Foto: Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa USA via AP
Políticos e líderes mundiais têm falado muito a respeito do recente anúncio do presidente Donald Trump de que os EUA vão retirar cerca de 7 mil soldados do Afeganistão, reduzindo a presença militar americana no país pela metade. Mas pouco se tem ouvido daqueles que têm mais em jogo: os próprios afegãos.
O Intercept conversou com homens e mulheres afegãos de cidades e áreas rurais sobre o que a retirada de tropas poderia significar para eles e suas famílias. O anúncio de retirada ocorre em um momento perigoso para o governo do Afeganistão, que tem lutado contra uma insurgência talibã cada vez mais poderosa que controla mais território do que nunca. As forças de segurança afegãs, cuja maioria dos integrantes vem de aldeias e áreas rurais, sofreram um número recorde de baixas durante os combates do ano passado, e poucos estão se inscrevendo para substituí-los. O país também enfrenta sua pior seca em uma geração, levando a escassez severa de alimentos, especialmente nas áreas rurais.
A notícia da retirada provocou uma variedade de reações, de receio a otimismo cauteloso. Entrevistas em Cabul foram realizadas pessoalmente, enquanto pessoas de outras partes do país foram entrevistadas por telefone. As respostas foram editadas para duração e clareza.
Wais Azamkhel, 27, estudante de medicina, JalalabadSe os americanos e as forças estrangeiras partirem e houver paz, será bom. Acho que o único pretexto para os talibãs e outros países continuarem lutando aqui é a presença das forças estrangeiras. Se as forças estrangeiras forem embora, o talibã não poderá provocar ou recrutar pessoas para lutar contra os afegãos. Como muitos afegãos, eu era favorável à presença americana. Mas, veja bem, nós temos mais insegurança, mais derramamento de sangue e mais cemitérios. Eu me preocupo com a próxima geração.
Eu tinha 10 anos quando o talibã foi removido do poder. Nós podíamos brincar. Havia mais segurança. Não havia bombas ou explosões. Hoje, temos algumas liberdades, mas não há garantias em cidades ou aldeias de que não se pode ser morto a qualquer momento, seja pelas forças afegãs ou pelos talibãs. Houve um casamento no bairro onde nasci há alguns anos. O talibã entrou à força, alguém avisou o governo local e, de repente, o casamento se transformou em um banho de sangue. Essa não é uma história isolada. Massacres e funerais são a nova normalidade em Cabul e nas províncias.
Nós queremos paz, um fim para o derramamento de sangue. Queremos acabar com o assassinato de afegãos por afegãos. Talvez fiquemos mais pobres, mas queremos sobreviver.
Foto: Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images
Eu tinha 12 anos quando o talibã foi forçado a sair do poder em 2001. Antes disso, não podíamos ir à escola, não podíamos fazer compras sozinhas, televisão e música eram banidas. Hoje, vivemos em um Afeganistão diferente. Eu terminei meus estudos, trabalho e sou uma mulher independente.
Não tenho certeza se confio no talibã. Eles serão capazes de tolerar todas as mudanças e transformações ocorridas? Eles me aceitarão como um ser humano igual? Tudo o que tenho visto são derramamento de sangue e ataques contra civis em Cabul e outras cidades. E se eles voltarem e começarem a lutar como os mujahidin faziam nos anos 90? Então eu tenho meus medos. Acho que os americanos e os outros vão embora e, quando o fizerem, tudo, inclusive os direitos das mulheres, será comprometido em nome da paz e da política.
Nazaka Bibi, 69, avó, distrito de Deh Rawood, província de UruzganPrecisamos de um fim para a guerra, um fim para o derramamento de sangue. Nossas áreas foram invadidas muitas vezes pelo governo e por forças estrangeiras, e também somos pressionados pelos talibãs. Nos últimos vários anos, vi quantos talibãs foram mortos. Eles são principalmente homens mais jovens das áreas rurais. Certa vez, assisti a um funeral de um combatente talibã morto em Helmand. Ele deixou para trás uma jovem viúva e dois filhos.
Viajei a Cabul para um tratamento no ano passado e descobri que as pessoas também estão morrendo de ataques na cidade. Às vezes, quando há um casamento, as pessoas ficam com medo por causa de helicópteros e aviões. Uma vez, houve um tiroteio comemorativo, e as pessoas ficaram muito assustadas por causa dos helicópteros pairando acima. Então, acho que, se as forças estrangeiras partirem, será pacífico. O Afeganistão precisa de paz.
Foto: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
O talibã assumiu o controle de grandes cidades algumas vezes. Eles são mais fortes, mais brutais. Ouvi no rádio que Trump disse que não levaria tropas em breve, depois, a retirada foi anunciada à noite. Eu tenho um filho servindo como comando no Exército Nacional Afegão em Helmand, e ele está preocupado. Jatos e apoio americanos são o motivo pelo qual os comandos afegãos são bem-sucedidos. Todo mundo sabe que o Afeganistão ainda não tem uma força aérea. Ainda somos totalmente dependentes dos americanos em logística, inteligência, apoio aéreo e dinheiro.
O talibã está agora atacando mesquitas, clínicas e salões de casamento. Eles não se importam que mulheres ou crianças se machuquem. Meu filho me contou que os militantes talibãs e paquistaneses incendiaram toda a cidade de Ghazni. Casas foram alvejadas. Pessoas fugiram.
Meu filho perdeu muitos de seus amigos. Toda vez que ele sai de casa, sinto medo. A mãe dele está preocupada. A mulher e os filhos dele estão preocupados. Às vezes, queremos impedi-lo de fazer seu trabalho, mas ele ama o que faz. Eu sempre rezo por sua segurança e bem-estar.
Um dia, os americanos irão embora, como os russos fizeram. Mas temo que, se os americanos saírem agora, o talibã assumirá, e teremos uma guerra civil. Tenho visto Trump no TOLO [canal de notícias de TV], e ele é um louco. Com ele, tudo é possível.
Alam Yar, 54, comerciante de tapetes, Mazar-i-SharifO anúncio sobre a saída das forças americanas é preocupante. Isso sugere que os EUA não têm mais nada com o Afeganistão. Agora, querem trabalhar com o talibã, para entregar o Afeganistão ao talibã. Na verdade, os americanos foram derrotados pelos paquistaneses e os talibãs. Agora, estão fazendo um acordo com as pessoas que mataram americanos, primeiro em Nova York e depois no Afeganistão, nos últimos 17 anos. A retirada dos EUA pode encorajar o talibã e os terroristas de muitos países estrangeiros que ainda estão aqui e que não foram derrotados.
As pessoas têm más recordações em Mazar. Eu me lembro do banho de sangue em cada rua nesta cidade, em 1998. Eu vi como os combatentes do general Abdul Rashid Dostum lutaram contra o talibã aqui. Se aquela situação se repetir, teremos um massacre. O que os afegãos querem é uma garantia de que não haverá combates rua-a-rua. Ninguém quer um único dia de guerra.
Eu não posso fugir desta cidade. Aqui é a minha casa. É aqui que meus cinco filhos moram. Os talibãs estão no campo da província de Balkh, não muito longe de Mazar. Acho que a decisão de retirar tantas tropas dos EUA assustou muita gente.
Shazia, 35 anos, professora do ensino médio, distrito de Andarab, província de BaghlanEm nosso distrito, a maioria dos homens está nas Forças de Segurança Nacional do Afeganistão, a maioria das pessoas está armada e há rivalidades. Dificilmente há um dia, uma semana ou um mês sem funerais no distrito. Há muitas viúvas, e muitas pessoas perderam familiares. Não tenho certeza do que o talibã faria com as pessoas em Andarab e outros lugares. Também me preocupa como seria viver sob o talibã. Antes, eles governavam com muita rigidez, então, espero que as forças estrangeiras possam ficar no Afeganistão para sempre, como uma garantia de que não voltemos aos dias do talibã ou, Deus me livre, tenha uma guerra civil. Veja o que aconteceu quando os russos deixaram o Afeganistão. O governo afegão entrou em colapso e tivemos caos e combates.
Foto: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
Essa decisão terá um impacto negativo. Os afegãos pensavam em uma transição autocentrada, mas não tinham interesse nela. O terrorismo e o extremismo não terminaram aqui. A posição dos afegãos está mil vezes pior do que em 2001.
O primeiro impacto negativo da decisão será a ocorrência de baixas e mortes nas Forças Nacionais de Defesa e Segurança do Afeganistão – tanto em vidas quanto em equipamentos. Do ponto de vista do governo, há desorganização e instabilidade, e estamos caminhando para mais instabilidade. Paquistão, Irã, países árabes, russos e outros estão interferindo. Se isso for implementado apressadamente, perderemos mais recursos e não seremos capazes de oferecer segurança.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Afegãos aguardam apreensivos retirada de milhares de tropas americanas por Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Google is facing a new campaign of global protests over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.
On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google’s offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark.
Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.
In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had “effectively ended” the project, sources said, because the company’s engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.
But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday’s protests — which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day — said that they would continue to demonstrate “until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all.”
Google “should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent,” said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. “Google’s directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don’t, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”
“Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”In August last year, 170 Tibet groups sent a letter to Pichai, stating that the human rights situation in China had worsened in recent years and that Dragonfly would “legitimize the repressive regime of the Chinese government and support the limiting of civil and political freedoms and promoting [of] distorted information.” Pichai did not issue any response, which the groups said has only heightened their concerns. (Tibet is governed as an autonomous region of China; activists have said that the Chinese government routinely violates human rights there, engaging in political and religious repression.)
Google has faced protests over Dragonfly from all corners. Human rights groups, U.S. senators from both major political parties, Vice President Mike Pence, and the company’s own employees and shareholders have formed an unlikely alliance in opposition to the plan.
In recent weeks, pressure on Google has continued to mount. On January 3, prominent Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she would be resigning from the internet giant after 11 years. Fong-Jones was a vocal critic of Dragonfly and other controversial Google initiatives, such as Project Maven, the company’s contract to develop artificial intelligence for U.S. military drones. She said she had decided that she could no longer work for Google because she was dissatisfied with its direction and “lack of accountability and oversight.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Google was blasted by a group of 49 investors said to represent some $700 billion in assets. Citing Dragonfly and other recent scandals in Silicon Valley, the investors called on Google, Apple, Facebook, and other tech giants to “respect users’ right to privacy and freedom of expression.”
Without the necessary oversight and due diligence in these areas, the investors said, companies “may cause or contribute to a wide range of human rights abuses affecting billions of people worldwide.” The investors called on the companies to adhere to internationally recognized human rights laws and standards, and said the tech giants should implement the principles set out by the Global Network Initiative, a digital rights organization.
Google employees who worked on Dragonfly previously told The Intercept that company executives brushed aside human rights concerns during development of the search engine and related smartphone apps. In December, the internet giant sought to address some of these criticisms by making changes to its internal review processes. The company’s global affairs chief, Kent Walker, wrote in a blog post that the company had introduced a new ethics training course for employees and would establish a new group of “user researchers, social scientists, ethicists, human rights specialists, policy and privacy advisers, and legal experts” to assess new projects, products, and deals.
Three Google employees told The Intercept that they were skeptical about the new process, however. They each pointed out that, according to Walker’s blog post, “the most complex and difficult issues” would be left to a “council of senior executives” — meaning that the balance of power on controversial projects would remain with a small handful of company bosses, with rank-and-file employees still largely sidelined.
“It’s superficial,” one current Google engineer told The Intercept. “We still need more accountability, more transparency, and a seat at the table when it comes to the big decisions — otherwise there will be nothing to stop projects like Dragonfly from being railroaded through again in the future.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Google Faces Renewed Protests and Criticism Over China Search Project appeared first on The Intercept.
AL QAIM, IRAQ — As the fight against the Islamic State in eastern Syria — where some of the U.S. troops President Donald Trump has promised to withdraw are based — enters its final stages, ISIS fighters are trying to cross into Iraqi territory.
“We normally have daily sightings,” Col. Saleh Al-Yacoubi of the Iraqi border guard said of the ISIS fighters, who are now cornered in a handful of villages on the reeds-enveloped east bank of the Euphrates River. “If they are armed, we hit them with full force.”
For months, the attempted crossings have kept the Iraqi border guards who patrol the area on their toes. But over the past weeks, the situation at the border has become increasingly uncertain, as the U.S. has begun moving military hardware and supplies out of eastern Syria in the wake of Trump’s surprise announcement of a troop withdrawal last month.
Al-Yacoubi spoke at a base north of Al Qaim, about 500 yards from the last ISIS position in Syria. His U.S.-backed forces, together with the Iraqi army, secure this side of the border, working closely with U.S. and French coalition troops stationed nearby. The Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF, an umbrella group of largely Shiite paramilitary units backed by Iran, meanwhile, patrols the Iraqi border south of Al Qaim. To the west of the border fence, some 2,000 ISIS militants are wedged between the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces to the north and Syrian regime fighters to the south.
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The array of armed groups on both sides of the border underscores the breadth of the coalition that has come together to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But it also hints at what could go wrong if the militants take advantage of the impending U.S. withdrawal to stage a comeback.
In Al Qaim, the last Iraqi urban center to be freed from ISIS in November 2017, the Iraqi security forces, which receive air cover, intelligence, and strategic advice from the United States, and the Iranian-backed PMF have long distrusted each other. A cascade of conflicting announcements by Trump and other U.S. officials over the last month have raised concerns about the ripple effects of a premature U.S. withdrawal from Syria. The 2,000 American troops there are expected to leave over the next few weeks, though the precise timing remains unclear.
The pullout “will negatively impact us, 100 percent,” Al-Yacoubi said. “But we are prepared to protect the border, whether the coalition forces are present in Syrian territories or not.”
Al-Yacoubi and his fellow border guards, equipped and trained by the United Sates, monitor ISIS movements around the clock using day and night cameras. When they spot suspected militants, they inform U.S. and French troops, who occasionally launch artillery strikes across the border.
“We don’t allow [ISIS] to cross. We deal with them while they are still inside Syria,” Al-Yacoubi said.
The U.S. troops who work with Al-Yacoubi are equally determined to prevent militants from seeking sanctuary in Iraq’s deserts.
ISIS “will be destroyed and defeated in the [Middle Euphrates River Valley] and they need a place to escape to,” Lt. Col. Kent Park, who is based in Al Qaim with the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, told The Intercept before the withdrawal announcement. “It’s important that we maintain that border security.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. forces in Baghdad declined to comment about the impact of the withdrawal from Syria on operations near the Iraqi border, referring The Intercept to the office of the secretary of defense, which did not respond to a request for comment. In a press conference this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said that Iraq was worried about the withdrawal, and that his government is working with its regional allies, including the Syrian government, to mitigate any negative consequences.
During a Christmas visit to an American air base near Al Qaim, Trump reaffirmed that, despite the Iraqi government claiming victory over ISIS more than a year ago, U.S. troops would remain in the country. One reason for the continuing U.S. presence in Iraq, he said, was “to watch over Iran.”
Trump also told reporters that the U.S. might base more commandos near Al Qaim to conduct special cross-border operations when needed. Several Iraqi officials have since alleged that the U.S. has set up new bases in Iraq, but a U.S. coalition spokesperson denied the claims.
Photo: Alaa al-Marjani/Reuters
Even without more U.S. troops on the border, the proximity of existing coalition forces to PMF fighters could turn Al Qaim into a potential flashpoint in the increasingly tense relationship between the United States and Iran.
The town is sprinkled with checkpoints manned by both the Iraqi army, which works alongside U.S. forces, as well as the PMF. The two organizations are vying for control, with civilians often caught in the middle.
“The presence of these forces is affecting the community,” said Ahmed Al-Dilemi, the mayor of Al Qaim. Both forces claim to control the town, leaving local traders, who need security clearances to bring goods there, unsure of who holds sway. “If the car is approved by the army, the PMF rejects [it], and the other way around, if PMF approves, then the army disapproves,” the mayor said.
Although the PMF has been officially incorporated into Iraq’s security forces, in practice, it operates independently. While regular Iraqi forces criticize the PMF for pursuing its own agenda, the PMF, in turn, regards itself as a bulwark against American influence, sometimes accusing U.S.-backed factions of not standing up to what the PMF regard as an occupying force. (Some locally recruited Sunni PMF units do collaborate with U.S. forces, though they generally wield less power than their Shiite counterparts).
With their common foe on the verge of defeat, the rifts between the U.S.-led coalition and the PMF appear to be deepening. The PMF has been increasing its numbers along the border with Syria, where some of its units also fight alongside Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government troops.
Among them is Kata’ib Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terror group and just one of a half-dozen Shia-led PMF units that have set up shop here. A large surveillance balloon hovers over the American base nearby, monitoring the area. The U.S.-led coalition and the PMF have divided areas of control to avoid confrontation, but that hasn’t been enough to calm tensions.
During a tour of PMF areas south of Al Qaim, Ahmed Nasrallah, who commands a PMF unit called Liwa Al Toufuf, rattled off a list of grievances against the Americans: They tried to undermine the PMF’s authority by supporting local Sunni PMF units; they used their surveillance assets to spy on the PMF; and they deliberately targeted PMF positions.
He pointed to a Kata’ib Hezbollah compound nearby that he claimed had been hit by a U.S. airstrike last June (other sources reported that Israel was responsible). The PMF threatened retaliation, but the U.S.-led coalition has denied involvement and rejected the idea that it targets the PMF.
“It’s absolutely false,” said Park, of the U.S. Army. “We have never targeted the PMF. The PMF are considered part of the Iraqi security forces. The rules of engagement prevent us from doing it, and it’s not in our interest to do it.”
Nevertheless, Al Qaim is a strategic point along a corridor that connects Iran to Beirut. The PMF controls more than 200 kilometers of the southern part of the Iraqi border with Syria, offering Tehran plenty of space to secure supply routes to its allies in Syria and Lebanon.
Unlike in the north of Al Qaim, where the coalition has been building a border fence to prevent incursions, there’s no physical barrier along the southern, PMF-controlled border. Instead, PMF outposts adorned with various militia flags line the frontier, in addition to the watch towers of Iraqi border guards.
“This is the second line of defense against ISIS,” Nasrallah said as he pointed toward the outposts. But the PMF doesn’t face ISIS across the border; instead, Syrian regime forces control the area on the other side. “We have good coordination with them,” Nasrallah admitted, though he denied reports that supplies were being sent across.
As the convoy passed through the Kata’ib Hezbollah areas, Nasrallah received a radio call that a sniper had attacked a PMF vehicle near the American base.
“Such attacks only ever come from the direction of the Americans,” Nasrallah claimed. “They do this to destabilize the region, so they can justify their continued presence here.” Two sources within the Iraqi security forces who work alongside American troops independently told The Intercept that the U.S. occasionally fires at the PMF when they are perceived to move into unauthorized areas, though a Western diplomat thought it was more likely that, just like in the case of the Kata’ib Hezbollah compound, Israel was responsible for such incidents.
Nasrallah accused the U.S. forces of aiding ISIS, a widespread but unsubstantiated belief among the PMF that highlights the depth of antagonism between the two sides.
In a bid to prove that the PMF was in charge, he rushed to the scene of the shooting and ordered his forces to search the area. Minutes later, officers of the Iraqi army appeared. The two sides greeted each other warily.
While cordial, the Iraqi army and PMF compete for territorial control and credit for foiling ISIS attacks. On paper, the PMF is supposed to be part of the Iraqi security forces. But Iraqi army officers and politicians often express dismay at the lack of de facto integration on the ground.
“We don’t have any control over [the PMF]. They are outside our chain of command,” said Gen. Adel Molaan of the Iraqi army’s 8th Division.
In the absence of direct communication between the PMF and American troops, the Iraqi army serves as a go-between, passing on information about troop movements to avert clashes. It’s an inefficient arrangement that seems prone to errors and hampers information-sharing about the presence of ISIS militants.
“Anytime you have a battlefield, you want all the different actors and forces to be able to communicate and coordinate,” said Park. “That certainly makes things a lot easier to prevent the enemy from potentially trying to work around the forces that should be on the same side.”
Though ISIS no longer holds ground in Iraq, sleeper cells around Al Qaim still mount guerrilla-style attacks against security forces. According to the U.S.-led coalition, most occur in PMF-controlled territory. Honeycombed with riverbeds and valleys, the area lends itself to insurgent tactics, a factor that is further amplified by the lack of coalition air and artillery support.
Nasrallah denied reports of any ISIS attacks in PMF areas or the need to cooperate with U.S. forces.
“I don’t need the Americans — not their support, not anything else,” the commander said dismissively.
The post ISIS Fighters in Syria Are Trying to Push Into Iraq, Where U.S.-Backed Forces Can’t Get Along With Militias Supported by Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
O assessor de Segurança Nacional dos EUA, John Bolton, em um programa de TV na Casa Branca, no dia 9 de maio de 2018, em Washington, D.C.
Foto: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Quem subestima John Bolton acaba se dando mal.
Lembra quando ele foi preterido para a vaga de secretário de Estado porque, segundo informações, Donald Trump não gostava de seu “bigode que mais parece um pincel”? Como a gente riu! Porém, menos de 18 meses depois, tendo aparecido várias vezes na rede de TV americana Fox News, ele foi nomeado assessor de Segurança Nacional, com direito a um gabinete bem pertinho do presidente.
Lembra quando o então secretário de Defesa, James Mattis, encontrou o recém-empossado Bolton na escadaria do Pentágono e brincou dizendo que ele era “o diabo em pessoa”? Mattis se foi. E Bolton continua firme e forte.
Lembra quando o então chefe de gabinete da Casa Branca, John Kelly, se envolveu em um “bate-boca recheado de palavrões” sobre imigração com Bolton do lado de fora do Salão Oval? Kelly se foi. E Bolton continua firme e forte.
Lembra quando Trump anunciou a retirada dos 2 mil soldados americanos da Síria poucas semanas depois de Bolton ter dito que os EUA permaneceriam no país até que as tropas iranianas e milícias apoiadas por Teerã se retirassem? Disseram que Bolton havia sido ignorado, desconsiderado e até deixado de lado. Mas não: no início de janeiro, em visita a Israel, o assessor de Segurança confirmou não haver um prazo para a retirada, que dependeria de uma garantia do governo turco para a segurança dos combatentes curdos. “John Bolton freia a retirada de Trump da Síria”, dizia a manchete do Financial Times.
É difícil impedir o assessor de Segurança Nacional de Trump de conseguir o que quer.
Em 2003, Bolton obteve a guerra que tanto queria contra o Iraque. Como alto funcionário do governo Bush, ele se aproveitou da influência que tinha para pressionar analistas de inteligência, ameaçar representantes internacionais e mentir descaradamente sobre as armas de destruição em massa. Ele nunca se arrependeu de ter apoiado a invasão ilegal e catastrófica do Iraque, que deixou centenas de milhares de mortos.
E agora Bolton quer uma guerra contra o Irã. É o que dizem, segundo o Wall Street Journal, funcionários do Departamento de Estado e do Pentágono que teriam ficado “inquietos” com seu pedido “de planos de ataque contra o Irã”, no ano passado. De acordo com o New York Times, “altos funcionários do Pentágono estão cada vez mais preocupados” com a possibilidade de Bolton “precipitar um conflito com o Irã”.
Deveríamos ficar surpresos? Em março de 2015, quando ainda não estava no governo, Bolton escreveu um artigo de opinião no New York Times intitulado “Para evitar a bomba do Irã, bombardear o Irã”. Em julho de 2017, oito meses antes de entrar para a equipe de Trump, Bolton disse a membros do grupo Mujahedin-e-Khalq, uma espécie de seita de exilados iranianos, que “o objetivo declarado dos EUA deveria ser a derrubada do regime dos mulás no Irã” e que “antes de 2019 estaremos comemorando em Teerã”.
Apesar do que parecem indicar esses vazamentos de funcionários “inquietos”, porém anônimos, Bolton está longe de ser a única pessoa próxima a Trump que defende um conflito com o Irã. Ele tem diversos aliados no governo. Como informou o portal Vox no dia 14 de janeiro, “Bolton levou pessoas que pensam como ele para o Conselho de Segurança Nacional (NSC, na sigla em inglês). Na semana passada, ele contratou Richard Goldberg, notório linha-dura quando se trata do Irã, para comandar a campanha do governo contra o país.”
Além de um NSC dominado por Bolton, outro “falcão” do governo é o secretário de Estado Mike Pompeo, que já defendeu o lançamento de “2 mil ataques aéreos para destruir as capacidades nucleares do Irã”. Como informei no dia 11 de janeiro, em um discurso no Cairo sobre a política americana para o Oriente Médio, Pompeo fez mais de mais de 20 alusões à “malevolência” e “opressão” iranianas, tendo criticado a “expansão” e “destruição regional” perpetrada por Teerã, ao mesmo tempo em que mandava um beijo metafórico à Arábia Saudita. “Cada vez mais países estão percebendo que precisamos confrontar os aiatolás, e não afagá-los”, declarou. Antes de deixar o Cairo, Pompeo disse à Fox News que os Estados Unidos organizariam, no mês seguinte, um encontro internacional na Polônia para tratar do Irã.
E como esses falcões pretendem conseguir uma guerra com Teerã? Bolton parece ter duas alternativas. A primeira tem a ver com a questão nuclear: “Estamos praticamente convencidos de que a liderança do Irã está determinada a desenvolver armas nucleares”, disse ele a outro inimigo do Irã, o primeiro-ministro israelense Benjamin Natanyahu, em Jerusalém, no início de janeiro. Não há, porém, nenhuma prova que corrobore a afirmação de Bolton. Pelo contrário, a própria comunidade de inteligência americana já desmentiu essa ideia várias vezes. “Não sabemos se o Irã vai decidir fabricar armas nucleares algum dia”, disse Dan Coats, diretor de Inteligência Nacional dos EUA, em um relatório de 2017 intitulado “Avaliação de ameaças mundiais da comunidade de inteligência dos EUA”.
A segunda opção de Bolton tem a ver com as atividades de grupos financiados pelos iranianos no Iraque, na Síria e no Líbano. Segundo o New York Times, o pedido de planos militares contra o Irã feito por Bolton “aconteceu depois que milícias apoiadas por Teerã lançaram três morteiros ou foguetes contra um terreno baldio pertencente à embaixada dos EUA em Bagdá, em setembro”. O ataque não deixou mortos nem feridos.
Mas até que ponto essa lógica de retaliação é válida? Os Estados Unidos já foram acusados de apoiar grupos extremistas e dissidentes no Irã e ataques israelenses contra posições iranianas na Síria. Isso quer dizer que Teerã tem o direito de retaliar com bombardeios em território americano? Será que os cubanos têm o direito de bombardear Miami, onde vários grupos anticastristas residem e operam com apoio americano?
A lógica, porém, nunca foi o forte de Bolton. Ele é um fanático. “É um grande erro aceitarmos as leis internacionais, mesmo que, no curto prazo, isso pareça ser do nosso interesse. Isso porque, no longo prazo, o objetivo daqueles que acham que as leis internacionais são válidas é reprimir os Estados Unidos”, disse ele em 2005.
Que se danem as leis internacionais. E o Tribunal Penal Internacional. E as vidas civis. O belicoso Bolton vai passar boa parte de 2019 fazendo campanha, tanto em público quanto por trás dos panos, por uma guerra contra o Irã – um conflito que faria a invasão do Iraque parecer um passeio no parque. É isso que faz desse assessor bigodudo, em seu gabinete a poucos passos de Donald Trump, o homem mais perigoso desse governo tão imprudente. “O diabo em pessoa”? Talvez isso seja até um eufemismo.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post Assessor de Segurança Nacional empurra os EUA para uma guerra contra o Irã appeared first on The Intercept.
I met Danielle in the counseling room of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi, which sits on a busy corner in the city’s arts district. Its vibrant pink paint job has earned it the name “the Pink House,” and it is the state’s only remaining abortion clinic.
Dressed in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, Danielle looked pensive as she sat in a narrow room in the back of the building alongside 12 other women there for abortion care. Betty Thompson, a counselor who has worked at the clinic for 24 years, stood before the women, ready to walk them through the necessary paperwork and go over next steps.
Twenty four years old with two young children, Danielle had just found out she was pregnant again. She had a fling with a co-worker, only to learn that he had sabotaged the condom they used. She was now four weeks pregnant. After weighing her options, she decided to terminate her pregnancy. She’d become pregnant via deception, she thought, and that didn’t exactly suggest stability on the part of the man she would be bound to if she were to carry the pregnancy to term. But more importantly, she told me that she just wasn’t in a position to have another child. A single mom, she takes pains to ensure that her two kids, ages 4 and 2, have everything they need to thrive. It’s a struggle and a lot of responsibility, and she didn’t think it would be fair to anyone to bring another child into the mix. “I got my kids in a place where they can take piano lessons and they can take swimming lessons; they’re having a great life,” she said. “I would feel like a bad mom if I couldn’t do that for them. So I don’t regret doing this now. And every woman should have a choice with her body, what to do with her body.”
On August 7, Danielle boarded a Greyhound bus for the three-hour trip to Jackson. She left the kids with their grandmother, and she packed a duffle bag because she’d be gone at least three days — Mississippi law requires abortion patients to have an initial visit in which they’re counseled on the choice they’re making, and then a second appointment for the abortion itself. In between is a state-mandated 24-hour waiting period, allegedly necessary to allow the patient extra time to wrestle with the gravity of her decision.
This meant that in addition to the bus fare and the $450 she needed to pay for the abortion, she would also have to come up with money for a hotel, meals, and cab rides back and forth to the clinic, all of which posed a significant burden, especially since Danielle was between jobs. By the time she left Jackson three days later, Danielle estimated that she would have less than $30 to cover family expenses for the rest of the month.
Danielle’s story is familiar in substance and circumstance. Like Danielle, many women who seek abortion care are already mothers, and a majority cite economics or competing responsibilities as a factor in their decision to terminate. And like Danielle, in order to obtain an abortion, women in a number of states must also navigate a byzantine maze of regulations ostensibly meant to ensure their health and safety. But in reality, the rules are enacted solely to frustrate women’s ability to access constitutionally protected health care.
With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, reproductive rights advocates fear that things will only get worse. Kavanaugh’s thin yet troubling record on abortion indicates that he is no fan of reproductive autonomy. And President Donald Trump long ago indicated that he has a litmus test for high court nominees: They must be “pro-life” judges, he said, who will vote to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion.
So it was really no surprise that the hand-wringing began almost immediately after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the court last summer. A slew of headlines signaled that the demise of Roe was imminent. Despite the fact that Roe is settled law — and has been for nearly 46 years — I was worried too. But I also felt that a lot of the early coverage missed a crucial point: Millions of U.S. women already live in what amounts to a post-Roe America.
I wanted to write about the impact of Kennedy’s retirement and Kavanaugh’s nomination, but I wanted to do it in a different way: I wanted to show what it looks like on the ground for women who live in parts of the country where the right conferred by Roe — and reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and again in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt — has already been significantly eroded.
To do this, I rented a Toyota minivan and teamed up with award-winning documentarian Maisie Crow for a three-state, 1,400-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi, contiguous states that have each enacted some of the strictest abortion laws in the country — and are surrounded by states that demonstrate similar, if not even more extreme, hostility to abortion rights. Together, they form a landscape encompassing a large swath of the country where millions of women live with a legal right to abortion, but often without meaningful access to exercise it.
Even if the Supreme Court does not overturn Roe outright and instead backs away from precedent in order to uphold the legality of the onerous restrictions passed by these states, the situation could quickly worsen. Currently, there are 20 states poised to outlaw abortion if given the opportunity, which would impact more than 25 million women of child-bearing age — and disproportionately poor and minority women. There are at least 16 abortion-related lawsuits just a step away from the Supreme Court, including one from Arkansas. In all, there are nearly 30 lawsuits related to reproductive rights that could make it to the court in the near future.
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I first got to know some of the women who make up the all-volunteer advocacy group Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice in 2017 after reading one of their legislative alerts about a bill pending in the state House that would require a woman to get her sexual partner’s permission before seeking an abortion.
In explaining to me the purpose of his proposal, state Rep. Justin Humphrey lamented that one of the “breakdowns in our society” is that men have been excluded from “these types of decisions.” He said he understood that women feel like they should be able to do what they want with their own bodies, but we needed to recognize that where pregnancy is concerned, we’re actually just a “host.” If you have sex and get pregnant, that’s your fault, he told me. “Your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible, then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”
The bill didn’t go anywhere and hasn’t been filed again, almost certainly because it is blatantly unconstitutional, at least by current standards. But dubious legality doesn’t appear to concern many Oklahoma lawmakers. Currently, the state is in court over several abortion restrictions it has passed in recent years — including one that seeks to ban the most common method of later-term abortion, one that would force doctors to use an outdated protocol for administering medication abortion (available in the earliest weeks of pregnancy), and one that has replaced the state’s 24-hour waiting period with a 72-hour “reflection” period, the longest waiting time required by any state.
If there were a three-day waiting period in Mississippi, Danielle would have had to stay in Jackson for at least a week in order to obtain her abortion — provided that she could get her two appointments to align — or make two six-hour round-trip bus rides to the city to obtain care.
In a quiet neighborhood northwest of downtown Oklahoma City, we met with Priya Desai and Danielle Williams, current co-chairs of OCRJ. Desai handed me a 10-page spreadsheet listing all the bills — good, bad, and terrible — that OCRJ has tracked through the capitol over the years. Among them are at least 128 bills related to abortion. It may sound like a lot, but it is fairly par for the course in states like Oklahoma, where grandstanding over abortion is an every-session affair.
Keeping on top of what legislators are doing to try to restrict access can be challenging, Williams told us, in part because lawmakers often file shell bills, legislation with a number and title, but without text. “So we could have a shell bill that is filed in February, and then all of a sudden, they fill it in April,” just a month before the end of the annual session, “and it’s an anti-abortion bill that we had no way of knowing what it would be.” Such a move seems designed, at least in part, to gin up support for a proposal behind closed doors without giving advocates time to organize in opposition.
Still, OCRJ has dedicated supporters in the capitol who help to keep them as in the loop as possible, and when they haven’t been able to stave off a particular bill, they’ve taken their fight to court, serving as a plaintiff in five lawsuits challenging various restrictions. They’ve won four times. The fifth is still in litigation.
Women needed to recognize that where pregnancy is concerned, we’re actually just a “host.”Whether they pass or not, the extreme measures proposed by Oklahoma lawmakers over the years have helped to sow confusion. Williams and Desai say they’ve heard from women who are confused about whether it is even legal to get an abortion in the state, or under what circumstances they’re allowed to do so. In response, OCRJ has published a guide (aptly titled “How to Get an Abortion in Oklahoma”) to help women navigate the hurdles.
This is a largely rural state, and not a particularly prosperous one, where the main population centers — Oklahoma City and Tulsa — are in its eastern half. This is also where the state’s abortion clinics are located, meaning that women in communities throughout Oklahoma must travel long distances, even hundreds of miles, for in-state access. They face a 72-hour waiting period, a 20-week gestational ban, medically inaccurate informed consent materials — which include the debunked warning that abortion could be linked to breast cancer — restrictions on access to medication abortion, a mandatory ultrasound law, and a ban on insurance coverage for abortion.
Restrictions like these do not make women safer. They force women to spend more money, travel greater distances, and carry their unwanted pregnancies far longer than necessary, if they don’t simply conscript them into parenthood.
When women can’t find services in-state and must cross state lines, they have to navigate a whole other regime of restrictions. In Arkansas and Mississippi — and, really, across the entire region, including Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama — lawmakers have essentially adopted the same goal: Legislate legal abortion out of existence.
Abortion restrictions fall into two basic categories. The first includes laws that supposedly aim at protecting the state’s interest in fetal life — things like mandatory ultrasounds, multiday waiting periods, and gestational bans. Some states have required a woman to view the ultrasound image and listen to the fetal heartbeat if one can be found, regardless of whether she wants to or not. Iowa and North Dakota have each passed a six-week gestational ban, before many women even know they’re pregnant. These laws have been blocked by the courts, for now. In December, Ohio lawmakers passed their own version of the law.
The second category includes what are known as targeted restrictions on abortion providers, or more commonly, TRAP laws. These are things that allegedly protect the health and safety of women seeking abortion care, but are medically useless, practically speaking. This category includes facility requirements — like mandating that abortion clinics be transformed into expensive, hospital-like surgical centers — as well as restrictions that attach to the abortion doctors themselves, like a requirement that abortionists have hospital-admitting privileges. This requirement is particularly dishonest: Doctors don’t get admitting privileges unless they regularly admit patients. Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures there is, so it is almost impossible for an abortion doctor to obtain admitting privileges — and the lawmakers who advocate for this restriction know that.
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As a whole, these laws are based on junk science.
In addition to the more familiar anti-abortion lawmakers who soapbox for these kinds of restrictions, Oklahoma is also ground zero for the Abolish Human Abortion movement — “Our sincerest apologies to the rest of the world,” Williams told us — which was founded in Norman, a college town roughly 20 miles south of Oklahoma City. Where most anti-abortion lawmakers have taken the familiar, death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach to restricting the right to abortion, AHA is more direct: They disdain the incremental and champion only measures that seek to eliminate legal abortion immediately and altogether.
For the most part, AHA’s adherents are young and look, as Williams put it, “like your standard hipster.” They wear GoPro cameras affixed to their chests to record their public evangelizing to crowds gathered wherever and for whatever reason, including outside concert venues, sporting events, or as Desai noted, Norman High School. They fancy themselves the moral equivalent of 19th century abolitionists, and they believe that women who have abortions should be charged with murder.
The AHA has found some friends among the Oklahoma legislature. In 2016, one lawmaker filed a bill that would categorize abortion as first-degree murder, and a similar bill is already teed up for the 2019 session. Another lawmaker sought to pass a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to outlaw all abortion (including the destruction of fertilized embryos created during in vitro fertilization) and to ban the use of certain contraceptives. Both measures were unsuccessful. In 2018, a former state lawmaker, Dan Fisher, ran for governor with the explicit promise of making abortion illegal in the state.
As it is across the country, the anti-abortion movement in Oklahoma has cloaked itself in religiosity and righteousness. Though what they seem to have forgotten is that the move to legalize abortion was also deeply tied to faith. Even in Oklahoma.
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Without traffic, it takes roughly two hours to drive from Oklahoma City north to Tulsa, a city known for its wealth of well-preserved art deco architecture. In a small theater on the edge of downtown, we met Cecilia Wessinger. She’s lived in Oklahoma for about a decade. Growing up in New York, Wessinger said that she didn’t think much about the politics of reproductive choice. “It’s very different being pro-choice and a feminist on the coasts than it is to be one in the middle of the country,” she said. “Oklahoma, it’s a whole different world.”
Wessinger didn’t grow up in a particularly religious family, but in Oklahoma, she joined the Unitarian church. Tulsa has one of the largest Unitarian congregations in the world. It was through the church that she got more deeply involved in reproductive rights and with the Oklahoma Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. “I can tell you that when I lived in New York, there were women that I respected,” she told me. “But when I moved to Oklahoma, I met women I wanted to be like.”
The women she met through the coalition encouraged her to start advocating for Planned Parenthood and work as a volunteer patient escort at Tulsa’s abortion clinic. She recalls manning a booth for Planned Parenthood at the state fair and being heckled by middle-aged white men, “who shouted some incredibly horrible things” while their kids stood by, “eating turkey legs.”
They also got her thinking more about the role of the church in reproductive choice. “I thought it was such an oxymoron, right? Where it’s religious, but it’s choice. And how does that work?”
In fact, there is a long history of faith leaders advocating for reproductive rights. In the pre-Roe years, a network of clergy helped hundreds of thousands of women access services because they saw the damage and death caused by illicit and self-induced abortions. What came to be known as the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion officially formed in New York in 1967, at a time when 42 percent of the city’s maternal deaths were due to unsafe abortions. At the center of the movement was the Rev. Howard Moody of the Judson Memorial Church. He brought together area ministers and rabbis to advocate for safe abortion, and they announced their intentions on the front page of the New York Times. In short order, the CCS grew to a network of more than 2,000 clergy members across the U.S. and Canada helping women to access safe abortion care.
The CCS opened one of the first free-standing abortion clinics in 1970, and after Roe legalized the procedure nationwide, the group continued to advocate for access, calling not only for equity in care for all women regardless of race or means, but also pushing for services to be provided in the least restrictive setting. In other words, the opposite of what many U.S. women currently experience in trying to access care.
The group eventually disbanded, but its work was carried forward by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice — of which the Oklahoma Coalition is a part. “As faith leaders, we all feel literally called — and supported by spirit on a daily basis — to model something different,” the Rev. Harry Knox, former president of the RCRC, told ThinkProgress. “Our message is that you are loved, loved, loved. God loves women who have abortions.”
In Tulsa, the faithful were equally active in helping to arrange pre-Roe abortion care. They met in the basement of the Unitarian church and put together a sort of “underground railroad,” Wessinger told us, to fund and facilitate abortion. One of the only women on staff at the University of Tulsa acted as a go-between, working in concert with the head of the school’s theology department, she said. Women would wait in a parking lot at the corner of Harvard Avenue and 30th Street, just southeast of downtown. After being picked up, they would lie face down on the car’s floor with a blanket over them, so they didn’t know where they were going, and would be driven to a doctor’s home to receive care. “That’s what abortion was like,” she said. “And those were the lucky ones, right?”
Arkansas’s Bad Medicine
Fayetteville is a leafy college town nestled in the Ozark Mountains in the northwest corner of Arkansas. It’s about two hours east of Tulsa and roughly three hours northwest of the state’s capital, Little Rock.
The Planned Parenthood clinic here is in a mixed-use development on a main thoroughfare at the edge of town. There are apartments on the second floor above the clinic and a CPA office next door. It is one of only three abortion providers in the state (the others are in Little Rock), and it provides only medication abortion.
Medication abortion is a two-drug cocktail available to women up to the 10th week of pregnancy. It is highly effective and extremely safe — just .16 percent of women experience any complications — and is growing in popularity, not only because it allows for the earliest of terminations, but also because, unlike a common procedural abortion, it is noninvasive, and a woman can manage the process in the privacy of her own home.
In the simplest of terms, this is how it works: A woman first takes a drug called mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, a hormone needed to maintain pregnancy. Then 24 to 48 hours later, she takes a second drug called misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the pregnancy. Medication abortion has been available in the U.S. since 2000. It has been used by more than 2 million women.
Because it can only be used in the earliest stages of pregnancy, the introduction of medication abortion was something of a game-changer, in part because it would seem to address many of the concerns held by anti-abortion activists chagrined by the termination of pregnancy later in gestation. It has not worked out that way. Instead, lawmakers in a number of states have pushed back against medication abortion, attempting to saddle providers with restrictions that they claim are necessary to protect women against its alleged harms. Nowhere have they done so more aggressively than in Arkansas.
In 2015, the state passed a law requiring medication abortion providers to contract with a doctor with admitting privileges. Theoretically this would create an extension of care, in case a patient were to develop a complication needing emergency medical treatment. Akin to the admitting privileges requirement that states like Texas had already imposed (before they were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court), it was sold as a way to demonstrate the state’s desire to ensure the health and safety of women.
But for that purpose, the law doesn’t make sense. For starters, it mandates only that a provider have a contract with a physician that has admitting privileges somewhere in the state, which encompasses some 53,000 square miles, meaning that there’s no requirement that the hospital in question be near the state’s abortion clinics or any particular abortion patient, many of whom have to travel hours to access services. Remember, medication abortion is self-administered by a woman at home (or wherever she chooses to be). In Arkansas, the first pill is taken at the clinic, but the pills that actually force expulsion of the pregnancy are taken days later. So if a patient were to face some sort of medical emergency while at home, there is literally no reason to think that they would drive hundreds of miles to a hospital somewhere else in the state. Instead, as with any other medical emergency, it is far more likely that they would seek care locally. And that isn’t even likely to happen: Just .06 percent of medication abortions result in a complication requiring hospitalization.
While pro-choice leaders scoffed at the law, the clinics nonetheless sought to comply with it — the problem is, they couldn’t. The clinic in Fayetteville sent out letters to doctors all over the state seeking a provider willing to help, but got no takers, in large part because anti-abortion rhetoric here has created a toxic situation, including for the hospitals that would have to agree to the arrangement.
Planned Parenthood and its Fayetteville doctor, Stephanie Ho, sued to block the measure from taking effect: The law was medically unnecessary, they argued, and would leave women across the state without meaningful access to abortion. If the law took effect, there would be just one provider in the entire state, Little Rock Family Planning Services — the only clinic that provides procedural as well as medication abortion — left to care for thousands of women each year. And it would force women who would otherwise opt for medication to undergo procedural (often called “surgical”) abortion.
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Although a judge agreed to block the law temporarily, pending a full hearing, the state balked and appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
While the case was pending, however, the Supreme Court issued its landmark 2016 ruling in the Whole Woman’s Health case, striking down Texas’s admitting privileges requirement on the basis that the actual medical benefit of such a restriction must outweigh the burden it places on abortion access. With that, it appeared that the 8th Circuit would have the logic needed to decide the Arkansas case. But then a twist: Instead of rejecting the law, the court upheld it, claiming that the district judge hadn’t made specific findings on how many women would be negatively impacted by the law. And when the Supreme Court subsequently declined to intervene (without explanation or dissent), the law took effect.
The impact was immediate. Ho remembers clinic employees scrambling to try to contact all the patients who’d already scheduled their appointments. Some of them simply couldn’t be reached. “So they didn’t find out until they actually arrived at the clinic,” Ho told us. They “just had to be turned away,” she said. “It was incredibly stressful for the patients.”
The clinic tried to find providers in other states that might be able to help its patients. “But there were some women who, because of this, the state forced them to carry the pregnancy to term against their will because that’s not what their plan was.” Ho remembers one of the patients who hadn’t heard the news before arriving at the clinic. “When she walked in the room and saw me, she just immediately burst into tears,” she recalled. “She didn’t know what was going on because you can tell somebody that this is the law; this is what’s happening. But they’re not thinking that. They’re like, ‘This is my life. Now what am I going to do?’”
There was another related problem: The women had gone through the state’s mandated consent process for medication abortion, but not for a procedural abortion. That meant that even if they were able to get an appointment in Little Rock, they would have to start the process all over again — go in for an initial appointment, undergo another mandatory ultrasound, be provided the state-approved (and largely medically inaccurate) information on abortion, and then abide by the state’s required 48-hour waiting period before returning for the actual procedure. “Not one single woman was safer” because of the law, says Ho. “Not one single woman was more informed, and not one single woman was happy with the fact that her government decided … to make that decision for her.”
Finally, two-and-a-half weeks after the de facto ban on medication abortion began in Arkansas, the law was again blocked after a district judge issued a 148-page ruling laying out in detail how many women would be burdened by the restriction. After enumerating several strategies for getting at a hard number, the judge stepped back, observing that “every woman” seeking medication abortion (in 2017, there were 653 in Fayetteville alone) “faces a burden due to the contracted physician requirement.”
The state again vowed to appeal, but then in late November, Planned Parenthood told the court that it had found a doctor with admitting privileges to contract with the clinic, which made the lawsuit moot — at least for now. Planned Parenthood has asked the court to allow them to revive the suit if necessary.
The Defense LineIt was noisy outside the Little Rock Family Planning Services clinic, located in a nondescript office park on the city’s west side, when we arrived one morning in early August. Across the street, a crew was using heavy machinery to clear land where the Arkansas Pregnancy Resource Center, a crisis pregnancy center, once stood.
CPCs like the one that used to be here are not clinics. They rarely provide any medical services — save for pregnancy tests and ultrasounds — and are mostly staffed by laypeople whose mission is to encourage women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. CPCs are often located close to abortion clinics, and have facades and signage that mimic an actual clinic. They collect lots of personal information about the women who come through their doors, but since they are not regulated like medical facilities, in Arkansas and elsewhere, they are not required to follow medical privacy laws. According to a directory of “helpful services” published by the Arkansas Department of Health, there are some 46 CPCs across the state. Their operations are subsidized by public money, and in many states, that includes money siphoned from federal welfare funds. In Texas, for example, millions in welfare dollars, as well as money earmarked for actual health care (including the provision of birth control for low-income residents), have been diverted to fund CPCs, most of which deliver an explicitly religious message.
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In Little Rock, protesters used to gather outside the Arkansas Pregnancy Resource Center in an effort to divert traffic to the CPC. In May 2018, a fire tore through the building that housed the CPC, leveling it. The group recently resurfaced in an office building right next door to the clinic.
Still, in August, it was clear that the fire hadn’t deterred the protesters. As the clean-up crew worked to scrape the land across the street, a handful gathered at the clinic’s property line — including several men apparently affiliated with Abolish Human Abortion. One was wearing a GoPro on his chest pointed at women as they arrived at the clinic; another was sporting a “Dan Fisher for Oklahoma” T-shirt. The man with the GoPro wore dark sunglasses and held a small orange cone to his mouth to amplify his voice over the construction noise. “We’d love to help you!” he yelled to someone in the clinic parking lot. “Whatever you need!” No one in the parking lot was taking him up on the offer. He changed his approach: “Please don’t go in there! We’ve seen many women leave that place hurting,” he said. “I’ve … seen people leave that place in ambulances!”
Karen Musick and Leeann Bennett were there too. Musick is one of the founders of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, and Bennett is the group’s membership director. Among the things that AASN does is provide an escort service for patients coming to the Little Rock clinic. They wear brightly colored, pullover vests and carry rainbow-striped umbrellas, which they use to provide privacy for women and their loved ones on their way in and out of the clinic, or to form a visual barrier against shouting protesters at the edge of the clinic’s driveway, an area Musick calls “the defense line.”
“We get two main groups here,” Bennett told me after lowering her umbrella and nodding to an older white man standing with a sign outside the clinic’s fence. That man and a few others across the street are part of what she calls “the Catholic cabal.” They mostly stand around quietly, holding signs and praying. On the other side though, she says, looking toward GoPro and his group, are the more confrontational ones. “They say horrible things to people as they’re coming through. Some are straight-up lies,” she says. “They’re the ones that are hard to take. Extremely hard sometimes.”
Scenes like this play out every day in front of clinics across the U.S. Some clinics like the one in Little Rock are fairly fortunate, in that they have a decent buffer between the property line and the actual entrance to the clinic. Others aren’t as lucky; the clinic in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, is on a busy downtown street with virtually no buffer, making it a favorite target of all kinds of anti-abortion protesters. Escorts there have seen hundreds of people descend on the clinic to harass patients as they come and go.
Generally, things are fairly under control in Little Rock — perhaps because AASN has a strict policy of nonengagement for its volunteer escorts. They go over this at length during their trainings: Ignore the cajoling protesters, volunteers are told. But occasionally things have gone sideways.
Musick first met Scott Skarda not long after she had started escorting at the clinic. He came up to her while she was in an overflow parking area and got in her face, she told us. He said she was the “face of evil.” The clinic’s security guard, a no-nonsense czar of order, later told her that Skarda was a pastor at a church in Hazen, a town about an hour east of Little Rock. At times wearing motorcycle chaps, he soon became a regular protester at the clinic.
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The November 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, had the Little Rock clinic, and escorts like Musick, on edge. Musick began regularly using her phone to record the protesters. Skarda apparently did not like it; after telling her to stop, he ripped her phone from her hand. In another incident a few months later, as Musick was using her umbrella to shield a clinic patient from a female protester, Skarda grabbed it and broke it over his knee, later claiming that Musick had hit the woman with it. Both incidents were caught by the clinic’s surveillance cameras. In each instance, Musick called police. Skarda was ordered to stay away from her. After the umbrella incident, he was hauled into court on a harassment charge. He was acquitted of that but was found guilty of violating the no-contact order. Skarda denied any wrongdoing.
On a muggy evening at a public library not far from the clinic, a handful of people attended AASN’s August escort training. Roz Creed, who with her daughter and Musick founded AASN, stood before the group with a pointed question: How would they deal with heckling from protesters? From the audience, people called out to the newcomers: You should be ashamed of yourself! How do you sleep at night?
Creed, who is a retired transplant from upstate New York, offered up one of her favorite heckles. “I have heard, ‘You have so much gray hair, lady, you have one foot in the grave; you’re going to be meeting your maker pretty soon. I can’t believe you’re doing this. You need to repent.’”
The answer to dealing with the heckling and harassment is that you don’t respond, Creed told the group. You come up with a mantra to distract yourself, and you make small talk with the patients in order to distract them from the onslaught. Talking about the weather or a person’s shoes will usually do the trick.
Creed knows that the work is hard and can be upsetting. But she also knows it’s necessary — infuriatingly so. Part of AASN’s work is managing an abortion fund that provides financial assistance to women struggling to afford care. A loose network of such groups operates across the U.S., with the National Network of Abortion Funds and the National Abortion Federation, a professional association for abortion providers, acting as points of contact for assistance. Creed manages AASN’s donor-supported fund and since 2016, has granted $23,000 to help roughly 200 women access abortion.
The calls she gets can be heartbreaking — like the one from a woman whose 15-year-old granddaughter was pregnant. The girl’s mother had died, and her father was in prison. There wasn’t enough money to pay for the abortion. “‘I can help you out with that,’” Creed told the woman. “She just exploded to me: You have saved my life!” she recalls the grandmother telling her. “I mean, I’m sitting there crying. I’m like, It’s OK, it’s OK. I’m glad I was able to help.” Over the last two years, Creed has amassed dozens of similar stories — of young mothers who, like Danielle in Mississippi, are pregnant and aren’t ready for another child; of women who are in school and not ready for motherhood; of broken relationships and fathers who have split; of women who are homeless.
Still from Reproductive Rights Road Trip
The Arkansas state Capitol sits just west of Woodlane Street, where it crosses West Capitol Avenue, just blocks from the Arkansas River. While it seems clear that West Capitol Avenue is meant to facilitate an unobstructed view of the capitol, it actually accentuates the fact that the capitol is offset from the avenue. It wasn’t planned this way; the capitol was built atop a state penitentiary that occupied the land before the statehouse took over its foundation. It was built with prison labor.
Inside, the building features all the gilt and grandeur of many state capitols — lots of golden lighting and wide marble stairways. Before we left Little Rock, Musick had arranged for us to come here to meet with state Sen. Joyce Elliott, one of Arkansas’s most ardent supporters of women’s reproductive rights.
Elliott spent 30 years as a teacher before entering politics — though she knew early on, during the John F. Kennedy years, that it was something she wanted to do. She was a state representative before transitioning to the state Senate, where she has represented part of Little Rock for the last nine years. During her time under the dome, she has been a tireless voice for equal rights, including for women’s reproductive autonomy, a cause that she sees as increasingly difficult and necessary to take on. She grew up in the pre-Roe years and saw the damage caused by illegal abortion, and she’s deeply concerned about her state (and the country) retreating into that past.
Arkansas is a relatively poor state with poor health outcomes, particularly in its most rural areas, like the fertile Arkansas Delta that runs along the Mississippi River in the eastern half of the state. And the state of affairs for women seeking to control their reproductive lives is especially grim, she says, defined by men making policy decisions about abortion while refusing to address other issues, like the statewide provision of high-quality health care and education, including comprehensive sex education.
“That kind of burden falls very disproportionately on poor women, on poor families. Because, I guarantee, if it’s a family of means, if they choose to have an abortion, it will happen. It always has. It will continue to be the case. And we will continue to punish that young woman … who could not make the same choice,” she said. “It is not serving our state well.”
It was hard not to think about our conversation with Elliott as we drove several hours east from Little Rock into the Delta. The land feels vast but haunted; there are few signs of vibrancy. The town of Helena, which abuts the Mississippi state line, is a perfect example. Kudzu has taken over the landscape. Downtown, there’s a crumbling brick building that still sports a faded, painted mural of country music singer Conway Twitty with his guitar, a Tweety Bird with a cowboy hat standing on its neck. A woman in Helena seeking abortion care would have to travel roughly two hours to the clinic in Little Rock; an hour and a half to the clinic in Memphis, Tennessee; or three hours to Jackson.
Just over the Mississippi River is the Isle of Capri Casino, which one Helena local told us is part of the reason her town has lost so much of its wealth — people like to gamble, and the slots there are tight. There really wasn’t anywhere else to stay, so we stopped at the casino for the night. Before going to sleep, I dumped a pile of papers on the bed. They were various pieces of anti-abortion propaganda that we’d picked up along the way. They each take a slightly different approach, but lean heavily on shame and fear to express the message that abortion is bad. And wrong. One, titled “This is Not Your Only Choice,” reminds women that “even though medical and surgical abortions carry different risks for the mother, both are EQUALLY FATAL to the baby.”
At her home in Little Rock, Musick had brought out her own propaganda collection, much of it collected from the windshields of cars in the clinic’s overflow parking lot. It included a number of black-and-white comic books, including one titled “Who Murdered Clarice?” that tells the story of an abortion doctor — “the butcher” — who “dismembered” little Clarice. He blows his brains out and meets God, who, needless to say, is super pissed off, but not about the suicide. “I performed that abortion at the mother’s request,” the dead doctor tells God. “It was perfectly legal. I worked within the law.”
“Not within My law … you committed murder and sold Clarice’s body parts,” God replies. “You devil … you sold her baby ears for $75 and I damn you to hell.”
Still from An Abortion in Mississippi
The roads in Jackson are riddled with potholes too large to avoid. Someone told me that a promising dancer who was a day shy of high school graduation died when she drove into a pothole that flipped her car. Someone else said that Jackson won a contest run by Domino’s Pizza, looking for cities with the worst potholes. The company offered to fix the holes to aid its drivers and protect the pies.
The stretch of North State Street that runs alongside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a mess. On the day we first drove up, there was a crew in the middle of the road cutting into the dilapidated asphalt using hand tools, as cars whizzed by in a dance of barely controlled chaos.
Along the sidewalk and in the street in front of the Pink House’s entrance, there was a similar chaos — and that’s typical, say clinic escorts Derenda Hancock and Kim Gibson. Gibson is a master of recording the “circus” on her phone, and regularly posts videos or livestreams to the Facebook page of the Pinkhouse Defenders. Unlike in Little Rock, the escorts here regularly engage with the protesters; they certainly don’t like one another, and the whole exercise has an odd quality of hostile politeness. “We’re polite because we’re Southern,” Gibson reminds me.
Many of the protesters here are older white men, which is pretty typical. But there is also a gaggle of children who are regulars, brought by Boyd Coleman, an area doctor. He and his wife ferry their home-schooled children to protest at the clinic — it’s part of their education, he told me, so they can grow up to be like their parents. The family brings a ladder, which they set up on the sidewalk, so they can see over the fence and watch the women as they come and go. Sometimes the kids, who range in age from toddlers to teenagers, stand on the ladder holding anti-abortion signage. They also work the sidewalk and the street, trying to get the attention of clinic patients, “counseling” them about their reproductive choices.
Coleman is adamant that his brand of Christianity is the correct one. I actually got into a bit of an argument with him about this — though I don’t know why I bothered. The point of having secular law, I said, was to protect against the imposition of rules informed by a particular religious view. That was wrong, he told me; his interpretation of God’s law was the only one that mattered, and we would all be judged by it.
Still from An Abortion in Mississippi
Shannon Brewer, who has worked at the Pink House for 17 years and has been its director for nine years, keeps an eye on all of this from her cluttered desk inside. The wall behind her is covered with Post-It notes and letters from clients and supporters praising the clinic. When you talk to Brewer here, her eyes constantly dart to her right, where a computer screen displays an array of video feeds from various security cameras around the property. She doesn’t usually engage with the protesters, she said. “Nothing you say is going to matter. Once you learn that, it’s like you’re talking to a brick wall. So you either stand there and listen to it, or you walk away. To keep my sanity, I just walk away. Sometimes I cuss them a few times, just to get my day going. Otherwise I walk away.”
Frankly, she’s got way too much work to do.
Mississippi lawmakers have been relentless in their efforts to shut down the Pink House. The state is one of four that has a trigger law on the books, meaning that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will immediately become illegal. There’s a 24-hour waiting period, mandatory ultrasound, and requirement that medically inaccurate information on abortion be provided to each patient. Then there’s the requirement that the Pink House follow complicated surgical center regulations in order to be allowed to perform second-trimester abortions, and a requirement that only ob-gyns provide abortion care.
Although there is ample evidence that other medical professionals, like nurse practitioners, can ably provide care, a number of states have implemented such a ban, which is a strategic move. There are a discrete number of abortion doctors across the country, which means that in many states, including Mississippi, doctors must be brought in to provide care. This in turn reduces the number of days that a clinic can provide services and creates a bottleneck in the system that increases waiting times. The Pink House has a doctor in house only a select number of days per month. The doctor was present for both of the days that we were there in August; over those two days, there were more than 100 appointments scheduled.
And then there is the state law passed last March that would ban abortion at 15 weeks, well below the point of fetal viability, which is generally considered to begin at roughly 24 weeks. Brewer wryly pointed out that during the debate on the bill, lawmakers asserted that the ban was needed to protect the humanity of the unborn child who, at this point in gestation, would already have teeth. “I had six kids,” she said. “Nine months, none of them had teeth when they came out.” Once the bill passed, the state had to rush to reprint its informed consent booklets, she noted, because the description of fetal development in the old books contradicted the assertions made by lawmakers.
The rush resulted in further mistakes: The pages in the book are out of order so that the description of fetal development jumps from 18 weeks to 32 weeks. Notably, the state cribbed the information in its new booklet from one created by the state of Alabama, which itself was already plagued by medical inaccuracies.
The clinic had been living under the specter of the ban until only recently. In late November, federal district Judge Carlton Reeves issued a blistering opinion blocking the law. He wrote that lawmakers’ “professed interest in ‘women’s health’ is pure gaslighting.” While they’ve taken a great interest in abortion, he noted, they’ve done nothing to address the state’s crippling maternal mortality rate, the highest in the country. “Leaders are proud to challenge Roe but choose not to lift a finger to address the tragedies lurking on the other side of the delivery room,” he wrote. “No, legislation like HB 1510 is closer to the old Mississippi — the Mississippi bent on controlling women and minorities.”
The state has appealed the ruling.
Still from An Abortion in Mississippi
If it had taken effect, the 15-week ban would have been one Mississippi abortion law Danielle would not have had to contend with. She’d caught her pregnancy very early, and had acted with deliberation and determination to have it terminated.
Still, when she arrived in Jackson, she would be forced to navigate a handful of the state’s other abortion restrictions, as well as the protesters who were gathered around the clinic. She was baffled by their presence, she told us later, and frankly, pissed off by it. “I thought I was seeing some regular guy on the street. He said good morning to me. When I said good morning to him, he kinda ran me down and tried to force his religious views on me. And then he tried to force me, saying, ‘What if the baby has your eyes? What if the baby has your pinky toe?’” she recalled. “Crazy stuff.”
Once she’d been through counseling and set up her appointment for the following day, a process that took several hours, she walked across the street to a taco joint before catching a cab back to the nearby Red Roof Inn. A lot of women stay there when traveling to Jackson for care, the clinic counselor, Betty Thompson, told me. It’s relatively inexpensive — roughly $50 a night — and the rooms are serviceable, save for the water pressure, which just sucks. In the room, Danielle had a blanket from home sitting on the bed, and the TV was tuned to a channel showing a marathon of “Law and Order Special Victims Unit.” She’s a fan of the show; it’s formulaic and predictable in a way that, despite the subject matter, is comforting when you’re away from home but wish you weren’t.
Danielle was frustrated by just about everything in Jackson. It wasn’t just the protesters whose attitudes she found dismissive and ignorant. “They don’t have no business doing that. They don’t have no business walking up on women, being aggressive, you know? They make them feel like they’re ashamed of themselves for the decision that they’re making. But at the end of the day, how they feel shouldn’t have nothing to do with you.” It was also the state, which had imposed this totally arbitrary waiting period. “The 24-hour thing really does get you,” she said. “If I’m ready, I’m ready.”
There was also the money she was spending — the bus ticket, the cab rides, the meals, and motel room, not to mention the cost of the procedure itself, since the state bans the use of public or private insurance to cover care, unless the life of the mother is at stake. Back at the clinic, Thompson had given the women the telephone numbers for several organizations that help to fund abortion care, including the National Abortion Federation. That afternoon, Danielle tried to call NAF. Numerous times. The lines were busy. The best time to call, the recording announced, was early in the morning and especially on weekends.
Before bed, she got on the phone with her younger brother, Walter. The two would often talk for hours. Tonight was one of those nights. They lamented the situation that Danielle found herself in, and both were frustrated by the obstacles she faced in trying to exercise her right to control her reproductive future. It was all about politics, they concluded. And it was time for those lawmakers to retire, Walter said. “My thing is, it’s 2018, some of the older people need to just sit down, retire, go sip some tea on your porch or something, and let the younger generation take control. Their time is up.”
When we arrived at the motel the following morning to meet Danielle for the trip back to the clinic, she had some good news: She’d gotten up early and had gotten through to NAF. They only take the first six callers, she said she had been told, and she was No. 6. They would be providing $150 toward her abortion. The paperwork would be faxed to the clinic, and that amount would be deducted from her final bill. Now she would have a bit more money left in her pocket to take care of family expenses.
Before leaving, she packed up her duffle bag because she was heading to the Greyhound station as soon as she could get her pills. She missed her kids and really wanted to get home, where she could finish her abortion. When she arrived back at the clinic for her second appointment, the protesters were already offering platitudes while Gibson and Hancock had turned the volume to high on a large boombox playing a local radio station in an effort to drown them out. It was pretty much business as usual.
Inside, the clinic was bustling and women, some with their partners, family, or friends, packed the waiting room. Finally, Danielle was called into the doctor’s office. They sat across a desk from each other while the doctor went over the final paperwork. Danielle would be given a prescription for an antibiotic, which she would need to take, and a mild pain pill, which she could take if she wanted. The cramping could be pretty intense as the muscles worked to expel the pregnancy. She was handed a dose of mifepristone, which she was required to swallow in the doctor’s presence. She was also handed a small envelope and asked to open it, to make sure that there were four small misoprostol pills inside. Those she would take 24 to 48 hours later.
In the cab on the way to the Greyhound station, Danielle wondered aloud what would come next and if she’d get the “baby blues” — if her hormones would drop after the abortion and leave her feeling a bit down. Mostly, she said she felt relieved. “Everything was just backwards,” she observed. “But I feel stronger. I had a choice. I handled my business,” she said. “Everyone has an opinion, but I don’t live for them. I live for me.”
Now it was just about the next steps. “That’s life,” she said. “I’ll keep walking.”
The post Millions of Women Already Live in a Post-Roe America: A Journey Through the Anti-Abortion South appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One upon arrival at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fla., on Oct. 31, 2018.
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
On Thursday, at 10:11 p.m. ET, BuzzFeed News dropped one of the biggest bombshells of the Trump presidency: “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.”
Let’s be clear: This is obstruction of justice, plain and simple. If this report from BuzzFeed News is correct, the president has committed a crime — obstruction of justice is prohibited by a number of federal criminal laws, including obstruction of judicial proceedings (18 U.S.C. 1503) and witness tampering (18 U.S.C. 1512) — and should therefore be impeached and indicted. (On Friday night, the Special Counsel’s Office investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia disputed some of the specifics and characterizations of BuzzFeed’s report, but BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith is standing by the story.)
Trump’s lawyers have always claimed that the president “cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer” under the Constitution. Again, let’s be clear: This is ahistorical nonsense; it is Trumpian dishonesty and deflection of the most brazen sort.
The president “cannot obstruct justice”?
Tell that to Richard Nixon. The very first article of impeachment adopted by the House Judiciary Committee in July 1974 stated that Nixon had “prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice,” and in the wake of the Watergate break-in, had “engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.”
Tell that to Bill Clinton. In December 1998, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment against him, one of which stated that Clinton had “prevented, obstructed and impeded the administration of justice, and has to that end engaged personally, and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or scheme designed to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence and testimony related to a Federal civil rights action brought against him in a duly instituted judicial proceeding.”
In Nixon’s case, the article of impeachment listed nine different examples of obstruction; in Clinton’s case, there were seven such examples.
What would such a list look like in Trump’s case? At the top of it would have to be the devastating allegation contained in this latest BuzzFeed News story, based on two law enforcement sources:
Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement. The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office. … It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.
As even Trump’s own nominee for attorney general, William Barr, confirmed this week in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a president persuading a person to commit perjury would constitute obstruction of justice.
Then there is the firing of former FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. The president may have had the legal authority to fire him, but it became obstruction of justice the moment he showed “corrupt intent.” How so? Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that he had been thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to get rid of the FBI boss. The day after he fired Comey, Trump told the Russian foreign minister — of all people! — that “great pressure because of Russia” had been “taken off.”
But there are also plenty of other examples of the president obstructing justice with “corrupt intent.” As a recent study by the Brookings Institution handily summarized:
To take only a few examples, it has … been reported that President Trump: attempted to block Attorney General Sessions’ recusing himself from the Russia investigation despite the AG’s clear legal duty to do so; asked Sessions to reverse his recusal decision; demanded and obtained the resignation of Sessions for his failure to contain the Russia investigation (before ultimately rejecting it); twice ordered the firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller; dictated a false account for a key witness, his son Donald Trump Jr., of the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign and Russian representatives; publicly attacked Special Counsel Mueller and key witnesses to the obstruction case; and has repeatedly disputed the underlying Russian attack and Vladimir Putin’s role in it despite possessing evidence to the contrary.
Obstruction, obstruction, obstruction!
So what now? Trump’s apologists argue that he cannot be indicted; they point to Department of Justice guidance that says that the indictment of a sitting president “would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”
Yet as a recent paper for the California Law Review by University of Chicago law professors Eric Posner and Daniel Hemel points out, “it is simply not settled law that a president is immune from indictment while in office,” plus “even if a president cannot be indicted while in office, it may be possible to indict and convict him after he leaves office of a crime he committed while in office,” and “even if a president cannot be indicted for a crime committed while in office, he may be impeached for such a crime.”
Is there an appetite on the Democratic side for launching impeachment hearings, prior to the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? On Thursday night, Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted: “Based on the Buzzfeed report and numerous other articles showing @realDonaldTrump committed Obstruction of Justice and other possible felonies, it is time for the House Judiciary Committee to start holding hearings to establish a record of whether @POTUS committed high crimes.” Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted: “If true — and proof must be examined — Congress must begin impeachment proceedings.” We will find out in the coming days and weeks, though, how many other top Democrats are willing to get onboard the impeachment train.
On this week’s Deconstructed podcast, I asked new member of Congress Rashida Tlaib — who only a few hours after being sworn in on January 3 grabbed the headlines by pledging to “impeach the motherfucker” — how she responded to critics on the left and the right who suggest that impeachment by a Democrat-led House would be a colossal waste of time and resources, given a Republican-led Senate would never agree to convict Trump and remove him from office.
“It’s not a waste of time to hold the president of the United States accountable,” she told me. “We need to understand our duties as members of Congress. And I believe, looking at even Nixon’s impeachment … it was Republicans and Democrats coming together and putting country first.”
There is very little chance of the modern Republican Party putting the national interest above their own partisan interests. So every GOP member of Congress should be asked, again and again, the fundamental questions posed by founding father George Mason at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, in response to those who objected to the inclusion of an impeachment clause in the new Constitution.
“Shall any man be above justice?” he asked. “Above all, shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?”
Update: Jan. 18, 2019, 9:07 p.m.
This story has been updated to include a reference to the Special Counsel statement Friday night disputing BuzzFeed’s story as well as a statement from BuzzFeed officials saying they stand behind the story.
The post Trump’s Articles of Impeachment Are Writing Themselves, With Echoes of Richard Nixon Growing Stronger appeared first on The Intercept.
Newly empowered progressive legislators and activists have set their sights on a Green New Deal to fight climate change and decarbonize the economy. But the devil is in the details, and a plan released late last week by some 600 environmental groups includes opposition to nuclear power and carbon capture—two tools without which it will be virtually impossible to meet any of the mid-century climate goals.
President Trump allegedly directed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie in front of Congress in order to hide his pursuit of a real-estate project in Moscow, according to a report by BuzzFeed News. Adam Serwer writes that the news, if true, is different from past charges: “The only defense of Trump’s conduct is an imperial, Nixonian conception of the presidency—that nothing the president could do is illegal.” Democrats in Congress seem to be taking that message to heart, as the report looks to be an inflection point that could lead them to push forward with impeachment proceedings even before the end of the Russia investigation.
Last week, the Broadway blockbuster Hamilton premiered in Puerto Rico, the ancestral home of the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. But the drama surrounding the long-anticipated opening rivaled that of the musical itself. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Hamilton in Puerto Rico became a fundraising venture to help support the island. But Miranda’s past support of budget-reducing measures on the island led to threats of a mass protest at the planned theater at the University of Puerto Rico, so the show was moved to another location.
Evening Read
(Illustration: Pete Ryan)
What is life like with a severe corn allergy? It isn’t just popcorn or corn tortillas that become forbidden: It’s everything from some salts (table salt has dextrose, a sugar derived from corn) to milk (added vitamins processed with corn derivatives) to any of the vast varieties of foods that contain corn derivatives. → Read the story.
Unthinkable
(Patrick Semansky / AP)
Unthinkable is The Atlantic’s catalog of 50 incidents from the first two years of President Trump’s first term in office, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance.
At No. 1: Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
Dr. Brian P. H. Green of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, writes: “Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece, and then the subsequent 50 unthinkable moments, it becomes clear that it is not the bending of norms that should have us alarmed—it is our incremental desensitization to what constitutes a norm at all.”
→ Read more reader-suggested moments here.
Poem of the WeekThe beloved poet Mary Oliver died this week at age 83. Here is one of our favorite Oliver poems, “The Loon on Oak-Head Pond,” from our July 1988 issue, a year in which our magazine—and the U.S.—was focused on a presidential election. Tap here to read the full poem.
See more of the July 1988 issue in which the poem appears, here.
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares their top stories:
Millions of Americans rely on tax refunds through the Earned Income Tax Credit. Those families are the first to file. And they spend their refunds right away—often on food or overdue bills (like heat). This year, those refunds might be very late.
Like Confederate monuments, President Trump’s vision of a massive wall along the Mexican border is about propaganda and racial oppression, designer Brian Lee Jr. writes: not national security.
Cities could get more people walking, biking, and riding transit, according to a new report, if they just know where to look for improvement. Here's what they're currently getting wrong.For more updates like these from the urban world, subscribe to CityLab’s Daily newsletter.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com.
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For roughly 40 minutes on Friday, a sleepy boutique hotel in Washington, D.C., burst to life as the epicenter of nuclear talks with North Korea.
As reporters and camera crews crowded into the lobby of the Dupont Circle Hotel and spilled outside to the street, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo briefly met with his North Korean negotiating partner, Kim Yong Chol, before emerging from an elevator, smiling ever so slightly, ignoring shouted questions of “How did it go?” and speeding off in a three-car motorcade to the White House. Kim, who slipped out of the hotel more surreptitiously, wasn’t far behind.
The payoff came later. After huddling with Pompeo and Kim for 90 minutes at the White House, President Donald Trump has announced that he will hold a second summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, in late February at a yet-to-be-announced location.
[Read: How to deal with North Korea]
In a sign perhaps of how cautiously the two sides are going into this meeting, however, the news wasn’t grandly announced to the press on the White House lawn as it had been ahead of the first summit. Instead, it came via a two-line email from Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Here’s a rundown of where the negotiations stand and what the sequel to the June 2018 Trump-Kim Singapore summit could bring:
What has—and has not—been accomplishedThe Trump administration says its diplomatic engagement with the Kim regime has already produced significant achievements. The parties have retreated from the brink of war (albeit a brink Kim and Trump steered their countries toward). North Korea has halted tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could reach the United States. The two countries have established direct dialogue at the very highest levels of government and, along with South Korea, are experimenting with a new model of top-down talks (after decades of ultimately failed bottom-up negotiations) in which meetings between political leaders serve as the catalyst rather than the capstone of the process. There have been some meaningful gestures of goodwill: The United States has suspended major military exercises with South Korea, while North Korea claims to have destroyed a nuclear-test site.
But seven months after Trump became the first American president to meet with a North Korean leader, boasting afterward that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program remains at least as formidable as it was the day before Trump and Kim shook hands in Singapore. Even as North and South Korea have made remarkable strides in reconciling—demilitarizing parts of their heavily fortified border, for example, and exploring ways to connect their railroads—efforts to achieve the “final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea,” as the administration likes to refer to it, have gone nearly nowhere.
[Read: Here’s what Trump actually achieved with North Korea]
The Kim government has not taken any steps that U.S. officials once hoped would occur early on in talks, such as providing an inventory of its nuclear-weapons program, dismantling a portion of its nuclear arsenal in a manner that can be independently confirmed, or offering a timeline for fully giving up its nukes. The Trump administration’s new envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, has not been able to get any face time with his Pyongyang counterparts.
Trump likes to describe the negotiations as a great success, but the president’s own government has at times been more candid. A report on U.S. missile defenses, released this week by the Pentagon, notes that North Korea “continues to pose an extraordinary threat” to the United States.
In other words, no progress has been made so far, and the Trump administration is hopeful that a second summit may jump-start negotiations again. (Critics of course say the meetings give Kim international credibility without any concessions from his side.)
What could be accomplished at the next meetingU.S. officials appear to be going into the next summit with an understanding that their original approach to the talks—withholding concessions until Kim gives up his nuclear weapons—has so far proved a dead end. Instead, they may follow the more reciprocal formula that North and South Korean officials have long advocated: taking steps to establish peace and new relations with North Korea (the first two commitments made in the statement Trump and Kim signed in Singapore) in exchange for Pyongyang taking corresponding steps toward denuclearization (the third commitment). Skeptics caution that this may amount to falling for North Korea’s old tricks, in which it pockets rewards without giving up anything of value.
In a New Year’s Day speech, Kim hinted at one possible deal: capping the country’s production of nuclear weapons and promising not to use them first in a conflict or transfer them to others in return for relief from international sanctions. “We declared at home and abroad that we would neither make and test nuclear weapons any longer nor use and proliferate them,” the North Korean leader noted, but none of that could happen while the United States persisted in pressuring his country.
When Pompeo was asked about the proposal in a recent interview with Fox News, he didn’t rule it out. He said he was exploring ways with the North Koreans to “decrease the risk to the American people”—a more modest goal that wouldn’t necessarily require eliminating the nuclear program outright.
[Read: The secretary of state is a North Korea hawk]
The half-measures agreed to at the next summit could come in a variety of forms. The United States and North Korea could, for instance, join with China and South Korea in symbolically declaring an end to the Korean War as a prelude to a peace treaty, or establish liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang. The United States could ease sanctions against North Korea or carve out humanitarian and other exceptions to those sanctions, while Kim dismantles the intercontinental ballistic missiles that directly threaten the U.S. mainland or facilities such as the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
The details of whatever agreement Trump and Kim reach in their next summit—assuming they reach one at all, or even meet in the first place—will represent the clearest indication yet of what exactly the Trump administration is up to with North Korea. Are these talks still really about denuclearization? Have they morphed into arms-control negotiations? Or have U.S. officials come to the realization, as they have in the past with countries such as Pakistan, that the best they can do is learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea so long as it isn’t overtly threatening?
Wild cardsThen, of course, there’s the wild card of Trump himself, who at the last summit decided off the cuff to cease U.S.-South Korea military exercises and could have other surprises in store for when he and Kim meet again. Even if his advisers believe a declaration ending the Korean War is premature, the president could go ahead and promise it anyway. Even if the North Korean leader doesn’t request that the United States reduce its military presence in South Korea, Trump might see fit to do it anyhow, since he thinks it’s a rip-off for the United States.
Kim is hardly the most predictable leader either—his government has blown off meetings with American officials and he’s ominously threatened to go “a new way” if the United States doesn’t let up pressure on his country.
Regardless, U.S. officials will spend the next month seeking to line up “deliverables” for the summit. But there’s no accounting for what happens when their boss gets in the room with Kim Jong Un.
It’s Friday, January 18. President Donald Trump will reportedly meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February.
How It All Could End: As the government shutdown bleeds into its 28th day, some congressional staffers have privately come to a consensus: A resolution to the dysfunction may require a dramatic government failure, such as an airplane crash or a massive food-safety scare.
Talking Impeachment: On Thursday night, BuzzFeed News reported that Trump allegedly directed Michael Cohen, then his personal lawyer, to lie to Congress about a real-estate deal he was pursuing in Moscow during the 2016 election. Trump denied the story, but it’s prompted many Democrats to consider proceeding with impeachment before Special Counsel Robert Mueller finishes his investigation.
Shutdown Time Capsule: Trump on Friday tweeted about a Washington Examiner report that a border rancher found prayer rugs near the southern border. The tweet offers a succinct demonstration of Trump’s entire shutdown approach, argues David A. Graham.
In Case of Attack: Trump’s blueprint for the U.S.’s missile-defense strategy outlines high-tech systems to detect and shoot down threatening projectiles. But the strategy relies on technology that is unreliable and even experimental.
Historical Shutdowns: In 1879, congressional Democrats, some representing former Confederate states, attached a series of riders to key military-funding bills in order to limit Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes from being able to finance Army protections for black voters from being terrorized at the polls. The standoff that ensued looked very much like a government shutdown. From our archives:
The democratic party, having a majority in Congress, demanded the repeal of certain statutes authorizing the use of the army to keep the peace, and providing for a supervision of elections of members of Congress by special officers appointed by the courts, to guard against fraudulent registration, voting, and counting; and its leaders threatened that unless the president assented to this demand they would leave the government without means of supporting either the army or the executive, legislative, and judicial departments, which was a threat of bringing the government to an end.
The Politics & Policy Daily will be off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday — see you next Tuesday.
Ideas From The AtlanticTrump’s Impeachable Offense (Adam Serwer)
“Republicans have tried their best to set expectations so that only the clearest and most shocking of acts would qualify as criminal—and Trump’s reported actions not only meet but exceed them.” → Read on.
In the L.A. Teachers’ Strike, the State Is the Problem (Michael Janofsky)
“Despite being the world’s fifth-biggest economy, with Democrats serving in every statewide office and holding supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, California ranks in the middle among states in per-pupil spending on elementary and secondary education.” → Read on.
The Trump Administration’s Careless Accounting (Megan Garber)
“That Trump summons more emotion for a notional wall than he does for the suffering of human children is clear enough. What this week’s report suggests, though, is how that bias gets bureaucratized.” → Read on.
(Patrick Semansky / AP)
Unthinkable is The Atlantic’s catalog of 50 incidents from the first two years of President Trump’s first term in office, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance.
At No. 1: Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
“Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece, and then the subsequent 50 unthinkable moments, it becomes clear that it is not the bending of norms that should have us alarmed—it is our incremental desensitization to what constitutes a norm at all.”
—Dr. Brian P. H. Green of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
→ Read more reader-suggested moments here.
Snapshot
Antiabortion activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana / AP)
What Else We’re Reading◆ Rep. Steve King Raising Money off Controversy From White Nationalism, Supremacy Comments (Robin Opsahl, Des Moines Register)
◆ Trump Said He Beat ISIS. Instead, He’s Giving It New Life. (Brett McGurk, The Washington Post)
◆ How Jared Kushner Tried to Stop Me From Running the Trump Transition (Chris Christie, Politico)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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People’s last words are often nonsensical and borderline bizarre, yet they’ve gotten conspicuously little attention from researchers, since it’s difficult to study people’s final moments without being overly intrusive. Michael Erard writes about the deeper meaning behind people’s last words, and why understanding them is important to ensuring good end-of-life care.
Relationships with siblings can be even more influential than those with parents, so conflict among children can shape their whole lives, writes Jennifer Traig. She takes a look at the history of sibling rivalries from biblical times to the present, and how parents’ treatment of their children has dramatically shifted away from playing favorites.
When thinking about economic inequality, it’s easy to think about the macro forces at work, such as government policies and big corporations. But there are also ways in which individual people can affect the status quo, writes the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker. He talked with a sociologist who has researched inequality for the past 40 years and has recommendations for what people who live in unequal societies can do to help mitigate the problem.
HighlightsData show that Baby Boomers are moving out of their homes at a steady rate, even as the overall moving rate for Americans is on the decline. Empty nesters who sell the family home often seek cheaper rent and proximity to their children or their own parents. But doing so is still often emotionally fraught, writes Hayley Glatter—especially for fledgling adults who thought their childhood home would remain a source of constant comfort.
Is intensive parenting a symptom of larger social inequalities? Children may benefit from extracurriculars like sports, music camps, and supervised playtime, but not all parents have the funding or time to support those activities, as one researcher tells the staff writer Joe Pinsker. On the flip side, “free range” parenting isn’t above classist criticisms, either: Affluent parents are often praised for indulging their kids’ creativity, while lower-income parents are called out as neglectful.
Losing a wedding ring or a piece of sentimental jewelry can be emotionally heartbreaking and financially taxing. While finding a lost memento might feel like the ultimate needle-in-a-haystack feat, a network of metal detectorists called the Ring Finders helps reunite people with their rings. The success rate is “close to 90 percent on the ones where the calls are to a specific spot in Central Park, or to the beach, or a yard,” one ring finder told Jessica Delfino. While some finders charge a fee, others do it for the fun—and the occasional request for chocolate-chip cookies.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader needs advice about a younger sister who has anxiety that causes “craziness” and small crises every time the two spend time together. The reader doesn’t know how to help, apart from recommending therapy, which the sister refuses to go to because she believes therapy is “just about assigning blame.”
Lori’s advice: Start responding differently to your sister’s problems, for both of your sakes.
With siblings growing up in difficult households, one often takes on the role of the strong one who seems to manage the turmoil more easily than the other … Sometimes we carry our childhood roles into adulthood without realizing it, even though those roles have become outdated. Your sister may have needed protection growing up, but so did you. The difference now is that you’re starting to see this second part—that you, too, need to protect yourself. On some level you know—because you suggested that she seek therapy—that your sister’s suffering is hers to fix. And so is yours.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
“We have some very bad players out there,” President Donald Trump warned from a Pentagon podium on Thursday. Advanced missile technologies are spreading among great powers and rogue actors alike, and with them new threats to the United States. So Trump threatened back. “We’re a good player, but we can be far worse than anybody, if need be.”
The blueprint he unveiled for doing that, the Pentagon’s long-delayed Missile Defense Review, outlined all kinds of potential high-tech systems to detect and shoot down threatening projectiles, including from outer space. Though Trump didn’t mention them by name, it was a message clearly aimed at rivals like Russia and China, which have made a public show of their advances in new weapons like ultrafast missiles. And it also singled out North Korea as a still-potent threat—even as a high-level North Korean official was in Washington, D.C., to plan another summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
But there’s a problem: The strategy relies mostly on tech and hardware solutions that are either unreliable or experimental verging on speculative. It gives no indication of how much any of its recommendations will cost, or where the money will come from. Still, it was a signal of how the military is trying to reorient itself from nearly two decades of the War on Terror—and back toward great-power competition.
Briefing reporters on Thursday, John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, declared that the document marks a “new era in missile defense.” So far, that largely amounts to a list of systems to be tested and studied, with little in terms of new technology actually deployed. “I don’t see anything in here that fundamentally alters any balance of power,” says John Plumb, who previously served as the principal director for nuclear and missile-defense policy at the Pentagon.
[Read: Trump hates international treaties. His latest target: a nuclear-weapons deal with Russia. ]
The document notably omitted a discussion of funding, and Pentagon officials repeatedly declined to answer questions about how much all of this would cost. “There’s not enough money to throw at it to do all of these things,” Plumb says.
There are also departures from the Obama administration’s strategy, and a major one is the focus on space.
Right now, if a missile were hurtling across the sky toward the U.S. from, say, North Korea, stopping it would involve shooting it out from the ground with another missile. There are 44 interceptors buried in Alaska and California for this purpose—with the North Koreans in mind—and more being added. They work like a bullet hitting a bullet, and as such they’re not especially reliable: The former Missile Defense Agency director Trey Obering once said that their odds of success were about as good as a coin toss, and they’ve shown uneven improvement.
[Read: What does Trump mean by ‘Space Force’?]
But when it comes to the newer, faster kinds of weapons Russia and China are developing, there is, so far, not much that could stop them even some of the time. As a first step, the Pentagon wants to expand its ability to monitor missiles from space by putting more satellite sensors in the sky.
That still leaves the problem of actually hitting the missile. The idea of putting armed satellites in space to do so, which the new strategy promises to study, is controversial and expensive. “It’s not a very popular idea,” says Plumb. Some arms-control advocates, scientists, and others have warned about the implications of putting weapons in orbit ever since the Reagan administration first proposed studying the use of space lasers in missile defense back in the 1980s. (The Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s missile-defense research initiative, got the derisive nickname “Star Wars” for proposals much like some of those unveiled on Thursday.)
What all this adds up to is an effort to solve a political problem with expensive hardware. For years, defense officials have worried about the rise of China and Russia, even as policy has tended to focus on challengers like Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups. In the meantime, China and Russia have been developing new ways to confront the United States. On Thursday Trump vowed to stay ahead of America’s enemies—but the country is in some ways only just catching up.
Stories of people and animals bringing comfort to one another are a dime a dozen on the internet. But every once in a while, an interspecies communion rises above the din. Ron Krajewski and his horse, Metro Meteor, are one such pair. The short documentary My Paintbrush Bites, directed by Joel Pincosy and Joe Egender and premiering today on The Atlantic, tells their remarkable story—one of a reclusive failed artist who finds redemption in the unlikeliest of places.
When Krajewski rescued Metro, the thoroughbred was on the brink of death. He had once been a successful racehorse, with eight winning races at the prestigious Belmont Park and $300,000 in prize money to his name. But severe injuries forced Metro’s stable to retire him. Krajewski, looking for an affordable horse for his wife to ride, bought Metro in the nick of time; had he not done so, the horse would surely have been sent to the slaughterhouse.
Shortly after they rescued him, though, the Krajewskis would discover how severe Metro’s health problems were. Just one trail ride rendered him unable to walk. The vet gave him a year to live. And to make matters worse, the horse had an attitude; he would often bite or kick those who attempted to touch him.
“Everybody had said that Metro’s not going to amount to anything,” Krajewski says in the film. “Well, we found a skill for him, and he’s pretty good at it.”
Krajewski had always dreamed of being an artist, but his abstract paintings never sold. When he noticed that Metro had an interesting tic—he would often bob his head up and down and side to side—Krajewski had what he terms a “crazy” idea. He taught Metro to hold a paintbrush. Using horse treats as a reward, he then taught the horse to touch his nose to the canvas.
“He went to town and just started painting,” Krajewski says.
Sure enough, the horse had a penchant for art. Krajewski sold Metro’s paintings to a local gallery, attracting international attention and buyers. Over the course of his career, Metro’s work would raise more than $80,000—some of the proceeds going to the horse’s experimental and very expensive bone-remodeling treatments. (Krajewski also donated a large sum to racehorse-rescue programs.)
“When Metro started taking off, I was kind of living my dream through him,” says Krajewski in the film. “Even though Metro’s name is on [the paintings], you know, that’s my artwork, too. Would I love to be a successful abstract artist? Sure I would. I’m not, but my horse is.”
Co-directors Pincosy and Egender told The Atlantic that Krajewski and Metro’s story revealed itself to be about more than just a painting horse. “What really drew us in was the fact there were multiple layers to this story,” Egender said. “Both [Krajewski and Metro] were hurt by the outside world, becoming isolated and feisty as a result. Yet both yearned for connection, and the fame from the paintings created an avenue.”
According to Pincosy, Ron loved Metro passionately, and also “saw him as a vehicle to achieve his dream—like a Little League father and his star athlete son.”
“It's one thing reading about or even watching a film of a horse that paints,” Egender said. “But to actually be in the barn and watch this massive animal take a paintbrush and make stroke after stroke is quite something to experience.” Egender admitted that he will never know if Metro was simply performing for treats. “Regardless, it was quite a feat for Ron to teach his horse to paint while seemingly enjoying it,” he said.
While Metro’s experimental treatment was able to extend his life far beyond his original prognosis, the horse sadly succumbed to his leg injuries last spring.
“His rambunctious attitude and health issues were a constant challenge, but we never gave up on him and he rewarded us by taking us on his amazing journey,” Krajewski wrote in a statement. “He was truly a special horse.”
Here is the finding listed as the “key takeaway” in a report compiled by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services and released to the American public on Thursday:
The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown. Pursuant to a June 2018 Federal District Court order, HHS [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] has thus far identified 2,737 children in its care at that time who were separated from their parents. However, thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the Court, and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children.
It bears repeating: The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown. Carelessness can suggest sloppiness, but it can also suggest something more literal: a simple lack of caring. The Office of Inspector General report, an attempt to graft care, after the fact, onto a process that seems to have involved little of it, doubles as a broad accounting of the U.S. government’s treatment of the families it separated, as part of its “zero tolerance” policy, at the southern border. And its conclusion presents evidence that Donald Trump’s administration has managed to combine both kinds of carelessness at once. Chaos, cruelty, xenophobia, thousands of children more than were previously acknowledged to have been separated from their families: They’re made manifest in the numbers in the report, and in the phantom numbers that poor record-keeping has made it impossible to know.
Last year, when the separation policy and its horrific results catapulted to the attention of the American public, members of the Trump administration and their allies in the media attempted to downplay the situation by suggesting that empathy for the families, torn apart and caged like animals, was wrong. “Child actors,” Ann Coulter said. “Don’t believe the press,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen warned. It was a particularly pernicious twist on Orwellianism—lies aimed not at the mind, but at the heart—and it is a strategy that has, despite its profound untruths, continued over the past several months. In November, a Reuters photographer captured a picture of a woman and two children running to evade the stinging smoke of tear gas that had been lobbed at a group of migrants by U.S. Border Patrol agents. The image was, in some quarters, dismissed as a hoax: the whole thing staged for the cameras, the argument went, in order to produce sympathy. A deceit in the guise of journalism, allegedly; a conspiracy that turned empathy itself into the liar.
President Trump has, in the past month, further blended the line between human suffering and political theater. In his national address last week—broadcast, with grotesque spectacle, from the Oval Office—he admitted that the situation at the border was a “humanitarian crisis.” He used that basic concession, however, to demand that other branches of the U.S. government give him the border wall he has promised to his constituents. The speech was, in a collision that is ever more common as the Trump administration wears on, simultaneously shocking and unsurprising: the humanitarian crisis, used as a bargaining chip. He seemed unable to discern between the desperation of migrant families and his own petulant wants.
The speech called to mind the callousness of Trump’s earlier reaction to the deaths of Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7, and Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, 8, under the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection late last year: “Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally,” the president wrote on Twitter. “They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try!”
That Trump summons more emotion for a notional wall than he does for the suffering of human children is clear enough. What this week’s report suggests, though, is how that bias gets bureaucratized. The inspector general’s office has provided evidence of personal carelessness that becomes systemic. With the report’s known unknowns—managerial ineptitude colliding with human lives—it suggests the radiating effects of leadership that, on so many levels, simply cannot be bothered to care. Later in the report: “There is even less visibility for separated children who fall outside the court case.” And: “Additionally, efforts to identify and assess more recent separations may be hampered by incomplete information.”
This past summer, the administration and its allies defended the zero-tolerance policy by suggesting that the American media had misrepresented its true effects. “This misreporting by Members, press & advocacy groups must stop,” Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted last June, as news of the family separations spread. “It is irresponsible and unproductive.” She added: “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”
It was an outright lie, and it was, in retrospect, clarifying precisely in its dishonesty. The administration seems to have had so little regard for the people it had put in its care that it failed to give them that smallest measure of dignity: being measured in the first place. Being counted, and accounted for. “The unfortunate reality,” the federal judge Dana Sabraw wrote in ordering a stop to the child-separation policy this summer, “is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”
The Office of Inspector General report makes it clear once more that chaos can have its own kind of cruel canniness. The same day the report was released, NBC News published another shocking finding: that the Trump administration had considered, among other things, the legal targeting of migrant parents in order to accelerate the deportation of their children. The same day, as well, the Trump administration appealed a judicial ruling, this one concerning the all-important national census that will be taken in 2020. The White House is fighting to ask American residents specifically about their citizenship, a move that would reverse nearly 70 years of protocol—and a change that, many argue, would lead to the undercounting specifically of immigrants and communities of color.
The White House’s legal struggle suggests another way of weaponizing data by enforcing its absence: to take human lives and relegate them to the realm of the known unknown. The tension it is bringing to the fore has lurked in the shadows cast by many of the Trump administration’s gaudy spectacles: the question of who belongs, and who does not; who will be counted, and who will not. One thing that is all too well known, within the muddle of the president’s own making, is how he has elected to answer those questions.
Imagine you were charged with choosing an artifact to put in a time capsule so that future Americans could understand the current government shutdown. This is an unrealistic scenario, of course. No single item can explain the current moment, and moreover, there’s no reason to believe that the shutdown is actually going to end.
But playing along with the game, your best bet would be this Donald Trump tweet from Friday morning:
Border rancher: “We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.” Washington Examiner People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2019It offers a succinct window into the president’s mind and his approach to the shutdown: an obsession with border security. A dubious anonymous source. Assertions that are unproven at best and likely bogus. A reliance on right-wing media. Anti-Muslim sentiments. Xenophobia. It is the total package; it’s just that the package is a booby trap.
The story to which Trump refers, but does not link, was published in the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. Even by the standards of what the president is willing to employ for political purposes, the article is shockingly thin. The reporter Anna Giaritelli—who previously served as a spokeswoman for the hard-line immigration-policy group Federation for American Immigration Reform—traveled to Lordsburg, New Mexico, where she spoke to a rancher about illegal immigration.
[Read: What will Trump’s fake-news habit mean in a crisis?]
Who knows who the rancher is, though, or whether there’s any reason to believe that she is reliable. The Examiner grants her anonymity “for fear of retaliation by cartels who move the individuals.” But given how vague and unconvincing the allegations she airs are, one wonders why the cartels would even care.
“There’s a lot of people coming in not just from Mexico,” the rancher tells Giaritelli. “People, the general public, just don’t get the terrorist threats of that. That’s what’s really scary. You don’t know what’s coming across. We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal. It’s not just Mexican nationals that are coming across.”
As the rancher admits, she has never seen any Middle Easterners, though she insists that she has seen prayer rugs. She’s just heard tell from Border Patrol officials that Middle Easterners have come through—“several agents that I trust. There’s not a lot that I do trust, but the ones I do trust, I talk to them.”
Her own account is suspect, too. The claim of abandoned prayer rugs, presumably left by nefarious Muslim terrorists sneaking into the United States over the Rio Grande to do dirty deeds, has long floated around conservative circles. In 2014, PolitiFact awarded then–Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst a pants-on-fire rating for claiming that prayer rugs had been found in the Lone Star State. The fact-checking group noted recurrences of the meme at least as far back as 2005, but concluded,“We find his statement incorrect and ridiculous.” More recently, video footage has indeed emerged of prayer rugs at the border—but the problem is, it was from the Hollywood action flick Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
The anonymous rancher also told the Examiner, “What Border Patrol classifies as OTMs [other than Mexicans] has really increased in the last couple years, but drastically within the last six months. Chinese, Germans, Russians, a lot of Middle Easterners, those Czechoslovakians they caught over on our neighbor’s just last summer.”
This is truly a remarkable piece of information because if it’s true, the Czechoslovakians are slipping not only over national borders but also through the bounds of the space-time continuum, since Czechoslovakia ceased to exist on January 1, 1993.
To sum up: The Examiner has a single unnamed source, with no obvious qualification beyond proximity to the border, passing along second- and third-hand information, some of which seems recycled from debunked memes.
[Read: Trump isn’t even trying to convince voters on the shutdown]
It’s doubtful that Trump checked any of this out. The president has demonstrated a long-running inability to sort truth from fiction, and he often shares bogus claims, even though he has the full power of the executive branch available to him to determine what is real. He appears not to read, and certainly not with any kind of rigor, which may make it harder for him to spot the many holes in the Examiner piece.
Then again, it’s hard to imagine that it would bother Trump even if he did know how flimsy the story he’s passing along is. Perhaps he omitted a link to it accidentally, or perhaps he’s just as glad not to make the original source material easily available. His aim is simply to score political points in the shutdown. Throughout the crisis, his actions have been driven by conservative media, which bullied him into shutting down the government when he was on the verge of compromising in late December. The Examiner story buttresses his insistence that the border needs more security, and it preys on xenophobia and on anti-Muslim sentiment in particular.
This is all quite helpful for his political messaging. Trump’s attitude toward the shutdown appears to be that it is better to be victorious than to be correct. His problem is that he is neither at this moment.
Harvey Karp makes soothing babies look like a cinch. In the video that accompanies his best-selling book The Happiest Baby on the Block, he holds one screaming infant after another, deftly rolls them on their side, and bam!—the crying stops. “Side position” is just one of the techniques to calm a baby in Karp’s repertoire. He also uses swaddling, shushing, swinging, and sucking. Bleary-eyed parents ooh and aah over how Karp can instantly activate a baby’s calming reflex, or “automatic shut-off switch,” using his trademark “five S’s.”
However, Karp himself has never raised a child. I imagine if he had, he’d be intimately familiar with the sixth S: straight out of luck.
I discovered the sixth S shortly after having my daughter nine years ago. A childbirth injury had left me bedridden with chronic pelvic pain, and for two months I lived on an air mattress in my living room because I couldn’t make it upstairs to my bedroom. I couldn’t sit in a comfortable position to nurse; I couldn’t stand to change my baby’s diaper or squat to bathe her; I couldn’t bounce her to calm her down. My husband stepped up, handling most things baby-related while I healed.
[Read more: The American obsession with parenting]
But one night, my husband was passed out on the couch with a fever, and I was left to handle the nighttime madness on my own. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and the baby was screaming, clearly hungry. I had struggled with milk production, but the books had been adamant: Breast is best. But my daughter wouldn’t latch, so I didn’t really have a choice. My baby would have to settle for second-rate food: formula. Well, when I brought it to her, she wouldn’t take that either.
As she arched her back and screamed, I thought back to when she was born and how everything might have been different if I’d just gotten one more massage from my midwife instead of opting for drugs. The natural-birth books had all warned against drugs and surgery; why had I been so weak? Why hadn’t I just endured the pain and tried to turn the birth experience blissful, like all the women in Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth?
In a fit of anger, I nearly threw the baby across the room. It’s the scariest feeling I’ve ever had, and I quickly put her in her bassinet, went back to my air mattress, and let her cry while I sulked. I was only weeks into being a parent, but according to the books, I had managed to fail at the three most important things so far—childbirth, breastfeeding, and soothing.
I’m not alone in my self-blame. Research shows that parenting books can be damaging to new parents, adding to mothers’ stress and heightening their chances of developing postpartum depression. The you’ve-already-failed messaging in these manuals is pervasive. Missed breastfeeding your newborns in the “golden” first hour of their life? Too late, your bond is irreparably harmed. Still using a pacifier after six months? Too late. Allowed your toddler to play with your phone? Not potty-trained by 3? Yelled at your kid? Too late, too late, too late.
Parenting is as high stakes as it gets—another person’s life is in your hands. And many of us look to gurus for easy step-by-step instructions on how to do it right. Don’t get me wrong, tips and tricks are great. But what the “experts” are telling us doesn’t always work. They don’t account for the fact that raising other humans is a messy endeavor. That each child and each parent is an individual with unique experiences and needs and quirks.
After almost a decade of raising a kid and talking to parents for my podcast, The Longest Shortest Time, I’ve realized something: We’re all winging it. We are master improvisers, managing our kids’ daily curveballs with a mix of random ideas, physical comedy, and whatever tools just happen to be at our fingertips.
[Read more: How to enjoy the exhausting role of parenthood]
Through trial and error, I discovered some techniques that really did make things easier with my daughter. For soothing, blowing on her eyelids and stroking the top of her nose worked. For breastfeeding, I sat her upright and facing me, as if seated in an invisible chair—a position that nobody mentions in breastfeeding books.
I asked the listeners of my podcast to send in their own tricks. It turned out that to get their kids to stop crying, some parents were snorting like pigs in their infant’s ear. Others were fake sneezing, sprinting around the house, wagging their butt in the baby’s face, or writing with a finger on the kiddo’s back: S-L-E-E-P. Yes, this was the stuff. This was what parenting actually looks like. I kept asking for these strategies on my podcast and website, and they poured in by the hundreds. They were hilarious; they were spontaneous; they were weird. And they were nothing like the lofty ideals promoted in parenting bibles.
Take the perennial question of how to get little ones to eat their broccoli. Recipe books such as Feeding the Whole Family, Little Foodie, The Big Book of Organic Baby Food, and Little Bento will have you believe that any child can become a healthy and adventurous eater if you just make food delicious and cute enough. But the 8-year-old son of Jillian St. Charles, who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, wouldn’t have it: He had an eagle eye for veggies mixed into his muffins. So Jillian started throwing “fancy dinners”—breaking out the china and the crystal goblets, then shutting off the lights and burning some candles. Her son loved the drama of the low lighting, and had no clue that there was spinach in his marinara.
Screen time is one of the biggest things that parents fret about these days. The Tech-Wise Family, for example, advocates for no screens before 10 a.m. and while kids are in the car; Simplicity Parenting encourages no television or computers at all before the age of 7. But screens aren’t always evil and sometimes even come to the rescue—and not just on road trips. After a screaming match with her eighth grader over a book he had to read for school, Kate Kerr in Lyons, Colorado, decided to download an audio version of the book that her son listened to while playing video games. Years later, he is a computer programmer who listens to podcasts while working.
These strategies are born out of desperation—they are a far cry from the aspirational methods you’ll find in the books by experts. Often I wonder, Is there even such a thing as an expert in parenting? Anyone advocating a one-size-fits-all solution for raising kids is certainly not doing parents any favors. In reality, we’re figuring out what works moment by moment—and what works today might not work tomorrow; what works on one child might not work on her sibling. Often, the best we can do is accept each challenge as a given and go weird. Do something completely unexpected or absurd, kind of like the “Yes, and” principle in improv comedy, where performers build on one another’s ideas.
Yes, the toddler twins are tearing each other’s hair out and the 6-year-old is whining that she’s bored and the preteen is yelling that I’m the worst for taking away her phone … And let’s grab hands, turn our faces to the sky, and get it all out with a family scream.
Yes, the teenage stepdaughter wants nothing to do with me and refuses to speak a word in my presence … And I will write her a thoughtful letter, leave it on her bed, and invite her to write back.
The trial-and-error route is realistic and it’s custom-made. The experts are trying to squeeze parenting into a rigid plan for the masses, but there’s something to be said for just making it up as you go.
The president is tweeting again.
Three weeks into a government shutdown triggered when the president reneged on a deal to fund the government, insisting instead that any deal had to include money for a wall on the southern border, Donald Trump tweeted about a story from the Washington Examiner that cited an anonymous rancher who claimed that Muslim “prayer rugs” were found at the U.S. border. Although the president likely imagines that this strengthens the case for his border wall, it’s really just an example of how the president will say anything he thinks backs him up, regardless of whether it’s true.
“There’s a lot of people coming in not just from Mexico … People, the general public, just don’t get the terrorist threats of that,” the story quotes the rancher as saying. “That’s what’s really scary. You don’t know what’s coming across. We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal. It’s not just Mexican nationals that are coming across.”
[Read: Waiting for a shutdown to end in disaster]
That is the entirety of the evidence provided for the discovery of “prayer rugs” at the border. The Examiner provides no photographs, no press accounts, no confirmation from government documents or sources—just the word of a single anonymous rancher. The same rancher also warns that the Border Patrol has caught migrants of other nationalities, including “Czechoslovakians.” Czechoslovakia hasn’t existed since George H. W. Bush was president. It’s one thing to use anonymous sources; it’s another to print whatever they say without a cursory attempt at verification.
As it happens, the claim that prayer rugs prove that terrorists have infiltrated the southern border is something of an urban legend, akin to the stories about a kid who ate Mentos and drank Diet Coke and exploded. In 2014, the right-wing website Breitbart mistook an Adidas T-shirt for a prayer rug; David Dewhurst, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, repeatedly told audiences that prayer rugs were found at the border. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias noted, finding prayer rugs at the border was also a plot point in the action film Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was released last year.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Why did the Border Patrol union switch its position on the wall?]
Even if the claim were true, it would prove nothing. It can provoke alarm only on the basis of the bigoted assumption that every Muslim is a terrorist, and therefore the presence of a prayer rug somewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border means that terrorists have sneaked into the United States. You can buy prayer rugs to decorate your home with on Etsy; you can also use them in devotions. It is an absurd and prejudiced assumption that they are an indication of terrorism, rooted in nothing more than animus toward Muslims. It is bad enough that some Americans provide an eager audience for this kind of nonsense. It is catastrophic that one of them is president.
Undeterred by an afternoon rainstorm, a band of students, teachers, and parents crowded the streets outside Hollywood High School the other day to chant, whistle, and brandish protest signs in support of United Teachers Los Angeles, the city’s striking teachers’ union.
Stop Cheaping out on the Children read one sign that pretty much summed up the union’s bargaining stance.
Similar scenes are playing out across L.A. in the city’s first teacher strike since a nine-day walkout in 1989. Rallies and protests on behalf of the 35,000 union members have scrambled the daily schedules of nearly 500,000 students and their parents and sparked a tweetstorm of support from boldfaced names in Hollywood and Congress.
The strike was all but inevitable. From his first day in office as union president in 2014, Alex Caputo-Pearl made clear that his vision of quality public education included more money for teachers, smaller class sizes, and expanded student support in the form of more nurses, counselors, and librarians—demands the district has addressed since then only modestly.
[Read: The unique racial dynamics of the L.A. teachers’ strike]
Caputo-Pearl’s first contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District expired almost two years ago, and tensions have been building ever since. Teachers simply aren’t buying the argument that there isn’t enough wiggle room to meet their needs in a $7.5 billion operating budget, plus the district’s roughly $2 billion reserve fund. The district’s unwillingness to spend the latter is a major point of contention with the union.
The state requires every district to set aside money for periods of economic uncertainty, for large and unanticipated expenditures, and to be eligible for a higher credit rating. While the union argues that the reserve should all go to teachers, the district says that it has already been earmarked for various costs over the next several years.
And that, says Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker and publisher of the Los Angeles Times with no prior experience in public education, could push the district into insolvency by 2021.
What if he’s right? What if the district really can’t afford the sort of investment that could make a difference in academic outcomes, now shaped by some class sizes that exceed 40 students and the pedagogical challenges inherent to Los Angeles, where 80 percent of public-school students live in poverty and many are learning English?
The real bogeyman isn’t L.A. Unified, and it isn’t Los Angeles, either. In Los Angeles, unlike New York, the city plays no role in public education. It’s Sacramento, the state’s capital, which provides about 90 percent of district revenue.
Despite being the world’s fifth-biggest economy, with Democrats serving in every statewide office and holding supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, California ranks in the middle among states in per-pupil spending on elementary and secondary education—about $12,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2016. That’s slightly under the national average and about half as much as the list leader, New York.
[Read: The ripple effect of the West Virginia teachers’ victory]
To make matters worse, California’s support for L.A.’s public schools has been diluted by the explosive growth of independent charters, which are publicly funded, privately run, and a severe financial drain on a system in which state money follows the student. Most of them are nonunion.
In L.A. Unified, which operates more than 1,300 schools, enrollment has been declining for a decade as the number of charters rises. The city now leads all others with 225 independent charters, serving more than 110,000 kids. Do the math, and it’s $1.3 billion of state funds not going into L.A. Unified, a sum the district needs to help cover capital improvements, transportation, teaching material, and other costs—even if it has fewer students to teach.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, conceded that the state needs to provide more money, much more. “Our target is both, the district and the state,” she told me.
She focused her ire on Beutner for his unwillingness to release the reserve fund, calling his resistance “a series of excuses that don’t meet the needs of students.”
But she was hardly effusive about the first budget from California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, who took office this month. Newsom proposed spending a record $80.7 billion on kindergarten through community college, a 3.6 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. He also proposed adding $3 billion to the state’s share of pension payments for teachers and administrators, which reduces the level of mandated contributions from districts, enabling them to use money for other things.
That’s not enough, Weingarten suggested. L.A. Unified and other districts need “a long-term, sustainable investment plan to fund the future.”
Within a day of Newsom’s budget announcement, the district made a new offer to the union that included $130 million for 1,200 more teachers, new caps on class size, money for more nurses and librarians, and a 6 percent pay raise.
Just as quickly, however, the union rejected the offer, calling it “basically the same” as the previous one, “just dressed up slightly differently.”
[Read: Why school funding will always be imperfect]
The problem isn’t the proposed salary increase; it’s the proposed cap on class size, which the teachers say is still too high. Education experts generally agree that academic achievement improves with fewer students in the classroom, especially for kids in kindergarten to third grade. The gold standard of evidence is the Tennessee Project STAR study, from the 1980s, and subsequent examinations have produced similar results. In the Tennessee study, the largest class sizes had 22 to 26 students. In the latest L.A. Unified proposal, classes were capped at 35 for grades 4 to 6, 39 for middle- and high-school math and English classes, and 34 at the highest-need middle schools.
But short of releasing the district reserves, there are only three main ways to scare up the funds necessary to dramatically reduce classroom size, and all would require aggressive action by—you guessed it—state lawmakers.
The first is to realign the state budget, robbing another interest group to pay the teachers. That’s a tough fight.
The second is to raise taxes, and good luck with that. As the bluest of blue states, California ranks annually among the highest-taxed states in the country, usually in the top five, with high-income earners taking the heaviest hit. State lawmakers are already contemplating universal health care and preschool, and Newsom has talked about “rebalancing” the personal income tax structure, an initiative that would surely whack the middle class.
The third approach is regulatory reform that would stem the growth of independent charter schools and impose new layers of accountability, a goal of California teachers’ unions for more than a decade.
Both sides in the strike now seem to acknowledge that the state is the bigger problem for teachers than the district. In separate interviews with The New York Times this week, Beutner and Caputo-Pearl each said the state needs to spend more to sustain the kind of academic achievement that everyone says they want.
That’s why Charles Kerchner, a professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University and an expert in public-school labor relations, suggested this week that the district and the teachers’ union should be “holding hands on the place to Sacramento.”
“The solution is a statewide one, not L.A.-specific,” he said. “The paymaster here is the state.”
Taken together, the complexity of issues has made fierce enemies of the district and the union, irrespective of all the nice things they say about teachers and their unyielding respect for them. But talk is cheap, and solutions are expensive. Beutner and Caputo-Pearl don’t much care for each other, but combining forces might be their only way out.
Updated at 9:16 p.m. ET on January 18.
Late Thursday night, BuzzFeed News published a report that, if true, could prove historic: President Donald Trump allegedly directed his then–personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a real-estate deal he was pursuing in Moscow during the 2016 election. Trump immediately denied the story, but for many Democrats, including those who had previously cautioned against impeaching the president before Special Counsel Robert Mueller produces his findings in the Russia investigation, the report was cause to consider proceeding with impeachment before the Russia probe is finished.
After almost two years of near-complete silence, the special counsel’s spokesman issued a statement late Friday night calling parts of the story inaccurate. “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate,” said the spokesman, Peter Carr. BuzzFeed News’ editor in chief, Ben Smith, stood by the story, saying in a statement: “We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.”
Earlier on Friday, however, Democrats made it clear that if it were confirmed that the president asked a witness to lie on his behalf, it would be cause for impeachment.
“If the @BuzzFeed story is true, President Trump must resign or be impeached,” Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy weighed in, too. “If Mueller does have multiple sources confirming Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, then we need to know this ASAP,” he wrote. “Mueller shouldn’t end his inquiry, but it’s about time for him to show Congress his cards before it’s too late for us to act.”
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley followed up on Friday morning: “If this report of Trump suborning false testimony is confirmed, then Trump committed a felony and must resign or be impeached,” he wrote. “This is obstruction of justice,” Democratic Representative David Cicilline, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told CNN. “If the facts are true, this is suborning perjury. It’s an impeachable offense.” Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of House leadership, told CNN, “This is a completely impeachable offense, if this report is true.” He said Congress would need to hear from “everybody who was involved” in the alleged conspiracy before moving forward with impeachment.
The comments marked a noticeable shift in what had been the standard party line on the possibility of impeachment—that Democrats should wait to act until after Mueller issues his final report. But the attorney-general nominee Bill Barr’s refusal to commit to providing Mueller’s findings to Congress and to the public, combined with BuzzFeed’s implication that the president committed a felony while in office, has given Democrats a new sense of urgency—and they won’t necessarily wait to hold Trump accountable, I’m told, if they conclude that he knowingly obstructed justice to hide his involvement in business negotiations with the Kremlin during the election.
“The conduct alleged by BuzzFeed is consistent with other, independent evidence of Donald Trump as candidate instructing others to lie and Donald Trump as president obstructing justice,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, who sits on both the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, told me. “Evidence is not a conclusion. It must be tested. We should do all we can in Congress with the subpoena power and oversight responsibility to see if Trump acted this way. I don’t think anyone will be surprised if it’s confirmed.”
A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, told Fox News on Friday that the allegation was “ridiculous.” “I’m not going to give any credence or credibility to Michael Cohen,” he said. But Mueller has documentary evidence to support Cohen’s claims, according to BuzzFeed, and its reporting is not the first piece of evidence that Trump has sought to obstruct the federal and congressional Russia investigations. The FBI opened an obstruction inquiry after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey—who was leading the investigation into his campaign at the time he was ousted—and told the Russians that dismissing Comey took “great pressure” off him. Trump’s decision to draft a misleading statement on his son’s behalf about a meeting with the Russians at the height of the election to obtain dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, has factored into the obstruction probe, too, according to The New York Times.
But the allegation that Trump asked Cohen to lie to Congress, which would be a federal crime, is “the most serious to date,” says Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “These allegations may prove unfounded, but, if true, they would constitute both the subornation of perjury as well as obstruction of justice,” Schiff said in a statement. “Our committee is already working to secure additional witness testimony and documents related to the Trump Tower Moscow deal and other investigative matters. As a counterintelligence concern of the greatest magnitude, and given that these alleged efforts were intended to interfere with our investigation, our Committee is determined to get to the bottom of this and follow the evidence wherever it may lead.”
Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee—the panel with the power to begin impeachment proceedings against the president—also promised to “get to the bottom of it.” And even Barr, Trump’s attorney-general nominee, who wrote a 19-page memo arguing that Mueller’s obstruction inquiry is “fatally misconceived,” acknowledged in that same memo that obstruction is an impeachable offense. “If a president knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity of availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction,” Barr wrote. “Indeed, the acts of obstruction alleged against Presidents Nixon and Clinton in their respective impeachments were all such ‘bad acts’ involving the impairment of evidence.”
The FBI began investigating whether Trump was a Kremlin agent in the chaotic days following Comey’s firing in May 2017, opening a counterintelligence probe into the president to determine whether he was acting in Russia’s interests rather than in America’s, according to the Times. FBI leaders believed that Trump’s attempt to obstruct the Russia investigation—he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”—was itself a serious national-security issue.
But the first in-court evidence that Trump might have been compromised by Russia while Russian President Vladimir Putin was waging a direct attack on the election didn’t come until last November, when Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timing of his negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow—and about how often he discussed the deal with Trump during the campaign. Cohen contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016, and was encouraged by Trump to travel to Moscow to clinch a deal during the election, according to BuzzFeed. He is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 7 before he begins a three-year prison sentence in March.
With Democrats in control of the House, Trump could well be impeached. But removing him from office, which would require an affirmative vote from the Republican-controlled Senate, is another question entirely. A spokesman for Republican Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to comment on the BuzzFeed report, but indicated that the committee still wants to hear from Cohen on this and other issues. “Mr. Cohen has had, for months now, a request to return to the committee to provide additional closed-door testimony,” the spokesman, Ben Khouri, said. “I will let the House members comment about impeachment or not,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Friday. “Our investigation, which is the only remaining bipartisan investigation, is continuing, to try to get all the facts and get them out to the American public.”
JAKARTA—Standing on a stage in the Hotel Bidakara’s ballroom in downtown Jakarta during a presidential debate, Indonesia’s incumbent leader, Joko Widodo, meekly defended what has been, at best, a checkered record on human rights.
Widodo, popularly known simply as Jokowi, denied having overseen any rights violations; he pledged, as he did four years ago when he first ran for the presidency, to reshape the justice system; and he promised, as he had four years ago, to push for land reform. And, in the course of the 73-minute back-and-forth on Thursday evening—the first of five such debates ahead of elections in April—he showed how little has really changed here during his time in office.
When Jokowi came to power in 2014, he did so articulating nine priorities, a program he called the Nawa Cita. Among them was a promise to resolve past human-rights injustices. His pledge held out the prospect of at least acknowledging, if not addressing, decades of army abuse, authoritarian overreach, and suppression of minority rights. In a part of the world often beset by a form of moral relativism—Our country is fine; others are worse—it appeared to be a significant step forward.
Little tangible progress has materialized, though. While Jokowi has not been directly linked with any human-rights infractions, his presidency has been characterized by a lack of improvement on the issue (rights groups would go further, saying he has in fact presided over a worsening of conditions). An inquiry into an attack on an anti-corruption investigator has gone nowhere; Jokowi’s administration has walked back suggestions that he would formally apologize for a decades-old government massacre; and it has declined requests from international bodies to visit a restive region that wants independence. Though Jokowi now says he wants to address past injustices, human-rights advocates are downbeat about the prospect that he will follow through. And this election has little chance of yielding change: The incumbent is ahead in the polls, and his lone challenger has an even worse track record.
“Jokowi won’t dare to solve human-rights issues,” said Rivanlee Anandar, a Jakarta-based researcher at the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, a rights group here known by its acronym in Indonesian, Kontras. “His administration has displayed a regression on human rights.”
[Read: What the United States did in Indonesia]
Indonesia has a long history of trampling on individual rights. Its first leader, Sukarno, was initially a forceful advocate for liberty as he led the movement that eventually won the country independence, but over his time in power he made more and more authoritarian moves (at one point, he made himself Indonesia’s president for life). Sukarno was eventually ousted in a military coup led by Suharto, a general and someone who, like his predecessor and many other Indonesians, goes by only one name. Suharto’s decades-long authoritarian rule began and ended in violence: In a tumultuous period between 1965 and Suharto finally capturing power in 1967, huge numbers—estimates vary from hundreds of thousands to 1 million—of Communists and suspected Communists were killed, and his resignation in 1998 came in the face of mass demonstrations and riots that left hundreds dead.
Since Suharto’s departure, some progress has been made: New laws were enacted, treaties were signed, and ad-hoc human-rights trials were held, “albeit unsatisfactorily,” said Andreas Harsono, the Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch, the international monitoring group. One of Jokowi’s predecessors, Abdurrahman Wahid, pushed for greater official acceptance of Indonesians who were ethnically Chinese, a minority group that faced persistent discrimination during Suharto’s rule, and apologized for the massacre that brought Suharto to power (he remains the only Indonesian president to do so). Wahid was, however, later impeached over an array of other scandals and following a power struggle with his successor. Since then, progress on the rights front has languished.
Jokowi had promised to change all of that. While campaigning for president in 2014, he promised, for example, to lift restrictions on international human-rights investigators and on the foreign press visiting the Indonesian region of Papua, where an independence movement has agitated for decades.
In office, it has been a different story. His government has declined to allow the United Nation’s human-rights chief to visit Papua, where rights groups accuse the military of violently suppressing the independence movement, and has restricted access for foreign media there.
And for years, Jokowi eschewed meeting with demonstrators taking part in the “Kamisan” rally, a weekly peaceful protest held in front of Jakarta’s presidential palace calling for the authorities to address past human-rights abuses, before finally relenting this past May (that he attended only in the final year of his term was interpreted as a political move, and drew criticism).
Kontras, in a report released in October assessing Jokowi’s time in office, said Indonesia had fallen backwards on an array of rights-related issues, from the use of the death penalty and extrajudicial killings to disability rights and the persecution of indigenous peoples and minorities. Defamation lawsuits—often used to suppress critical reporting or criticism of those in power—have spiked in the past four years, while frivolous prosecutions, such as the jailing of an ethnically Chinese Indonesian woman for blasphemy after she complained about the volume of sound from a nearby mosque, have proliferated.
Among the most troubling cases has been that of Novel Baswedan. The senior anti-corruption investigator was in the midst of a wide-ranging inquiry in 2017 when someone threw hydrochloric acid at his face. Baswedan had to be rushed to Singapore for treatment, and after undergoing four operations, he still remains almost entirely blind in his left eye. Yet no one has been arrested or prosecuted for the assault.
Concerns have also been raised about the company the Indonesian leader keeps. Among his ministers is a retired general who was placed on a visa watch list by the United States in 2004 and who has been indicted by the UN over his alleged involvement in a series of abuses, including murders, surrounding Indonesia’s withdrawal in 1999 from East Timor, a province it had controlled. Jokowi’s current running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, is a leader of Indonesia’s top clerical body, an organization that under his leadership issued religious declarations in support of female genital mutilation and condemned religious minorities.
Jokowi’s “record on the preservation of human rights, his regard for core democratic principles, his commitment to transparent and accountable government, and his support for a meaningful anti-corruption agenda are all highly dubious,” Tom Power, a researcher specializing in Indonesian politics at the Australian National University in Canberra, wrote in a recent analysis.
There is, if anything, a feeling among some Indonesians that these issues are being given short shrift by a leader who had promised to promote them. “Human-rights tragedies,” Maria Catarina Sumarsih, whose son died in the 1998 riots and who has since become a prominent activist, told me, “are just a political commodity, used to get more votes.”
Jokowi has at least one thing going for him, though: He is not his opponent.
Facing off against the Indonesian president is the same person who challenged him in 2014, the former military commander Prabowo Subianto. Subianto, who was once married to one of Suharto’s daughters, was dogged by allegations of human-rights violations during the previous campaign. A recently declassified U.S. diplomatic cable alleges that the one-time head of Indonesia’s special forces ordered the kidnapping of dissidents in 1998. He has threatened clamping down on the media, and has warned that if he loses the upcoming poll, Indonesia could “go extinct.” (Subianto has, however, appointed former members of Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights to be part of his new campaign team.)
According to Debbie Stothard, the secretary-general of the International Federation for Human Rights, ordinary voters were beginning to realize that in this election, “it’s a question of who is the lesser evil.”
Heading into the opening night of Hamilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 11, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The musical was supposed to begin previews three days earlier at the theater of the University of Puerto Rico, the alma mater of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s father, Luis, under a new million-dollar roof financed by the show’s fundraising campaign to repair hurricane damage. Some students and staff had other ideas, however, leading to a controversy that redefined what it meant to take the show to Puerto Rico.
When Miranda went to the island in 2010 as the star of his Caribbean diaspora hip-hop musical, In the Heights, he received a joyous welcome. One festive number included a Spanish-language call to raise the Puerto Rican flag; the audience members pulled 500 banderas from their pockets, the producer Jeffrey Seller told me over lunch at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, in San Juan. Although Miranda was born in New York, he spent childhood summers in Puerto Rico in his family’s hometown of Vega Alta, where his grandfather ran the local credit union. Lacking fluent Spanish, Miranda passed many days alone making home movies. To be cheered by a Puerto Rican audience, he told Oprah last spring, “closed something in me I didn’t even know was open.”
Hamilton—another hip-hop story of a man born in the Caribbean who comes to New York to reinvent himself and his nation—opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 2015. Miranda then called Seller and said he wanted to take his second show to Puerto Rico. (Broadway tours seldom visit San Juan because of the time and cost of shipping sets from the mainland, the producer explained.) Then, in 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated the island. “The hurricane changed our mission,” Seller recalled. Instead of a simple homecoming, Hamilton in Puerto Rico would become a fundraising venture, a tourism lure, and a declaration of support for the island’s recovery. Miranda had already helped to raise $43 million through his father’s Hispanic Federation for immediate relief. Revenue from Hamilton in Puerto Rico, which runs until January 27, with Miranda returning to the title role, is expected to bring in $15 million to benefit arts organizations on the island.
[Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda shapes history]
At the center of the discord over the show was the fact that UPR, like much of the island’s education and economic system, is in crisis. Puerto Rico owes a reported $72 billion in municipal bonds, accumulated over the past two decades to pay for social services as businesses and residents left for the mainland. PROMESA, a financial oversight board appointed in 2016 by President Barack Obama, had imposed unpopular austerity measures: hundreds of school closures, along with tuition hikes and budget cuts at UPR.
Miranda initially supported PROMESA, invoking Hamilton’s plea for governmental relief after a hurricane hit the Caribbean in 1772, and implored Congress to pass a debt-restructuring bill. (“I write about Puerto Rico today just as Hamilton wrote about St. Croix in his time,” he said in a New York Times op-ed.) As the star and creator of a musical that champions America’s first Treasury secretary, and that was famously hatched and hallowed in Obama’s White House, Miranda appeared closely linked to the federal authority that had taken away Puerto Rico’s control over its own economy. When Miranda gave a talk at UPR in 2017 to announce a Hamilton production on the island, a group of students marched onstage with a sign that read, in Spanish, “Lin-Manuel, our lives are not your theater.” (According to Carmen Haydée Rivera, a UPR English professor who interviewed Miranda during the talk, he listened thoughtfully to the protest and explained afterward that his views on PROMESA had changed.)
More obstacles arose as hurricane restoration work continued at the UPR theater and Hamilton began rehearsing there in December 2018. A university-employee association, facing slashed benefits, sent Miranda a letter last November stating that demonstrations might occur if Hamilton were performed on campus. Seller worried about security; police routinely patrolled Hamilton events in New York, but they are restricted on the UPR campus (and recently clashed violently with university protesters). Another option emerged: Ricardo Rosselló, the governor of Puerto Rico, offered Hamilton the Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré, a government theater with more seating and no obstacles to police protection. Only a few weeks before opening night, the producers decided to cancel the UPR engagement and move to Bellas Artes, the same theater where In the Heights had played in 2010.
Instead of quelling controversy, the change of venue fueled it. Now Hamilton was officially associated with a pro-statehood governor whose administration had drawn ire for suppressing Puerto Rican cultural celebrations in the school curriculum. In a post on 80grados, a left-leaning journal, the activist Amárilis Pagán Jiménez asked in Spanish why San Juan should welcome a show that chronicles “the history of the same damn country that has us under an unworthy colonial state and that ended us with PROMESA.” The musical that had been celebrated for the revolutionary diversity of its cast was now being aligned with the American political establishment that Hamilton had tried to reimagine.
[Read: The situation in Puerto Rico is untenable]
These criticisms were compounded by disputes over whether a Nuyorican like Miranda had the authority to speak for Puerto Rico, and whether the arts were a luxury amid crippling austerity. Rivera, the UPR professor, wrote to me that “while many people in Puerto Rico appreciate Lin-Manuel’s efforts and support, these are, at times, eclipsed by the climate of uncertainty brought about by the current fiscal crisis and politically tense relationships between the island and the U.S.,” especially after the hurricane.
During my time in San Juan leading up to the show, my taxi drivers all cheered Miranda. “Everyone loves him here,” one man told me. “He’s done so much for the island.” A UPR student who had performed in In the Heights during high school said she had waited in line overnight to get tickets for two Hamilton shows: “The first one to cry, the second one to watch.” She understood the concerns of student protesters—she had gone without power for months after the hurricane and had to drop out of UPR after tuition went up—but didn’t think Miranda was at fault. “He didn’t have to come here,” she said. “It means everything to us that he did.”
On the website for the San Juan daily paper, El Nuevo Día, however, Spanish-language comments on a pro-Hamilton article were contentious. One said that Puerto Ricans who enjoyed Hamilton would be “happy colonized subjects applauding like seals at the victory of the independence struggle of the United States.” January 11 was Hamilton’s birthday; it was also the birthday of a Puerto Rican revolutionary hero, Eugenio María de Hostos. “Why not create a play about the life of Hostos, instead of Hamilton (who nobody in PR knows)?” another commenter asked. When I raised these criticisms with Luis, he replied, “It’s easier to criticize than to create,” adding that if someone wrote a musical about Hostos, the Mirandas would celebrate it.
Outside Bellas Artes on the night of the premiere, a line of police officers cordoned off the street. A small group of pro-statehood protesters appeared and caused little disturbance. In the lobby, patrons who had flown in from the U.S. mingled with Puerto Rican celebrities and original Hamilton cast members. Shonda Rhimes, Jimmy Fallon, and Questlove were in the audience. Then the show began.
The performance itself brought three indelible moments. The first came when Miranda entered as Hamilton. There’s often applause for his entrance, but arguably nothing like this time at Bellas Artes, where the entire audience rose, as one, for an ovation that lasted more than a minute and seemed like an epoch. It was as though all the tension of the preceding months was being released in a collective exhalation; the people in the theater, at least, wanted Miranda to know they wanted him there. (“It was the first time I felt a cheer,” Miranda recalled at a press conference after the show. “I felt my hair move.”)
The second moment came when Hamilton, enmeshed in a political scandal, thought back to the hurricane that destroyed his childhood island. “In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet,” Miranda sang, with an emotional depth that belied his customary ebullience. The hall was hushed. (“I feel like I’m going back to Maria when I sing it,” he later explained.) The show had become about the island’s trauma after the disaster. “Hurricane” sounded like an echo of the West Side Story lyric from “Maria” that Miranda had remixed for a benefit single: “Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying.”
The final moment came at the curtain call, after Miranda had thanked his co-creators and invited his father onstage. “Lin-Manuel always said, and I take that to heart, that it was not only to experience Hamilton in its artistic value, but also to leave Puerto Rico a little better than we found it,” Luis said, speaking of their fundraising efforts. Then his son reached into the breast of his Hamilton costume and whipped out a giant Puerto Rican flag. The crowd erupted. Miranda appeared to be in tears. Where 500 flags had greeted In the Heights, what looked like thousands of cellphones came out to capture Miranda waving la bandera puertorriqueña. I showed my cellphone video to my Airbnb host the next day, and she started crying. “We’re a colony,” she said. “We’re treated as American, but we speak Spanish. When Lin-Manuel takes out the flag, it’s like, Yes, we exist.” Did it matter that Hamilton was a show about America’s Founders? “Not at all. It’s a great story!”
Hamilton has always been about the slipperiness of political narratives. “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story,” Washington tells Hamilton on the eve of the American Revolution. In San Juan, the musical’s strength lay in its complexity, its eagerness to embody conflicting points of view. Was Hamilton a brilliant son of the Caribbean who used his wit and determination to change the world? Or was he an incorrigible motormouth who inserted himself into debates over a colony’s independence, argued for a centralized financial system to control local debt, and antagonized so many people that he brought about his own demise? Was the audience rooting for America to rebel against King George III (played with aplomb by Rick Negron, the only Puerto Rican–born actor in the cast)? Or did the drama of a colony trying to unshackle itself from a superpower across the sea, ruled by a narcissistic buffoon, have a different resonance in PROMESA-era San Juan?
Before seeing the show in Puerto Rico, I hadn’t noticed that Hamilton’s nemesis, Aaron Burr, sings his anthem, “Wait for It,” to a reggaeton beat. (“I wanted to change it, but Lin knew his people,” the cast album’s producer, Questlove, told me at the opening-night party.) When Burr later sings that he wants to be “in the room where it happens” while Hamilton and Jefferson negotiate a debt plan, the applause in Bellas Artes stopped the show. Could the audience hear in Burr’s song a longing to participate in decisions about Puerto Rico’s economic future?
At the post-show press conference, Miranda was asked about his support for PROMESA (he had seen it as the only bipartisan solution, but doesn’t support the austerity it imposed and now sees debt forgiveness as the only way forward); his response to Trump’s plan to divert disaster-relief funds to build the border wall (“absolutely monstrous”); his stance on violent crime in San Juan (“It’s a virus that is everywhere in the U.S.”); and his reasons for moving the show from UPR (“If there’s the slightest chance something goes wrong, I cannot have that on my conscience.”). He spoke Spanglish, jumping between languages mid-sentence, and returning contritely to Spanish at the request of local reporters. With his desire to please, he seemed no longer the visiting star. About bringing his creation back to his family’s island, Miranda said, “I’m like a little kid with it; I just want you to be proud of what I made.”
This week marks the halfway point of Donald Trump’s presidency. “Like many Americans, we sometimes find the velocity of chaos unmanageable,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, wrote in his introduction to a special project taking stock of Trump’s first two years as president. “So we decided to pause for a moment and analyze 50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency to date.”
We asked readers: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list?
Here’s how readers responded. (This is the second post featuring readers’ responses to “Unthinkable.” Read the first one here.)
Some readers were struck by President Trump’s insensitivity:
“For me,” Douglas S. McGill of Ontario, Canada, wrote, “nothing touches the utterly unbelievable claim by Trump that if present during the Parkland shooting, he would have rushed in unarmed to save students from the shooter.” For someone who “knows nothing of bravery or service,” McGill continued, the comment amounted to “slimy self-promotion” in the wake of a tragedy.
Christine Lowrie of Clearwater, Florida, cited a moment from before Trump became president. At a 2016 campaign rally in Redding, California, the future president “sought to tout his support among African Americans … by pointing out a black man in the crowd and saying, ‘Look at my African American.’”
One reader agreed with Megan Garber’s point that it’s not just the president who undermines facts—the people he surrounds himself with do, too:
Christopher Lett from Easton, Pennsylvania, wrote: “The entire governing philosophy of the Trump administration is neatly encapsulated” by Rudy Giuliani “emphatically declaring” that “Truth isn’t truth!”
Trump has the ability to make fun things less fun, two readers said:
For Irene Maxfield of San Antonio, Texas, Trump questioning a child’s belief in Santa Claus was one of the most unthinkable moments of his presidency thus far.
“I know this is trivial,” Rachel Teplow of New York, New York, wrote, “but I just cannot get over” the fact that Trump “gets two scoops of ice cream while everyone else gets one. What kind of terrible person does this?! Why does it matter how much everyone else has as long as he gets enough? It just bespeaks a unique level of awfulness.”
Finally, one reader commented on the legacy that Trump will leave behind:
Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece, and then the subsequent 50 unthinkable moments, it becomes clear that it is not the bending of norms that should have us alarmed—it is our incremental desensitization to what constitutes a norm at all.
Because as I worked my way through this partial list, I realized how many of these extraordinary departures from protocol, precedent, and civility had completely slipped my mind. As individuals like me, the media, and all the talking heads find ourselves distracted by each day’s new absurdity—as if we had only so much capacity for outrage—yesterday’s despicable act or omission is quickly lost to memory. Each small violation imperceptibly shifts the curve of our tolerance toward apathy and numbness.
Perhaps Trump’s most lasting legacy is how his comportment has demeaned and debased the majesty of the Oval Office. I wonder if the presidency will ever again convey the gravitas and mystique and moral weight, the aura of quiet and competent power, that befits the United States’ preeminent role in the world. His pandering vacillation, his lack of a moral compass and consistent philosophy, and his inveterate and pathological lying have robbed his words of all authority. Very few take him seriously; every pronouncement is discounted, even ignored. His juvenile behavior has contaminated Congress as well, where hyper-partisanship, childish name-calling, and a winner-take-all mentality have made the average voter utterly cynical about the entire political class. Politics is the art of compromise, but compromise doesn’t happen when only the loudest voices get rewarded.
Of course, Trump’s worst legacy will be his contempt for fact-based argument and his ignorance of science. Climate change is the singular existential challenge of our times. Future generations will look back on his four years in office (we can only hope it stops at four!) with deep despair and utter loathing. Time is getting shorter and the stakes higher, yet nothing gets done. We need leadership, not smirking quips. There was a time when the president of the United States had the moral authority and the competence to provide that leadership. Both have been squandered under Trump. His successor will have a hard job restoring them. It will not help that the solutions to climate change will, by then, need to be that much more draconian and politically unpalatable.
Even after Trump leaves office, his hulking, scowling, belligerent shadow will continue to hang over us all.
Dr. Brian P. H. Green
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
I’ll acknowledge that reading about music seems counterintuitive. But it’s one thing to just listen to a piece or song, and another thing entirely to do so while understanding what a particular melody might represent, or what inspired a composer, or what impact a certain work may have had on musical history.
The esteemed pianist Alfred Brendel gives readers a peek inside his mind with Music, Sense, and Nonsense, a collection of his essays and lectures that unpack “sound, silence, sublimity, humor, and the performer’s critical role in the experience of music.” In an excerpt from The Indispensable Composers, Anthony Tommasini reconsiders the legacy of Giacomo Puccini, the prolific composer of operatic works like La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, and Tosca.
A biography of Claude Debussy—famed for his impressionistic, atmospheric style of composing that can be heard in pieces like “La Mer” and “Clair de Lune”—considers the “worldly trials” the French composer faced during his lifetime. And here’s another famous name to add to the list: Charlie Chaplin, the auteur of the silent-film era of the 1910s and ’20s, who was also a musician and composer. But Chaplin couldn’t actually read any notes, meaning that his musical achievements—including an Oscar for Best Original Music Score—were the result of often unrecognized collaborations, as Jim Lochner analyzes in The Music of Charlie Chaplin.
Fast forward to this decade, and electronic music—the genre de rigueur—is contextualized as “a radical project” in the British journalist David Stubbs’s Future Sounds. But looking at the recent pop charts, Stubbs wonders, is electronic music living up to its potential?
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out.
Check out past issues here. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
(Per-Anders Pettersson / Getty)
The writer who makes perfect sense of classical music
“It’s easy to take for granted that a performance should speak directly to a listener’s passions, vulnerabilities, and sense of self. What many listeners might not fully consider is that the experience is almost totally in the hands of the performer, someone tasked with somehow summoning the ethereal without losing the audience in the process.”
📚 MUSIC, SENSE, AND NONSENSE: COLLECTED ESSAYS AND LECTURES, by Alfred Brendel
Making a case for opera’s most successful, yet condescended toward, composer
“Puccini is not only indispensable, but one of the most dramatically astute and musically expert composers to write for the stage.”
📚 THE INDISPENSABLE COMPOSERS, by Anthony Tommasini
The worldly trials of a fantasist composer
“By his own admission, [Debussy] suffered from ‘a sickness of delay … and this curious need never to finish.’ It was as though the emotional expression he sought resisted closure, with the ironic effect that daily life closed in.”
📚 DEBUSSY: A PAINTER IN SOUND, by Stephen Walsh
The caveat to Charlie Chaplin’s musical achievements
“Movies are an inherently collaborative process. Yet the influences of collaborators can often be discounted, contributing to a less-than-complete picture of how a filmmaker such as Chaplin created his films, and thereby supporting a mythologized ideal of auteurs and their processes.”
📚 THE MUSIC OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN, by Jim Lochner
The largely forgotten, radical power of electronic music
“Though machines are often blamed for Chainsmokers-style blandness, ‘The problem is not the technology itself … It’s the conservatism and timidity and pragmatism of those using it.’”
📚 FUTURE SOUNDS: THE STORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC FROM STOCKHAUSEN TO SKRILLEX, by David Stubbs
You RecommendIn our last briefing, we dove into The Atlantic’s archives and asked you to suggest books that you’ve changed your mind on after a second (or third or fourth) reading. William Kostura, from California, wrote that the first time he read The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin, he found it “terse and bleak.” But on a second pass, years later, William reconsidered: “It IS terse and bleak, but it points the way to developing a perspective that will allow us to find acceptance, peace, and an ability to work for a better society no matter how bad things seem to be. I find the spare prose irresistible now; there is nary a wasted word.” For Iris Berkel, from Waxhaw, N.C., Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is no longer the “hilarious” and “unbelievable” work she once thought it was. Now, Iris wrote, “I find the antics of the characters to be abysmally colonial and unaware of the culture and people that they blindly went to convert.”
What’s a book about music that you’d recommend? Tweet at us with the hashtag #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by J. Clara Chan. The book she just started this week is The Free Speech Century, by Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone.
Comments, questions, typos? Email jchan@theatlantic.com.
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Teachers on strike in Los Angeles, “Kiss a Ginger Day” in Ireland, icy purification in Japan, a terror attack in Nairobi, the Australian Open in Melbourne, heavy snow in Austria, fashion shows in Berlin and Paris, the “No Pants Subway Ride” in New York, and much more
When Christine Robinson was first diagnosed with a corn allergy 17 years ago, she remembers thinking, “No more popcorn, no more tacos. I can do this.”
Then she tried to put salt on her tomatoes. (Table salt has dextrose, a sugar derived from corn.) She tried drinking bottled iced tea. (It contains citric acid, which often comes from mold grown in corn-derived sugar.) She tried bottled water. (Added minerals in some brands can be processed with a corn derivative.) She ultimately gave up on supermarket meat (sprayed with lactic acid from fermented corn sugars), bagged salads (citric acid, again), fish (dipped in cornstarch or syrup before freezing), grains (cross-contaminated in processing facilities), fruits like apples and citrus (waxed with corn-derived chemicals), tomatoes (ripened with ethylene gas from corn), milk (added vitamins processed with corn derivatives). And that’s not even getting to all the processed foods made with high-fructose corn syrup, modified food starch, xanthan gum, artificial flavorings, corn alcohol, maltodextrin—all of which are or contain derivatives of corn.
“It’s such a useful plant,” Robinson says of corn. “It can be made into so very, very many things that are, from my perspective, trying to kill me.”
Corn allergies are relatively rare, and ones as severe as Robinson’s are rarer still. (Many people unable to eat whole corn can still tolerate more processed corn derivatives.) But to live with a corn allergy is to understand very intimately how corn is everywhere. Most of the 14.6 billion bushels of corn grown in the U.S. are not destined to be eaten on the cob. Rather, as @SwiftOnSecurity observed in a viral corn thread, the plant is a raw source of useful starches that are ubiquitous in the supply chain.
It’s not just food. Robinson told me she is currently hoarding her favorite olive-oil soap, which she had been using for 17 years but recently went out of stock everywhere. (A number of soap ingredients, such as glycerin, can come from corn.) She’s been reading up on DIY soapmaking. A year ago, the brand of dish soap she liked was reformulated to include citric acid, so she had to give that up, too. And navigating the hospital with a corn allergy can be particularly harrowing. Corn can lurk in the hand sanitizer (made from corn ethanol), pills (made with corn starch as filler), and IV solutions (made with dextrose). A couple years ago, she went to see a specialist for a migraine, and her doctor insisted she get an IV that contained dextrose.
“And while in the midst of a migraine I had to argue with a doctor about the fact [that] I really could not have a dextrose IV,” she said. In the moment, she realized how absurd it was for her to be telling a world-class specialist to change her treatment.
[ Read: The allergens in natural beauty products ]
Because corn allergies are rare, many doctors are not familiar with the potential scope. Robinson said she was the first case her original doctor had ever seen in 38 years of practice, and he didn’t know to advise her against corn derivatives. Even official sources of medical information can be confusing, telling corn-allergy patients that they do not need to avoid cornstarch and high-fructose corn syrup. Misinformation abounds in the other direction, too, because corn allergies can be easy to misdiagnose and easy to self-diagnose incorrectly. All this means that corn-allergy sufferers encounter a good deal of skepticism. But Robert Wood, president of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and a pediatric allergist at Johns Hopkins, told me that derivatives such as corn syrup can indeed cause problems for certain people.
People with corn allergies have naturally been finding one another on the Internet. A Facebook group called Corn Allergy & Intolerance (Maize, Zea Mays) now has nearly 8,500 members. Becca, a tech worker in Washington State, writes a fairly prominent blog called Corn Allergy Girl. (She asked I not use her last name because she doesn't want her health status to affect her professional life.) The blog collates years of Becca’s research into corn allergies, as well as resources inherited from other, now-defunct corn-allergy blogs.
Members of the Facebook group have also forged ties with individual farms. Once a year, Robinson said, a farmer in California sends members of the group a big box of avocados that have not been exposed to corn-derived ethylene gas or waxes. “It’s a great month when you’re trying to get through all of them,” she said. For the rest of the time, she gets most of her food from a CSA with a local farm in Pennsylvania.
Becca, who writes Corn Allergy Girl, also gets a lot of her produce from local farms. The rest she grows. She goes to a specific butcher and meat processor who will custom-process whole animals for her without using lactic acid or citric acid. She has two fridges and several freezers to store food for the winter, when fresh vegetables are less abundant. “I go all Little House on the Prairie on the weekend,” she said, “pickling things and shredding them and baking them.” She counts herself lucky to live in the Pacific Northwest, where there are many organic, local farms. It’s harder to find fresh food in many other parts of the country, and it’s much harder to do so on a budget. “Your dollars just don’t go as far as if you’re getting a bunch of Chef Boyardee. It’s very cheap to eat canned, preserved food,” Becca said. She had to run GoFundMe campaigns, for example, for friends who couldn’t afford to buy chicken from a source they can tolerate.
The diet of someone with a severe corn allergy is in some ways the ideal diet for a certain type of foodie: fresh, local, free of preservatives and processed foods, the provenance of every ingredient intensely cataloged. It’s just not exactly by choice.
Knowing how to avoid foods with corn is one thing; knowing how to navigate social situations where danger lurks in every corner is another.
Robinson said that she has two rules when eating out with friends now. First, eat beforehand. Second, order a San Pellegrino and an appetizer for the table to share, which deflects the inevitable concern from the waitstaff. “They’re nice, but people really feel they can find something, and they try. You have to keep saying, ‘No, I can’t, I can’t,’ and everybody feels bad.”
Cassandra Wiselka, whose 5-year-old is allergic to corn, has written about the problem of Halloween. Virtually all mass-produced candy contains high-fructose corn syrup. Her son still goes trick-or-treating, but she switches out the candy he collects with corn-free alternatives: lollipops, gummy bears, and “fancy expensive chocolate that we don’t even buy for ourselves.” She makes and freezes big batches of corn-free cupcakes and pizza to bring to birthday parties. It’s hard, she says. “He still gets upset at birthday parties and things where he has to have his own special food.” They recently had to turn down a birthday party that was moved to a pizza place at the last minute because they didn’t have time to make safe pizza to bring.
Wiselka’s family moved from Germany to California when her son was 18 months old. He seemed to get worse after the move. It’s hard to say exactly why, but Wiselka noticed that “in Germany, things are a lot less processed, food-wise. At least not processed as much with things like corn.”
The one thing Robinson told me she really misses is being able to travel without worry. She did make a trip to Hawaii recently, after much advance planning. She picked Hawaii for the scuba diving. When she dives, she has to watch out for a few specific things—that her wetsuit has not been washed with a corn-containing detergent, that her dive partners have not been eating corn chips. But once she’s in the water, she’s calm. Sure, scuba diving can kill you if you aren’t careful (the most recent data show that 40 to 50 people die while diving in North America every year), but she can be sure there is no corn in water.
“You don’t realize you’re carrying around this extreme sense of alertness,” she said. “That level of hypervigilance that you have for things that you could touch or breathe in is gone. You’re breathing air that you know is safe and you know the actual oxygen content of. It’s just incredibly freeing.”
Updated at 11:35 p.m. ET
It’s not just the collusion. It’s the conspiracy.
On Thursday evening, BuzzFeed News dropped a bombshell, reporting that President Donald Trump told Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, to lie to Congress about the Trump Organization’s pursuit of a real-estate project in Moscow during the 2016 election, a period in which the Russian government was seeking to aid Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Assuming all the evidence adds up to the conclusion that the president asked Cohen to lie about the Russia deal, it’s evidence of conspiracy, of obstruction of justice, of suborning perjury,” said John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s and a former associate counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation. “It’s impeachment material.”
According to BuzzFeed News, Special Counsel Robert Mueller assembled evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie, including “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.” That would represent a significant escalation in the legal and political risks to the president.
[Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump]
“If true, this directly implicates the president in a conspiracy to obstruct justice or to make false statements to Congress, or as an aider and abettor to Cohen committing those crimes,” said Randall Eliason, a former U.S. attorney and a law professor at George Washington University. “Whether a sitting president can be indicted is a separate question, but there would be no wiggle room in terms of whether he was guilty of the offenses. The key, of course, is whether you can prove it and whether there is additional evidence beyond just Cohen’s word—and from the article, it sounds like there is.”
While evidence that the Trump campaign sought to assist the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election, and that the president then sought to hamper the federal investigation into that effort, has been in public view for some time, evidence that the president directed Cohen to lie to Congress would be something different entirely, a claim that the president conspired to commit a crime in pursuit of personal financial gain. Republicans have tried their best to set expectations so that only the clearest and most shocking of acts would qualify as criminal—and Trump’s reported actions would not only meet but exceed them.
The report, if verified, provides a potentially simple narrative for a story that has often seemed complicated: Trump sought to profit from a real-estate deal in Moscow, and so defended Russia against accusations of interference, and then directed his personal attorney to commit perjury to cover up what he had done.
Obstruction of justice and perjury are crimes that turn on state of mind, but the details in the BuzzFeed News report would leave Trump with few defenses. “If President Trump instructed Michael Cohen to testify to Congress, giving an account of the Russia project that Trump knew to be false, that’s obstruction of justice,” said Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham and a former associate counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation. “It’s hard to imagine that Trump would have had an innocent ‘state of mind.’ The only viable legal defense would be ‘It didn’t happen.’”
Late Friday evening however, the office of the special counsel took the unusual step of issuing a vague but firm denial of BuzzFeed News’ reporting. Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel’s office, said that “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
During the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies have said, the Russian government ordered a campaign of disinformation and hacking designed to hamper the candidacy of Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, and to help put Trump in the White House. The theft and release of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from the Clinton adviser John Podesta were major factors in the election—damaging Clinton’s reputation and altering the news cycle during periods in which the Trump campaign was dealing with negative coverage, and ultimately affecting what turned out to be a startlingly close election in which Trump failed to win the popular vote. Throughout the election, and even his presidency, Trump has used his influence to dismiss the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that the Russian government was responsible for the hacking.
[Ken White: Three remarkable things about Michael Cohen’s plea deal]
Shortly after becoming president, Trump pressured then–FBI Director James Comey to end an investigation into Trump’s former campaign surrogate and national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had lied to federal investigators about his contacts with Russian officials. Comey refused and was later fired by Trump. Although the Trump administration initially said Comey was fired for improperly disclosing information about the federal investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified emails, he later told Russian officials in the Oval Office and an NBC reporter in a televised interview that he had done so because of the Russia investigation. Trump publicly fumed that his choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from that investigation after misleading Congress about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, rather than protecting Trump.
Republicans deployed a new line of argument—that Trump’s behavior was simply so careless and blatant that he couldn’t have intended to commit a crime. They dismissed the growing number of former Trump aides pleading guilty to federal crimes unrelated to the president’s conduct with Russia. Republicans scoffed at the president’s felony violation of campaign-finance laws as small potatoes. Trump stalwarts also argued that because firing an FBI director is within the president’s authority, it could not be considered obstruction of justice, even if Trump was trying to stop the investigation. Indeed, that was the core argument of a memo written by William Barr, Trump’s choice to replace Sessions as attorney general.
But Trump’s reported conduct would exceed even the high standards for presidential criminality set by Barr in his memo. Barr wrote, “If a President knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction.” During his confirmation hearing earlier this week, Republican and Democratic senators pressed Barr to clarify his argument.
[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: The real significance of the FBI’s probe into Trump]
When the Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar asked, “A president persuading a person to commit perjury would be obstruction. Is that right?” Barr answered, “Yes.” When the South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham asked Barr, “If there was some reason to believe that the president tried to coach somebody not to testify or to testify falsely, that could be obstruction of justice?” Barr again replied in the affirmative. By the sky-high standards set by his own handpicked choice for attorney general, Trump’s reported conduct would be a crime.
“If it is true, and can be proven, that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, then he has no wiggle room,” said Alex Whiting, a law professor at Harvard and a former federal prosecutor. “There has been some debate about whether acts by the president to curtail a criminal investigation can be obstruction, since he is the head of the executive [branch] … but instructing or encouraging another person to lie under oath to Congress falls outside of that debate. There is no question that it was a crime for Cohen to lie to Congress, and Trump’s role in soliciting or directing that lie makes him criminally liable as well.”
Indeed, assuming the BuzzFeed News story holds up, the only defense of Trump’s conduct is an imperial, Nixonian conception of the presidency—that nothing the president could do is illegal.
“Being president does not mean you get to rob a bank. Being a president doesn’t mean you get to do drug deals,” said Barrett. “Conspiring to provide false evidence to Congress has nothing to do with the exercise of a constitutional power.”
[Read: The dueling narratives on Trump and Russia]
Justice Department regulations prevent a sitting president from being indicted. But the Constitution provides a remedy for presidents likely guilty of criminal acts: impeachment. From Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, both parties have considered obstruction of justice to be an impeachable offense.
“Congress should hold the upcoming hearings with Cohen and otherwise try to gather evidence supporting these allegations. If they can be proven, I think Congress has to seriously consider beginning impeachment proceedings,” said Eliason. “There’s no question that obstructing justice by instructing a subordinate to lie to Congress in order to help yourself get elected is an impeachable offense.”
There should be no illusions about the difficulty of impeaching this president. He has built a cult of personality among his supporters, who dwell in an alternative reality where the president’s critics are the ones truly guilty of the offenses of which Trump has been accused. He retains the support of conservative media outlets, who provide a steady drumbeat of fawning praise and conspiratorial disinformation. And Republican legislators who once excoriated the president for his politics, his racism, and his personal conduct have bound their fate to his.
But there should also be no illusions about what the weight of evidence against Trump says: The president is a crook.
The house in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, that Denise Portner and her husband raised their two children in was the site of dozens of celebrations—from birthday parties to Passover seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners. It was where she beat cancer. It was where her children were potty trained and where they returned to during their breaks from college.
But after 15 years, it was time to go.
“It was a big house, an old house,” Portner, a 56-year-old marketing-communications professional, told me. “The taxes were really high.” So, they moved to nearby Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, cutting their tax bill to a third of what it once was. “We are able to save money that we can use for travel and for saving for our kids’ needs.”
Portner and her husband moved after her youngest child left for college and their large Tudor-style home was no longer the hangout hot spot it was when her kids were younger. Leaving the neighborhood was difficult, but ultimately, as is the case for many parents who have sold their home, as empty-nester syndrome set in, putting up the for-sale sign seemed like the natural next step. Though these moves can signal an important transition in life for both parents and children, selling the family home becomes an emotionally fraught manifestation of that change.
[Read: The psychology of home: Why where you live means so much]
Karen Kennedy, a realtor with the Boston-based Hammond Residential Real Estate, says that a large percentage of her clients are empty nesters. Kennedy works primarily in Newton, an affluent suburb, and says that homeowners there tend to be looking to sell their houses to free themselves from the burden of maintaining large residences.
“It’s basically people that have had their last child leave the house and go into college, and they’re in a big house,” Kennedy says. “They feel that the house is too much for them to keep up—all of it, the property and the house.”
According to the Census Bureau, 7.1 percent of Americans between the ages of 55 and 74 moved last year, a rate that has remained virtually unchanged over the past decade, even as domestic migration rates have cratered in other age brackets. These movers, like Kennedy’s clients, tend to skew affluent, since wealthier people are more likely to be both homeowners and home sellers. And yet, despite the financial ties that may bind some empty nesters, the underlying reason for their moves isn’t always about money.
“The way a lot of people talk about moving in terms of jobs and taxes and things like that, that’s really not the immediate cause,” says Thomas Cooke, a demographer at the University of Connecticut. “The way demographers … look at it is in terms of a life course. The basic idea is that at different stages in the life course, different places have different values to you.”
For empty nesters who are approaching retirement, a leafy suburb with well-regarded public schools may have seemed like the perfect zip code for raising children, but it can be less appealing once a family’s youngest child collects a high-school diploma.
According to the Census Bureau, a majority of the 4.8 million 55- to 74-year-old movers in 2017 stayed within the same county, but about a fifth of them left for a different state. Where empty nesters decide to move depends on several factors, such as proximity to their workplace, where their adult children live, and—if they’re already retired—the weather and community amenities that can make aging as comfortable as possible. Portner and her husband, for instance, decided to move less than a mile away from their own parents.
“Our move reflects changing priorities and a shift in caretaking from our kids to our parents,” Portner says. “Whereas our lives were focused around our children, and our house in Elkins Park was just a few blocks away from our day school and our synagogue, now we are very close to our parents, who are getting older.”
For Patricia Lara Garza—a 63-year-old corporate-relations director who moved from Wilmette, Illinois, to Chicago in 2017—shedding the family home not only saves her roughly $1,000 a month, but it has also improved her quality of life. Since she works in Chicago and both of her children live there, too, she says there was nothing keeping her in the suburbs. She can now “be part of the city and do the cultural things” without the hassle of commuting back and forth. Garza wasn’t just looking to save—she was looking to get something fundamentally different from the community in which she lived.
Kennedy, the realtor, says that access to the heart of a city is also important to some of her suburban clients, who are thinking about mobility as they get older.
“Sometimes they want to be in downtown Boston, so they have walkability,” she says, “and sometimes they want to be in the same community but have a first-floor master [bedroom]. It’s not necessarily that they can’t do the stairs now, but they’re looking down the road to when they might not be able to.”
Regardless of where empty nesters move, selling a family home can be a weighty endeavor. When a family inhabits the same house for decades, its sale can conjure a flood of memories, separation anxiety, and grief; it’s not just that people mourn the sale of their home, but that they mourn their former selves who grew and evolved there.
[Read: How a house can shape a child’s future]
It can be especially difficult for kids who are in college or just starting off their careers, when a sense of rootlessness is pervasive. The transition from high-school student to working adult can involve a lot of boxes and packing tape, whether it’s moving from the parents’ house to a dorm or from one apartment to another. Through it all, having the chance to return to a family home can provide a sense of stability, but if their parents move, visits “home” mean traveling to an unfamiliar place.
Alene Bouranova, a 24-year-old resident of Brookline, Massachusetts, who grew up in Kirkland, Washington, was sitting in a dining hall at Boston University during the fall of her junior year when she she found out that her parents had sold her childhood home. Bouranova had not even realized the house was on the market.
“I started crying in the dining hall, just crying all over my plate of pasta,” Bouranova says. “I was not pleased at all. That was my home.”
But, as Robin Gordon, a 57-year-old who moved from Maple Glen, Pennsylvania, to Pompano Beach, Florida, told me, when you live in a home for several decades, it becomes the backdrop for not just the climaxes of life, but also the mundane. It’s where the kids haphazardly tossed their soccer cleats, where the family ate leftovers, and where everyone battled over access to dial-up internet and landline phone service.
“It sounds so dark, but [I remember] all the bad things, the crazy things that happened,” Gordon says. “All the injuries that the kids had in the old house … the parties that went wrong when they were teenagers, the birthday parties that we had, and the family dinners.”
Although her three children understood why she was moving, Gordon says they were still upset that she was selling the house: They had assumed that it would remain a steady constant in their lives, and had looked forward to bringing their own kids there one day. In this way, not only can the sale of the family home serve as a life marker for empty nesters, but it can also bookend a stage for their adult children who haven’t actually lived there for years.
Bouranova told me that even though she was initially upset by the idea of leaving her home and neighborhood in Washington State behind, she was able to put the move in perspective and fly back from college to help pack up her things and give the house a final goodbye.
“It’s my parents, and as sad as I was originally, it’s their lives and they can do what they want,” Bouranova says. “I just want them to be happy.”
And that’s the rub, of course: At the end of the day, it’s not the banisters, cabinets, and backyards that give a house meaning and that make selling it so difficult. It’s the lives lived inside the walls.
“I never loved the house,” Gordon says. “I loved the home.”
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