, works at Norlha as a tailor and a model. Like other nomadic women suddenly thrust into a 9-to-5 job, she had found the concept of free time after work completely alien.
For women especially, nomadic life is difficult. Days are long and dominated by chores: starting fires, milking animals, chopping wood, churning butter, cooking meals, collecting dung for use as fuel, cleaning pots, caring for children. The idea of a hobby never came up. “In traditional life, women don’t play basketball, but it doesn’t mean women don’t like it,” Jamyang Dolma told me. “It may be because they never had the opportunity, or anybody to lead them.”
In 2016, a female Norlha employee, Wandi Tso, asked Johnson whether women at the company could form a team.
“Whenever you want to play,” Johnson told her, “let’s do it.”
The women who signed up were initially too afraid to even catch the ball. But as they learned the fundamentals, their confidence rose. Their shooting form was generally “textbook,” Johnson says, unlike the men’s, whose years of bad habits had to be trained out of them. Villagers in Ritoma gradually grew accustomed to seeing women on the court.
Dugya Bum and Jamphel helped Johnson train the women’s team, which included both of their wives. Lhamo Tso became the team’s best all-around player, and Jamyang Dolma the team’s best shooter. At home, she and Jamphel would discuss the drills they’d worked on that day.
Left: Jamphel Dorjee, the most improved player on the men’s team. Above right: Players from the Norlha women’s team, including Lhamo Tso (far left), the team’s best all-around player, and Jamyang Dolma (second from right), the team’s best shooter and Jamphel Dorjee’s wife. (An Rong Xu)In September 2017, the Norlha women played competitively in front of the villagers, in a three-on-three tournament organized by Johnson. Wearing light-blue jerseys, the Norlha players giggled each time they blundered, and clapped whenever their team scored.
When I was there, I watched one of the women’s team’s practices. Two female coaches were visiting for the week: Ashley Graham, a former professional player in Europe who owns the training group Pinnacle Hoops, and Carly Fromdahl, a Pinnacle instructor who played college ball at Seattle University. They ran the Norlha women through drills, including layup lines (the women dribbled slowly but made most of their shots), ball-handling exercises, and chest-and-bounce passes.
Basketball, Dechen told me, has become a “gateway for the women to try new things.” They started doing yoga and meeting regularly outside of work. They eat meals together now, and have begun discussing their jobs, lives, and plans for the future.
Basketball has “made them more courageous,” Dechen said.
For the men’s team, however, hurdles began to emerge. At MIT, Johnson had considered practice time sacred—something to be missed only because of serious illness or a family member’s death. In Ritoma, Johnson scheduled mandatory practices three days a week. But aside from Dugya Bum and Jamphel, attendance was spotty. Once, Johnson’s players informed him they couldn’t practice, because they had to chase after fearsome Tibetan mastiffs that were roaming around the village and terrifying people. Another time, they said they couldn’t practice because they had been up all night circumambulating the village monastery, a Buddhist ritual performed to accumulate merit toward future rebirths. Often, players had to help relatives with nomadic duties, such as finding lost sheep.
So early in the 2017 season, Johnson set a benchmark: To play in a major tournament in Maqu scheduled for August, the team was required to hold 20 practices with at least 10 players in attendance. But at summer’s end, the standard hadn’t been met. At a team meeting, Johnson said Norlha wouldn’t play in Maqu. (He later discovered that multiple players had joined the team solely for the trip, during which they would have been able to skip work and stay in a hotel.) All but three of the players quit. The holdouts: Dugya Bum, Jamphel, and Jampa.
Soon afterward, Johnson and Dechen met to discuss the program’s future. Norlha’s team was open only to employees, and it had become clear that the company’s 120-person workforce was not a large enough pool from which to draw a committed squad. During their chat, Johnson noted that among the villagers who didn’t work at the factory were many good players who were eager to train, but had no coach.
Korchen Kyap, for example, was a 23-year-old nomad who had proved to be one of Ritoma’s best players—6-foot-2, with excellent leaping ability. Throughout the previous winter, when Johnson returned to the United States to visit family, Korchen Kyap and other nomads who had been playing without a coach flocked to Norlha’s court daily for pickup games, braving the ice and snow. But during the summer, the heart of the basketball season, it was impossible for Korchen Kyap to play with the team, even without Norlha’s employees-only rule. The up-mountain pasture to which he herded his animals each morning was too far from the village center for him to return for practice at 5:30 p.m.
Dechen had seen how Johnson’s brand of team-first basketball had brought Tibetans together, spread the Norlha name, and raised revenue by earning cash prizes—anywhere from the equivalent of several hundred to several thousand dollars—at tournaments in the region.
So Dechen decided to open up the team to the nomads—and pay the players. She set aside an annual budget of 145,000 yuan, or about $21,000. Two players, Dugya Bum and Chökyong Kyap—a fiery, talented guard from the White Horse Clan—would become full-time basketball players, with Dugya Bum earning a monthly salary of 2,500 yuan (about $365, or four times the average local income) and Chökyong Kyap earning 2,000 yuan. Eight players making 1,000 yuan a month would round out Norlha’s traveling team. Five practice players, including three developmental players, would earn 500 yuan apiece. (Johnson himself was now earning a salary as Norlha’s e‑commerce manager, a job he’d taken on in 2016.)
Johnson is hoping to eventually add monks to the team. Ritoma’s best monk player is Dugya Bum’s brother, Sonam Drakpa. (He is the backboard-shatterer I saw in the video on Norlha’s Facebook page.) He and two other monks—Korchen Kyap’s brother and a 6-foot-4 bruiser named Sherab—scrimmage with Norlha during the monastery’s brief summer break. But as far as playing full-time, “it’s tough with the monks’ schedules,” Johnson told me sadly.
Photographs taken in October 2018 in Zorge Ritoma (An Rong Xu)I wasn’t the only visitor who had planned to attend Johnson’s Norlha Basketball Invitational and Tibetan Hoop Exchange. Eight other Americans made the trip as well, including four basketball players: Graham and Fromdahl from Pinnacle Hoops; Andrew Greenblatt, a former Division III men’s basketball player at Swarthmore College who had helped Johnson raise funds for the tournament; and Isaac Eger, a writer who was traveling the world playing pickup basketball. Johnson had arranged for some low-key pickup games against monks in the region. Building relationships with them, he said, is “priceless.”
With this in mind, Johnson planned a scrimmage with the top team from Labrang, one of Amdo’s largest monasteries. But first we were given a tour. Pressed up against a big green mountain, the monastery’s white, red, and yellow structures, some with gilded roofs, are connected by a labyrinth of dirt alleyways through which monks and pilgrims roam. A monk leading tours collected my ticket stub, crumpled it up, and tossed it into a trash bin. “NBA,” he said, bumping my fist.
The day of the scrimmage, as we drove along a narrow mountain pass, Johnson warned our group of Labrang’s physicality, and offered an advance apology: “No one’s purposely trying to hurt you,” he said. “They’re still Buddhist.” (I’d intended to play, but was sidelined after pulling a muscle the previous day while demonstrating a jump hook.)
We made a winding descent into a valley, then turned off the road and drove unsteadily on rocky grasslands. The court appeared, its weathered surface riddled with cracks and wet spots. A stream flowed alongside it. In all directions, empty plateau stretched for miles.
A green taxi wobbled up behind us. It stopped shy of the water’s edge, and several 20-something monks in robes got out, holding bags and basketballs. More taxis followed, also filled with monks. The men vanished into a nearby hut and emerged wearing basketball gear, including white “USA” jerseys. They splashed across the stream and onto the court.
The athleticism and creativity of Labrang’s players were immediately evident. They hung in the air on jump shots and made Kobe Bryant–esque fadeaways. They played hard, and they fouled hard. At one point, Greenblatt got clocked by the opposing point guard and fell. “They don’t mean any harm!” Johnson shouted.
A stray ball rolled onto the court, and some of the Americans stopped playing. Labrang seized the chance to make an uncontested layup. “Guys!” Johnson shouted, “There’s gonna be hawks, vultures, balls rolling onto the court—you gotta play through!”
The teams played two games to 20, and both went down to the wire. The monks won the first one, 20–19. The second went to the Americans, 20–18. After that game, Greenblatt, Graham, and Fromdahl sprawled onto the court, exhausted, unaccustomed to playing at that altitude.
“These guys are tough,” Johnson said.
“Super tough,” Greenblatt replied.
The Norlha basketball team prepares for a game against the Sichuan All-Stars at a tournament in Hezuo, the capital city of the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. (An Rong Xu)Although the Norlha Invitational tournament had been postponed, Johnson was still planning to lead, with the visiting Americans, several days of clinics for Norlha’s teams. But after the first day—a cool, sunny afternoon of spirited drills and pickup games—Johnson received more bad news: False rumors had reached the Public Security Bureau that the Americans, myself included, were NBA players; apparently worried that our presence would attract large crowds, the authorities urged the Norlha team to stay away from the court. All remaining basketball activities were called off.
The following day, a damp snow fell, blanketing the court. Entire streets were reduced to mud. The village was quiet.
I took the opportunity to visit Dugya Bum’s house. I walked through his front gate into a muddy outer courtyard, and then into a room with a red carpet and wood-paneled walls. Displayed high on one was an elegantly framed picture, bordered by Tibetan letters, of LeBron James in front of a grasslands backdrop of horses and mountains. Basketball trophies were perched on a shelf.
Sipping butter tea, we spoke about his dream, nearly realized, of making a living playing basketball. When I asked him what his life would be like without hoops, he chuckled uncomfortably, then paused. “If basketball disappeared,” he said softly, “my love would be finished. Everything would be finished.”
Shortly after I left the plateau, good news arrived at last: A monk had built a new gymnasium in Hezuo, the capital city of Gannan, 16 miles away, and there would be a tournament in late November. In a preliminary-round game, Norlha faced the Zorge All-Stars, a brutally physical, all-nomad team. Norlha lost in overtime by one point. But the team won its three other matchups, qualifying for the playoffs.
Norlha won a quarterfinal rematch against Zorge, 48–39. In the semifinals, Norlha defeated a university team from Zhuoni County by one point, setting up an evening final against White Khata, a team featuring standout players from across the vast Amdo region.
Before sunrise on the day of the championship, Norlha’s players rode their motorbikes up to Amnye Tongra, Ritoma’s highest peak. They made offerings of sugar, barley, and fruit to the mountain deity believed to protect Ritoma and shouted, “Lha gyal lo!”—“Victory to the gods!”
A large contingency of Ritomans—nomads, monks, and Norlha employees—drove to Hezuo, where fans of both teams squeezed into the tiny, high-ceilinged gym, stuffing it beyond capacity. Fans bled onto the court; some climbed up the basket supports. Norlha wore its standard blue jerseys; Khata wore red. On the walls behind the baskets hung billboard-size posters of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.
Eventually, officials locked the gym door; outside, latecomers climbed onto one another’s shoulders and peered in through the windows. Back in Ritoma, in the monastery and in households alike, people huddled around their smartphones, which were illuminated with shaky video feeds of the match.
When the game began, Dugya Bum seemed overhyped and anxious. On his first offensive touch, he rose up for a 10-foot jump shot that clanked long off the backboard. Twice in the ensuing minutes, he turned the ball over.
Meanwhile, Khata’s blazing-fast guards penetrated at will. The score, indicated on a small flip-style board at center court, seesawed back and forth. At halftime, Norlha led 18–16.
In the second half, Dugya Bum’s nerves settled. He soared in for rebounds and, low in his defensive stance, kept Khata’s ball handlers at bay. Norlha led 28–24 entering the final quarter.
Johnson hopes that his team will become so well respected that it will attract players from across the Tibetan plateau. (An Rong Xu)Khata bounced back, tying the score and then taking a narrow lead. In the waning minutes, with Norlha trailing 36–35, Johnson hit a three-pointer from the top of the key. Khata replied with a three of its own and followed that with a layup to pull ahead by three. A Norlha player then made one of two free throws to cut the lead to two.
But that was as close as the team got. In the final seconds, there was scrambling and desperation from Norlha. Whoops and hollers filled the gym. But the clock wound down. A horn rang and Khata fans burst onto the court. Norlha had lost 41–39. Dugya Bum kneeled on the floor and covered his eyes, hiding tears.
Johnson huddled his team close. “We played our hearts out!” he shouted. “I know this hurts. But use this hurt, this feeling that you have right now, to fuel you over the winter.”
Jampa drove Johnson and Dugya Bum back to Ritoma. Dugya Bum was in the back seat, silent. It was almost midnight when they arrived back in Ritoma. Jampa dropped off Dugya Bum and Johnson at Norlha’s gate.
In a few months, Johnson would move out of the guesthouse and into his own place in the village. “I’m still scratching the surface of this way of life, this culture, Buddhism,” he told me, adding that he’s “definitely here for the long haul.”
Johnson’s vision for Norlha basketball is to build a program so well respected across the plateau that the best and most driven players will flock to train in Ritoma and then return to their towns and villages as player-coaches to spread what they have learned. Johnson knows achieving this goal is in large part dependent on Dugya Bum: If his commitment remains steadfast, Johnson believes he could become one of the best players in all of Tibet.
It was with these aspirations in mind that Johnson, late that night after their championship loss, gathered his thoughts as he and Dugya Bum stood together in the darkness. Before heading their separate ways, they embraced. Then Johnson looked Dugya Bum in the eye. “What you’ve done this last year was amazing,” Johnson said. “But keep it going. You’re our leader now. This is just the beginning.”
Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. It appears in the January/February 2019 print edition with the headline “How Tibet Went Crazy for Hoops.”
President Donald Trump likes to see his supporters loudly defending him on television, and since joining the team in April, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has delivered. He’s also made gaffes with memorable arguments such as “Truth isn’t truth” and, as The New York Times documented last week, continued drumming up business with governments around the world that might see him as a shortcut to the president, whom he defends for free.
On the Sunday-morning talk shows, Giuliani dropped the defense lawyer’s conventional “admit nothing” approach in favor of what might be called “deny nothing.”
Hush-money payments weeks before the November 2016 election to women alleging extramarital affairs? Sure that happened, Giuliani said on ABC’s This Week, but “paying $130,000 to Stormy whatever and paying [$150,000] to the other one is not a crime.” And anyway, he said, those paltry settlement sums show that the women were just looking for money: “I have been involved in cases like this. When it’s true and you have the kind of money the president had, it’s a $1 million settlement. When it’s a harassment settlement and it’s not true, you give them $130,000, $150,000. They went away for so little money that it indicates their case was very, very weak.”
[Read: The Sunday shows set the agenda in Trump’s Washington]
Did members of the Trump campaign collude or coordinate with Russians to influence the election? “I have no idea,” Giuliani said. “I know that collusion is not a crime. It was over with by the time of the election.” It was not clear whether he was admitting something about the 14 Trump associates known to have interacted with Russians during the campaign or the transition.
What about any coordination between WikiLeaks and Trump associates? Longtime adviser Roger Stone traded messages with the anti-secrecy organization and made public statements that claimed or suggested inside information. Stone now denies any contact with the group that made its name by publishing highly classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents. But even if that did happen, Giuliani said, “if Roger Stone gave anybody a heads-up about WikiLeaks’ leaks, that’s not a crime. It would be like giving him a heads-up that the Times is going to print something.”
The negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that quietly continued well into the presidential campaign? Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen—whom Trump on Sunday called a “rat,” once again invoking the language of mobsters—has testified that he was in talks through June 2016, when news broke about Russian intelligence agencies hacking Democrats. According to Giuliani, Trump’s written answers to the special counsel’s questions say the Trump Tower Moscow discussions may have continued even later, “up to November 2016.”
Read: [Donald Trump’s Mafia mind-set]
As for the president’s shifting accounts on various issues, which critics decry as lies to the American people? Aboard Air Force One in April, for example, Trump declared that he did not know about hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who alleged an affair; Giuliani contradicted him in a Fox News interview a month later. “The president’s not under oath,” Giuliani said Sunday of Trump’s false public statements. “And the president tried to do the best he can to remember what happened back at a time when he was the busiest man in the world.”
Giuliani also appeared on Fox News Sunday and said Trump would not sit down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, whom he dismissed as “a joke.” The president submitted written answers to the prosecutors’ questions and will not allow a follow-up interview in person. “Over my dead body,” Giuliani said.
[Read: Process crimes and misdemeanors]
Trump often dismisses allegations because they aren’t proved with certainty, such as the intelligence community’s consensus about Russian election meddling or the CIA’s assessment that the Saudi crown prince most likely ordered the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Giuliani sought to apply that standard to the president’s own actions. Like any defense lawyer, he wants to convince the public that nothing can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and he wants to make any doubt seem reasonable. He dismissed Cohen as “a serial liar who taped his own client” and who told one story and now contradicts his old account. “You’re going to tell me which is the truth?” Giuliani said. “I think I know what the truth is. But unless you’re God, you will never know what the truth is.”
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
My sister is a year younger than me and has two children, ages 16 and 14. I have four children: one age 14, one age 12, and 8-year-old twins. We have another sister with 6-year-olds. We’ve all always exchanged Christmas and birthday gifts and have always sent one another's kids birthday gifts.
A few years ago, my sister stopped giving my children and me birthday gifts. I continued to send her and her children gifts. For their 14th and 16th birthdays, however, I stopped in response. The gifts themselves are not the issue—it’s totally fine to stop sending gifts (and none of us really needs anything anyway), but I'm wondering what prompted this change since she still sends gifts to my other sister’s kids. She’s never said anything about it.
We did have an argument four years ago, but that was resolved and everything has seemingly been fine for years. But I wonder if she has some issue with me that I’m not aware of. Should I ask her about it? I don’t want her to think she needs to send my kids gifts. That's beside the point. I'm just wondering if there was some message I missed that I should address. Or should I just let it go?
Anonymous
New Jersey
Dear Anonymous,
Gift-giving in families can be a minefield, because the act of giving a gift (or not) has the potential to represent so much. A gift can be a way to communicate love or affection, or to offer an olive branch; the absence of one can communicate anger or hurt or spite. Some gifts send a message of resentful obligation (the overtly cheap gift; the blatantly “wrong” or impersonal gift) while others become a tool of manipulation (the estranged sibling who sends a gift to “look good” in the eyes of other family members and then, to look even better, complains to those family members that the recipient, who didn’t want the gift in the first place, wasn’t appreciative).
Accurately or not, we also use gifts as a barometer of the giver’s feelings for us. If I give my sister a more thoughtful and personal gift than the online gift card she gives me, does that mean I’m more invested in our relationship than she is? If I give my brother’s kids nicer gifts than he gives my kids, does he not care about my kids as much as I care about his?
I mention all of this because your question is really about your relationship with your sister. She stopped giving gifts to you and your children a few years ago, and yet in all that time, neither you nor she has acknowledged this. Meanwhile, you’ve been left worrying that you may have hurt her without intending to. And so I wonder if there’s a pattern between you two in which the only way she expresses herself is by withdrawing in some way, leaving you to ask, “Is anything wrong?” And if so, does she calmly tell you what’s bothering her, or is the interaction generally fraught? Or does she say “Nothing’s wrong,” even though it later becomes apparent that something is wrong?
In other words, 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. Likewise, there may be something in your history together that has made her reluctant to say to you, “Hey, I think that we and the kids are old enough now that I’d like to stop giving gifts since none of us needs anything anyway” or “What do you think about giving to charity on each other’s behalf instead of gifts we don’t need from now on?” It’s possible that she anticipated—based on past experience—a negative reaction from you, so she felt that it was easier to avoid the topic altogether.
Avoidance usually takes hold when one or both people in a relationship feel that the benefit of evading the issue outweighs the benefit of being direct. And both you and your sister have avoided not just this conversation about whether things are okay between you, but also the conversation about why you two are so afraid of being direct with each other about what’s in your hearts and on your minds. Now would be the perfect time to start by telling her how important she is to you, that you want her to feel comfortable talking to you and vice versa, and that you’re curious to know what prompted the change around gift-giving and whether there’s anything she’s upset about, related or unrelated to gift-giving. And then you can say something more general about how much closer you feel to her when you two can tell each other what you’re thinking and feeling.
Two final thoughts about gifts: True gifts are those we give freely and without expectation of reciprocation. If you’ve been giving gifts to your sister and her children for their sake (and not in order to get something back), then your decision to continue to give should have nothing to do with whether your sister gives gifts to you or your children. Genuine giving isn’t a tit-for-tat situation. (Of course, if your sister explicitly requests that you stop—and so far she hasn’t—then you’ll need to respect her wishes but can also talk about what’s behind them. It may be, for instance, that she can’t afford giving gifts to everyone on their birthday and finds it awkward to receive them under those circumstances.)
Second, a gift is one way to say, “I have you in mind today; I celebrate you.” But there are plenty of other ways, too, such as calling to offer birthday wishes, sending a thoughtful card, taking the person to lunch, or going on a special outing together. This goes for both your sister and her teenagers and is an important part of nurturing these relationships. Once the gift-giving stopped, did you both continue to call or send a card or in some way acknowledge the birthdays? If not, you two might also talk about how you’d like birthdays acknowledged in your respective families, even if gifts aren’t involved. No matter what’s decided, taking the guessing out will be the best gift you can give to your relationship.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
In 2013, The Atlantic ran a piece titled “Why Do Liberals Hate Cory Booker?” The article searched for the sources of progressive distrust of the senator from New Jersey. It scoured his policy positions to find his transgressions of party orthodoxy—and it couldn’t find any substantive deviation. It concluded, “The case against Booker seems to rest chiefly on tone and approach. Like Obama, he has positioned himself as a conciliator willing to work across the aisle.”
When I met with Booker this month, he reminded me several times that he had recently returned from New Hampshire. His barely concealed preparations for a presidential run have included the unveiling of large-scale, creative policy proposals that should put to rest any questions about where he resides ideologically. He has crafted a piece of legislation to provide low-income kids with a nest egg of $50,000, what he calls “baby bonds.” Another Booker bill would guarantee a job to anyone who wants one. Earlier this fall, he spoke passionately about the problem of economic concentration.
Despite all this aggressive legislation, his tone remains stridently conciliatory. A recurring theme in his speeches is love—or as he once put it, “unreasonable, irrational, impractical love.” I met him in his office, where he sat on a sofa underneath a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. We spoke at length about, well, love. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Franklin Foer: You don’t often hear politicians talk about love.
Cory Booker: We may not use the word, but the things that we revere most about American history are often incredible acts of love. I mean, [Andrew] Goodman, [James] Chaney, and [Michael] Schwerner dying together. So here you have two Jewish Americans who are not directly affected by the injustices going on in Mississippi, but [they] went down there to stand for their principles, side by side.
[Read: Cory Booker’s four standing ovations in Des Moines]
Foer: But why have you decided to elevate love at this precise moment?
Booker: I was almost going to try to challenge your presupposition, but I think you might be right. I find myself leaning even more into it now. We are heading toward a point in my lifetime where I haven’t seen a level of tribalism like this. I was reminding people in New Hampshire this past weekend that commercials ran in their state against Chris Christie for the singular sin of hugging Barack Obama. I mean, it’s gotten so bad that touching another American is considered a betrayal of tribe. We’re at a point in American history where when I hugged John McCain on the floor, literally after he got his cancer diagnosis, I get home and I’m getting pilloried on Twitter.
Foer: A lot of politicians talk about bipartisanship and restoring civility. But love is a very different way of explaining the problem.
Booker: My heroes have been not afraid to talk about love. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the “beloved community.” He talked about the Greeks, who separated love into three categories: eros, philia, and agape love. I think patriotism, by its very definition, is love of country. But we seem to have become a country where the highest thing we’re reaching for is tolerance. When you say “bipartisan,” you’re really saying, “Hey we’re going to tolerate each other.” Go home and tell somebody that you live with, or your neighbor, “I tolerate you.” That’s not a high aspiration.
[Read: Cory Booker: man of data, man of faith]
Foer: So to pose the obvious …
Booker: Let me just finish this point, because it’s one that I think is really important. Let’s spin the globe right now and put our finger down. Go to, say, the Middle East. You’re going to see tribal connections. But we said we were going to found a country where we’re not connected by those things. We’re connected by ideals. I think about those words at the end of the Declaration of Independence, our declaration of interdependence, our declaration of love. If we’re going to succeed, we must mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. That is not just about tolerance, isn’t just bipartisanship. We are at our best when we give the ultimate sacrifice of putting other people, putting the country, putting our communities ahead of ourselves. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
[Read: “We can’t make our elections about being against Trump”]
Foer: As I was thinking about your descriptions of love, I went back and read some King.
Booker: By the way, this year I decided to go back to King myself. I’ve read The Radical King and King’s collection of speeches on labor, a really great compendium. But you could also take Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the great civil-rights leaders, whose whole house was bombed numerous times, whose wife was stabbed. I mean, he embodied and preached the same idea of beloved community, the debt we owe each other.
Foer: The hard part of it is the loving of your oppressor, loving the one who hates you.
Booker: Yes, but isn’t that the call? I had this interesting experience in the Midwest when I was visiting farms. Someone called up the guy that was giving me the tour and said, “I can’t have Cory Booker in my home.” The person said, “Why?” They said, “Well, we’re a Christian household.” My tour guide laughed and said, “Cory’s a Christian, too.” But they had watched something, I think it was from Fox News, and they thought I was just this really bad human being. My host, in a sort of tickled way, just reminded the person of his own faith values. Then when we got together—it’s hard to hate somebody that you sit down with—we ended up having an incredible connection.
Foer: To pose the obvious and vexing question, can you find love for Donald Trump?
Booker: When I gave a speech at the convention, Trump tweeted something really mean about me, veiledly dark. You know, almost a weird kind of attack on me.
Foer: Who would expect that from a Trump tweet?
Booker: Then next morning, I’m out with Chris Cuomo on CNN and he puts up the tweet. I think he was trying to get a rise out of me. He goes, “What do you have to say to Donald Trump?” I said, “I love you Donald Trump. I don’t want you to be my president; I’m going to work very hard against you. But I’m never going to let you twist me and drag me down so low as to hate you.”
Foer: But not hating Donald Trump is different than actually finding love for Donald Trump.
Booker: My faith tradition is love your enemies. It’s not complicated for me, if I aspire to be who I say I am. I am a Christian American. Literally written in the ideals of my faith is to love those who hate you. I don’t see why that’s so shocking. But that doesn’t mean that I will be complicit in oppression. That doesn’t mean I will be tolerant of hatred.
Something I talked about in my New Hampshire speeches and New Hampshire house parties is the example of Lindsey Graham and what he said during the [Brett] Kavanaugh hearings. One side might call it a rant, one side might call it a noble exposition. But I have to say, I was not happy about it. Obviously he made me angry; obviously I disagreed with what he was saying. But just a few weeks later, he and I are on the phone to the White House. He is defending one of the provisions I want in the criminal-justice-reform bill that’s heading to the floor now, effectively ending juvenile solitary confinement. He was a partner with me.
I’m one of the few senators, perhaps ever, that lives in a community in which there are still regular shootings. My mayor is doing a great job lowering violent crime, but I had a guy murdered on my block. I also live in a community where lots of people come home from jail, having done some of those shootings. I see that idea of redemption and unconditional love from people in the community.
Foer: Your speeches seem to almost be exhortations. You’re not just saying, “I believe in love for myself.” You’re exhorting your audience to believe in love.
Booker: Two things. One is anger, let’s not mistake it. Anger is a constructive emotion, and clearly in the five years that I’ve been here, I’ve been angry at times.
Foer: You had your Spartacus moment.
Booker: Look, the reality is what King said so eloquently: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate can’t drive out hate; only love can do that.” Not only do I believe it is an important ideal, I also believe it is the right strategy, the right political strategy.
Foer: But if I listen to Trump talk about, say, immigrants, how could I not let that anger turn, at a certain point, into hatred? Just as love is a human emotion, hate is also extremely human.
Booker: God, my anger as a former athlete gets me into the gym working harder. I think our outrage should get us out working. That fire of rage should be fuel to get us to do the things that make the change. But if we become a party that is about what we’re against, I don’t think that’s a winning strategy. I think if we give all of our energy—psychic, mental—toward Donald Trump, it makes him powerful.
The other thing I want to say is, millions and millions of good Americans, good decent Americans, voted for Donald Trump. As [Abraham] Lincoln said, “The best way to destroy my enemy is to make him my friend.” If you make Trump the subject, then you’re not talking about the shared pain in this country, the shared injustice in this country. The fact is, Donald Trump voters aren’t getting paid a living wage; they’re losing their dignity in their work. There’s common pain in this country, but we’ve lost a sense of common purpose. If you make Donald Trump your central focus, then it’s going to be much harder to get to a sense of common purpose.
Foer: Do you believe love can conquer racism?
Booker: I don’t think the word conquer is right, but I do believe that it can break down all these artificial constraints. I just really do believe that at the end of the day, this country respects and honors people based on their character and the quality of their ideas. I just see so many people who are talking to hearts and heads and not tribalism, and that kind of thing breaking through.
Foer: King talked about how self-righteousness is an enemy of love? It seems like we kind of do live in a world plagued by …
Booker: A world plagued by self-righteousness, by righteous indignation. I think about the profound humility that people had in the face of the likes of Bull Connor. In Birmingham, the first time jails were completely full in the modern civil-rights movement, they were filled with kids. As the kids are on the bus going home, you know what they’re singing? “What do we want? Freedom. When do we want it? Now.” Then they start saying, “What does the governor want? Freedom. When does he want it? Now.” They were literally singing songs not of attack toward the people that were oppressing them and literally shipping them off to jail; they were singing songs about the idea that my liberation and your liberation are interwoven. As King says, “Dignity is indivisible.” I can assault the tactics you’re using, the walls that you’re perpetuating. But as I start attacking your human dignity, I’m diminishing my own.
Foer: We’re in so many ways in a political war of attrition right now. If I look at your program, there’s a way in which power, wealth, and opportunity need to be redistributed. There’s a zero-sum quality to it all. And if you come in preaching love, aren’t you going to be accused of being soft and not having the required temperament to accomplish all of these things you propose?
Booker: Right, a couple things. So one is, Gandhi overthrew the strongest empire on the planet without raising a fist. This idea that we have—that to be tough you’ve got to be cruel and crass; in order to be strong you’ve got to be mean?—doesn’t hold up in human history. I’m a guy who came through a street fight to be elected mayor of a city. You know, I wasn’t mayor of a wealthy city. It was a tough city during a recession, in which inner cities experience depression. What we accomplished, because it definitely wasn’t just me, was the largest economic-development period in our city’s 60-year history, the first time our population was growing again. I mean, I can go through all the things we were able to accomplish that necessitated toughness and strength from a whole lot of folks.
The only thing I do want to take issue with is this idea of redistribution. I don’t really think it is. When you make an investment in a kid’s education, it expands the economy. When you make an investment in every child having wealth, you actually expand the whole. It has a multiplier effect.
Foer: But you’re proposing an estate-tax increase to fund your program, where you are literally taking away …
Booker: I believe in the kind of things that will have a multiplier effect on our economy. That we’ve got to be a nation that gets back to investing in the most valuable natural resource we have in this country, which is the genius of our children.
Foer: I see all that, but why shy away from saying that you’re attacking concentrations of power?
Booker: No, trust me, I don’t shy away from saying the concentrations of economic power and political power in this country have been detrimental to the strength of our economy.
Foer: This is a pretty dark moment. Has it made you more faithful?
Booker: These are things I didn’t think I’d be talking about, but I have been praying more fervently, beginning my days on my knees with a lot more consistency. A lot of it’s just to ground me and keep me focused on my highest ideals, because there are difficult days where you do feel your lesser angels. I want to stay humble and focused. I think that these are practices that have helped me be a better person.
Foer: Don’t you ever see yourself tipping into self-righteousness?
Booker: Absolutely. There are things I’ve said in the last two years I regret. A lot of my prayer, quite literally, is to make me worthy of this moment, and to help me to live in accordance to the ideals that I hold. I love Saint Francis of Assisi’s prayer “Make me an instrument of peace. Where there’s hatred, let me sow love. Where there’s darkness let me sow light.” This is a time for all of us to be humble aspirants.
Foer: How has your thinking about love practically changed you as a politician?
Booker: Yeah, I think there are times where I’ve checked myself. There’s an example popping in my head that I really haven’t shared with anybody. It was a committee hearing, and I found myself lecturing the other side, like senators often do. And some senator who tests me to be the best person I am shot back at me something I found kind of obnoxious. I got mad, and then I reflected upon it. I said, “It’s not for me to lecture people who disagree with me; it’s for me to call myself to exhibit that behavior, not to lecture people on it.”
In one of my favorite stories, I encountered somebody who was homeless. He asked if I had extra socks and I told him, “I don’t have socks, I don’t have socks.” The guy I was with bent over and took off the socks he was wearing and gave them. And I said, “Here I am, this guy that talks about love all the time, but I’ve got this one moment to show it, to be more creative in my moral imagination, and I didn’t demonstrate it.” I think it’s so much more important for us, as leaders right now, to live those values and not preach them.
On June 4, President Donald Trump tweeted, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”
Trump is not the first president to consider a self-pardon. On August 1, 1974, Vice President Gerald Ford met with Alexander Haig, an aide to Richard Nixon, who raised the possibility that the president might: invoke Section 3 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment if impeached by the House and step aside temporarily on the grounds that he was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then reassume office if the Senate failed to remove him; “plea-bargain” with Congress for censure instead of removal; pardon the other Watergate defendants and himself, then resign.
Or Nixon might resign and Ford might pardon him. In his 2009 book, The Presidential Pardon Power, the political scientist Jeffrey Crouch suggested that the point of the meeting was for Haig to let Ford know that, as president, he would have the power to pardon Nixon before indictment or trial.
Four days later, the Justice Department produced a memo arguing that under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case,” a president could not pardon himself. On August 9, Nixon resigned; a month later, Ford granted him “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for all federal crimes committed during his presidency.
[George Packer: The corruption of the Republican party]
Since then, the idea of a presidential self-pardon has floated on the fringes of constitutional dialogue. Scholars are split on whether the president’s constitutionally conferred power “to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment,” includes self-pardon. One side points out, correctly, that the text of the Constitution limits the pardon power in only one respect—“cases of impeachment”—and thus can be read as unlimited in every other way. But the other side notes, also correctly, that there is no mention of self-pardon in the framing or ratification debates, nor in the legal history of pardons. As the late University of Chicago scholar Philip Kurland, who during the Watergate hearings helped the Senate Judiciary Committee conclude that Nixon had obstructed justice, once summed up the literature: “Obviously there’s no answer.”
In 2018, of course, scholars’ views don’t mean much. The current constitutional rule is Donald Trump can do anything he can get away with. The president operates by hotel-burglar logic: If people don’t want to be robbed, they ought to lock their doors; if the Founders didn’t want Trump to do something, it’s their own fault for not writing “the president can’t do this.”
But even if Trump could get away with a self-pardon, would it do him any good?
The most crucial calculation for a self-pardoning president is when the pardon takes place. Suppose that Trump decides to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and also pardon himself and his associates for any federal crimes they may have already committed. Everybody’s off the hook.
But there’s a catch: One possible charge against Trump is that he has conspired to obstruct justice—and continues to do so. As of the date of the pardon, past acts of conspiracy could no longer be prosecuted. But if Trump blocked investigations after the pardon, he would be committing fresh acts of obstruction—which the pardon could not have covered. According to Samuel W. Buell, a former federal prosecutor who teaches a seminar at Duke University called “The Presidency and Criminal Investigations,” if the president were prosecuted for the post-pardon acts, his pre-pardon conduct could be used against him in court—for instance, as evidence of “the background and purpose” of any conspiracy he was charged with.
Moreover, the pardon itself may be a criminal act under federal law. “Lawful acts can constitute obstruction of justice when done with a bad motive,” Buell says. “I don’t see why a pardon would be any different, if it’s done for the purpose of keeping the president from being held to account.”
[Mikhaila Fogel and Benjamin Wittes: Mueller is laying siege to the Trump presidency]
In his wickedly entertaining 2012 book, Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies, Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law professor, imagined a president who pardoned himself regularly to cover all illegal acts committed since the previous pardon; each successive pardon would cover the previous pardon. But even an energetically self-pardoning president won’t be president forever. Eventually, one self-pardon would have to be the final one, and thus not pardonable by the president himself. The self-pardoner would be one pardon short of home free.
The more prudent course—politically, at least—would be for Trump to wait until the last day of his final term, and then issue a self-pardon just before midnight, so that anything he’s done while in office and beforehand would be covered. Pretty clever, except for two problems. First, a pardon doesn’t exempt him from criminal jeopardy at the state level. Even if he fires Mueller, regular U.S. attorneys are likely to encounter the Trump name in other investigations (Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen was indicted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose charging documents effectively named the president as a conspirator). So Mueller might still be a ghost at Trump’s feast for the rest of his time in the White House.
Second, Trump would leave office the day after that midnight pardon—and its consequences would then depend on his successor. A Democratic president might feel compelled by the party base to pursue prosecution despite a pardon. Even a Republican successor might be reluctant to block an investigation that turned up genuine crimes. Thus, while Trump “might want to pardon himself if it looks like he might get prosecuted,” Kalt told me, “what has to give him pause is that it might not work.”
The attorney general for a new administration could begin with an investigation of the pardon itself, then probe pre-pardon conduct, and then indict Trump for any crimes that turn up, arguing that a self-pardon is void. Trump would plead the pardon and move to dismiss the charges—and the issue would swiftly move to the Supreme Court.
Would the conservative majority uphold the pardon?
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich probably thinks so. He recently explained that a Democratic congressional investigation of Trump after the midterms would let the world know “whether the Kavanaugh fight was worth it”—since a proper Trump judge would block any subpoenas directed at the president.
One wonders how Justice Brett Kavanaugh felt hearing Gingrich’s words. He has an uphill fight to restore his reputation with the public. To be properly cynical, this justice might see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dispel the cloud on his image by voting against Trump.
[Adam Serwer: Trump is running out of alibis]
And let’s remember how radical a self-pardon would seem. The last presidential pardon, of Richard Nixon, covered “all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”
That’s a highly unusual, perhaps unique, pardon. Ordinarily, pardons—even those granted before trial or indictment—cover specific offenses the recipient has committed or may have committed. Even presidential amnesties—such as Jimmy Carter’s in 1977, which pardoned an entire class of Vietnam War draft resisters—didn’t purport to cover any crime the draft dodgers might have committed, only those related to conscription and service, and only if nonviolent.
By the time Nixon was pardoned, everyone knew what he’d been up to during his presidential term. A pardon issued by Trump to Trump, however, if it were to insulate him from federal charges, might have to cover a much longer time period—he’s been running his organization since the early 1970s. And “all offenses” would thus cover a wider range of possible crimes—allegations of sexual assault, for example, and campaign-finance violations, among others. I’ve not been able to find a pardon like it.
Upholding such a broad pardon would be quite a lot to ask of Supreme Court justices, even those who owe their seats to Trump. The five votes he needs might be hard to get.
As Jeffrey Crouch points out, the use of pardons for raw personal and political advantage has become routine since the Nixon years. In late 1992, as President George H. W. Bush prepared to leave office, he and many of his associates were still under investigation by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh for their conduct during the Reagan-era operation that sold arms to Iran and illegally funneled the proceeds to guerrillas in Nicaragua. Four defendants had pleaded guilty or had been convicted, and two were facing trial, and new evidence had set off speculation that Walsh might summon Bush to testify before a federal grand jury—creating jeopardy of prosecution for perjury or worse.
A few weeks before Bush left office, the veteran political columnist Dan Schorr wrote a column for The Baltimore Sun, musing on whether Bush was considering self-pardon to spare himself prosecution by Walsh. (He wasn’t, Schorr concluded, while pointing out that legal experts believed that he could.) Writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the columnist James Gill suggested that Bush should resign a day early and allow Vice President Dan Quayle to succeed to the office and pardon his political patron. Gill was joking—but in 2018, that scenario is hideously plausible.
In the event, Bush pardoned all the defendants, those convicted and those awaiting trial, leaving Walsh no leverage with which to make a possible case against Bush. It was effectively a self-pardon, but with no constitutional infirmity.
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, members of Congress speculated that Bill Clinton might pardon himself. Clinton did not; he survived an impeachment trial and, at the end of his term, issued pardons of the old-fashioned corrupt variety that were aimed less at protecting himself than at rewarding political supporters. President George W. Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who had been convicted and sentenced for lying to federal investigators about the potential release of information identifying an undercover case officer for the CIA. (Trump fully pardoned Libby last April.)
Trump can certainly take the George H. W. Bush route by pardoning his associates, and he needn’t wait until his term is over to do so. But he still wouldn’t be out of the woods. As noted, the pardon power covers only “offenses against the United States,” so states with ambitious prosecutors, such as New York, Illinois, or California, could begin investigations of his conduct against which a federal pardon would provide no protection.
Finally, if Trump were to pardon himself, Congress could still step in and impeach him for abuse of the pardon power—possibly even after he left office. There’s historical warrant for impeachment of former officials. The most famous British impeachment began in 1787, when Parliament brought a bill against William Hastings, who had already resigned as governor-general of India; his trial dragged on for seven years before he was acquitted.
Even if Democrats don’t take control of both the House and the Senate until 2020, they can still impeach and try Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors” after he leaves office. Conviction would carry no penalty beyond “disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” Given the horror with which many of his enemies regard him, a Democratic majority might be tempted to drive that stake through Trump’s political career.
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