Dezenas de milhares de residentes dos Estados Unidos foram deslocados por desastres provocados pela mudança climática em 2018. A Califórnia enfrentou uma série de incêndios maciços – desde o Complexo Mendocino, em julho, que se tornou o maior incêndio florestal registrado no estado, até o incêndio de Camp, o mais letal. Enquanto isso, o furacão Florence, a segunda maior tempestade em volume de chuva registrada em 70 anos nos EUA, foi rapidamente esquecido quando o furacão Michael atingiu a Costa do Golfo. Foi o terceiro furacão mais forte a atingir o país.
Os sobreviventes dos desastres tiveram que recorrer a acampamentos em estacionamentos de supermercados, sofás de amigos, trailers estacionados nos gramados de suas casas destruídas ou ao aluguel de apartamentos superfaturados em comunidades onde as moradias se tornam cada vez mais escassas. Rotineiramente, redes de segurança – como seguros contra enchentes e incêndios ou a Agência Federal de Gestão de Emergências (FEMA, na sigla em inglês) – deixaram de fornecer o apoio necessário para manter os sobreviventes abrigados, alimentados e em pé. O caminho para a recuperação de um refugiado do clima é determinado por suas economias, pela riqueza familiar, conexões com a comunidade e sua pontuação de crédito.
Enquanto tempestades e incêndios florestais reduziram milhares de casas a cinzas e escombros ou deixaram-nas cobertas de mofo, desastres mais lentos, como a elevação do nível do mar nas costas do Atlântico e do Golfo, e a erosão causada pelo derretimento do permafrost (solo congelado) no Alasca estão deixando diversas comunidades com os dias contados.
Mas os refugiados do clima mais vulneráveis vivem fora dos Estados Unidos. A seca de um ano no Corredor Seco da América Central, por exemplo, está silenciosamente levando os agricultores de subsistência e trabalhadores agrícolas para a fronteira cada vez mais militarizada dos EUA com o México. E, embora os EUA sejam responsáveis por mais emissões de dióxido de carbono do que qualquer outro país do mundo, seu sistema de asilo não leva em consideração quem esteja fugindo da seca. Na verdade, em um mundo em que a mudança climática já está alimentando movimentos maciços de pessoas, quase nenhuma nação reconhece oficialmente a existência do refugiado climático.
Foto: Talia Herman para o Intercept
Michelle Teixeira está morando em um trailer de 28 metros quadrados com o marido, o pai, duas filhas e quatro cachorros. O chefe de seu marido é dono de um empreendimento residencial composto de lotes vazios, onde os Teixeira e outras quatro famílias acamparam, chamando a si mesmos de “tesouros do trailer”. São todos refugiados do incêndio florestal de Camp, que atingiu Paradise, na Califórnia, matando 85 pessoas, incluindo muitos aposentados.
Em breve, terão de encontrar um novo local de acampamento. Quatro dias após o incêndio, a maior parte dos lotes recebeu ofertas de pessoas em busca de novas casas. A oferta habitacional já era escassa na área, e o incêndio, que destruiu 13.792 residências, fez os valores dispararem, com refugiados tentando reassentar nas proximidades.
Segundo o cientista climático Daniel Swain,o verão de 2018 foi mais quente do que o habitual naquela parte da Califórnia, e as chuvas de fim de outono chegaram tarde. Comunidades como Paradise, localizadas às margens das áreas florestais, são particularmente vulneráveis a incêndios florestais provocados pelas mudanças climáticas.
Quando Michelle acordou na manhã do incêndio, o quarto, geralmente cheio de luz branca da claraboia, estava brilhando em laranja. Nervosa, levou a filha de 14 anos de carro para a escola, com a menor de quatro anos enrolada em um cobertor no banco de trás.
Foto: Talia Herman para o Intercept
Quando chegaram, Michelle pediu à filha para verificar se haveria aula. A adolescente voltou com o namorado a reboque. As aulas estavam suspensas e as cinzas caíam do céu, mas ainda não havia nenhum aviso claro de que era necessário evacuar – isto é, até Michelle passar para ver como estava uma amiga com problemas de ansiedade. O marido da amiga veio ao seu encontro quando ela parou o carro. “O fogo está três ruas abaixo. Você precisa ir para casa agora, pegar o que puder e sair”, disse ele.
Parar em casa não seria uma opção. O céu ficou preto, e o carro balançou por causa da velocidade com que a fumaça soprava. O trânsito parou, com pessoas abandonando os carros nas ruas por terem ficado sem combustível ou entrando em veículos vizinhos. Michelle viu uma mulher sozinha que parecia ter cerca de 80 anos no carro ao lado dela. “Abri a janela e perguntei, ‘você está bem’?” Implorou para a mulher entrar no carro deles. “Ela me disse: ‘Vivi uma vida longa. Se for minha hora, é a minha hora’.”
Logo, havia casas incendiando ao redor. Michelle entregou garrafas d’água para as crianças. “Eu disse a elas: ‘Vocês precisam colocar a água no cobertor e usá-lo para cobrir o rosto, porque a fumaça pode matar’”, lembrou. “Teve um momento em que pensei se seria rápido se morrêssemos. Meus filhos sofreriam? Eles morreriam da fumaça ou morreriam do fogo?” Finalmente, os carros começaram a andar.
Spot, o lagarto da família, não sobreviveu, nem os 13 peixes ciclídeos, mas o pai de Michelle conseguiu escapar com os dois pitbulls, um chihuahua e um dachshund. Quando conseguiu voltar para o que restava de sua casa (cinzas, vidro e metal empenado), seus quatro patos e cinco das sete galinhas a receberam, um pouco mais magros do que antes.
Como eles tinham seguro, a FEMA lhes negou apoio, mas a apólice levou mais de um mês para entregar os fundos. O dinheiro para o trailer de 17 mil dólares foi obtido com a ajuda de amigos e familiares.
A saúde de seu pai de 62 anos piorou desde o incêndio. “Em um mês, a função renal dele diminuiu rapidamente, ao ponto dos médicos recomendarem que ele faça diálise imediatamente”, disse ela. A família vai precisar de outro trailer para que ele tenha espaço para cuidar de si mesmo. A filha de quatro anos de Michelle tem enfrentado terrores noturnos, assombrada por um monstro vermelho.
Alguns dos vizinhos dos Teixeira não vão reconstruir, mas Michelle não imagina fazer outra coisa além disso. “Aquela é a minha casa. Eu nunca me senti bem em nenhum outro lugar”, disse ela.
Foto: Tracie Williams para o Intercept
Cerca de dois meses atrás, Davíd decidiu vender sua cama de metal com colchão alto e se juntar à caravana de migrantes junto de outras sete pessoas de comunidade em Lejamaní, Honduras. As coisas não correram como ele esperava. No início de dezembro, Davíd, cujo nome foi mudado devido a preocupações com sua segurança, viu-se parado em Tijuana, impedido pelos EUA de entrar no país e pedir asilo. Tendo perdido os amigos, o homem de 29 anos dormia em uma grande barraca vermelha e marrom com outras oito pessoas, compartilhando um cobertor com outro homem, às vezes dois. Quando a chuva inundou a barraca, os homens trouxeram cadeiras e tentaram dormir sentados, tremendo de frio.
Para a família de Davíd em Honduras, a vida e a morte são determinadas por quantas sacas de feijão a terra produz. Nos últimos três anos, não foi o suficiente. As chuvas vêm com muito pouca frequência, e as plantas crescem, mas se recusam a florescer.
“Mais do que qualquer outra coisa, é a mudança climática”, disse Davíd, explicando como acabou se juntando à caravana de migrantes. “Estou aqui por causa da seca.”
O filho de Davíd tem praticamente a idade da seca, e tem asma. Aos cinco meses de idade, ele ficou gravemente doente, e foi apenas por causa das três sacas de feijão da família que foi possível pagar a ida ao hospital. O médico disse a Davíd que, se tivessem esperado mais tempo, o bebê provavelmente teria tido um ataque cardíaco.
Isso foi quando a terra ainda estava produzindo um pouco. Nos anos bons, Davíd costumava obter 10 sacas de feijão por ano. No ano passado, não conseguiu preencher uma sequer. Às vezes, mandava a filha de 10 anos para a escola sem ter comido nada. O aumento da insegurança econômica facilitou a entrada das gangues, recrutando crianças e disparando armas de fogo nas ruas.
Foto: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
A casa de Davíd está no meio do que é conhecido como Corredor Seco, que atravessa a Guatemala, Honduras e El Salvador. A área é marcada por uma estação seca, que corresponde aproximadamente ao inverno nos EUA, depois uma estação chuvosa, que corresponde ao verão norte-americano. No meio da estação chuvosa, costuma haver uma seca conhecida como canícula. De acordo com Chris Castro, cientista climático da Universidade do Arizona, a seca de verão que foi a mais afetada pela mudança climática, tornando-se a mais quente e seca nos últimos 20 anos.
“O que é realmente assustador”, ele acrescentou, “é que estamos obtendo essas secas de verão mais secas e quentes durante os anos em que a variabilidade climática natural não sugeriria que isso deveria estar acontecendo.”
A seca ocorre no meio da estação de crescimento. “Quem será mais impactado? Serão os agricultores de subsistência, que têm parcelas relativamente pequenas de terra em áreas rurais e funcionam com uma margem muito pequena”, disse ele.
De volta a Honduras, a esposa de Davíd estava com dois meses de aluguel atrasado, mas ficou difícil se comunicar com ela porque uma bolsa com o telefone dele foi roubada. Ansioso, ele começou a procurar trabalho em Tijuana e se juntou a um revezamento de greve de fome para transmitir o desespero dos membros da caravana aos políticos dos EUA que os impediram de atravessar a fronteira.
Mas as coisas só pioraram. Quando Davíd finalmente conseguiu pegar um telefone emprestado, descobriu que sua mãe havia sofrido um ataque cardíaco. Ele decidiu que a única coisa a fazer era se entregar às autoridades mexicanas e voltar para casa.
“Se eu soubesse que seria assim, não teria vindo”, disse ele. “Agora só preciso estar com a minha família, a minha mãe.”
Jamie Johansen, Burgaw, Carolina do NorteTrês meses depois de o furacão Florence ter deixado bolor preto subindo pelas paredes da casa de Jamie Johansen e mofo amarelo e branco crescendo no carpete, a família ainda não conseguiu se mudar para o trailer da FEMA instalado em sua propriedade. A tempestade deixou 53 pessoas mortas, mais de 4 mil propriedades residenciais destruídas e mais de 74 mil danificadas, com bairros inteiros dizimados, seus moradores deslocados.
Na semana anterior ao Natal, um inspetor chegou a aprovar a fiação elétrica do trailer, mas havia água vazando das paredes. Os funcionários da FEMA não forneceram à família qualquer explicação sobre o motivo. O trailer da FEMA aparentemente havia se tornado a fonte do próprio alagamento. Jamie, o marido, a mãe, o filho de cinco anos e a avó de 93 anos passaram o fim de ano em um local alugado em uma cidade próxima, longe de seus cinco cavalos e dois pôneis.
Oito anos atrás, as três gerações juntaram seus fundos e se mudaram da Pensilvânia para a Carolina do Norte. Morar lá era mais barato, e seria mais fácil abrigar seus animais. Esse capítulo acabou agora. “Estamos pensando em voltar para o norte”, disse Jamie, “porque lá não há inundações”.
O furacão Florence, que atingiu a Carolina do Norte em 14 de setembro, foi a segunda tempestade com mais volume de chuva dos EUA nos últimos 70 anos, logo atrás do furacão Harvey, que atingiu o Texas em 2017. Um estudo realizado por cientistas do Laboratório Nacional Lawrence Berkeley, da Stony Brook University e do Centro Nacional de Pesquisas Atmosféricas, descobriu que os impactos da mudança climática fizeram com que a previsão de chuvas da tempestade fosse 50% maior do que seria de outra forma.
Os Johansen, como muitos dos mais afetados pela tempestade, viviam fora da várzea, de modo que não tinham seguro para inundação. Seus vizinhos moraram na área a vida inteira e nunca tinham visto a propriedade inundar. Assim, quando o furacão Florence chegou, não havia planos de evacuação.
Quando a chuva parou, o bairro parecia bem. Os Johansen montaram em seus cavalos, examinando as árvores caídas. Porém, às três da manhã da segunda-feira seguinte, quando o cão ganiu pedindo para sair, o mundo havia se transformado. A água estava nivelada com a varanda da frente, que ficava a 1,20 metro do chão. O rio Cape Fear havia transbordado e inundado suas terras. Jamie pensou imediatamente no mini pônei da família, que sabia que estaria afundado até o pescoço.
Águas de enchente são perigosas em uma situação como essa. Entre os perigos estão as bolas de formigas de fogo flutuantes, que se formam para proteger a colônia quando há uma inundação. Se você tocar em uma dessas bolas, as formigas podem se espalhar pelo seu corpo, como se você fosse terra seco. Como a comunidade usa tanques sépticos, o esgoto se misturou com a água da chuva e do rio. O marido de Jamie caminhou no meio da água e soltou os cavalos, para que eles pudessem encontrar um lugar mais alto. Eles se instalaram em uma elevação na frente da casa.
De manhã, um helicóptero chegou para resgatar a família. Uma empresa chamada Oracle ofereceu um aerobarco para salvar os pôneis, Lady e Hook, que estavam quase se afogando. Mas os cavalos pesavam demais, então, permaneceram isolados na pequena elevação por 10 dias, até que a água baixasse o suficiente para eles saírem.
Encontrar onde morar mostrou-se difícil, especialmente com animais de estimação. Como Jamie se preocupava com o fato de que separar a avó de seu cachorro seria demais para ela, a família se acomodou em motéis baratos até encontrar uma pousada onde os cães pudessem ficar e, finalmente, em uma casa alugada. As locações, que custavam mil dólares por mês agora estavam entre 1,5 mil e 2 mil. A família contou com o apoio de membros da comunidade e se endividou no cartão de crédito.
Inicialmente, Jamie foi informada de que a família não se qualificava para uma compra da FEMA porque sua casa ficava do lado de fora da várzea. Foi só porque ela ligou novamente que recebeu a informação de que a agência havia mudado sua política e agora estava disposta a considerar todas as casas que haviam sido inundadas. Eles decidiram diminuir as perdas e deixar a terra para o rio.
“Não acho que possamos passar por isso novamente”, disse ela. “Nunca mais quero olhar pela porta da minha casa e ver meus cavalos quase se afogando.”
John Washington contribuiu com reportagem de Tijuana.
Tradução: Cássia Zanon
The post Incêndios, enchentes, secas: refugiados do clima contam suas histórias appeared first on The Intercept.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, speaks to the press during a tour of the newly inaugurated Al-Fattah Al-Alim mosque in Egypt’s new administrative capital, east of Cairo, on Jan. 10, 2019.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, Pool/AFP/Getty Images
“The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over.”
So said Mike Pompeo in Cairo on Thursday. Donald Trump’s hawkish secretary of state delivered a speech at the site of Barack Obama’s famous 2009 address to the Muslim world, but Pompeo denounced the former president for “wishful thinking,” partnering “with enemies,” and a reluctance “to wield our influence” in the region.
Pompeo claimed that the United States was “a force for good in the Middle East” and referred to “America’s innate goodness.” His 3,500-word address at the American University in Cairo contained only one passing reference to “democracy” and zero references to “equality” or “human rights.” There were more than 20 references, however, to “malevolent” and “oppressive” Iran.
Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, described it “as one of the worst foreign policy speeches I’ve witnessed from a senior U.S. official,” calling it “cynical, petty, incoherent, small, and, well, silly.” Paul Danahar, former BBC Middle East bureau chief, referred to the speech as “simplistic,” noting that “its theme was the goodness of Israel and evil of Iran.”
The pompous Pompeo told his audience in Cairo that he was going to be “very blunt and direct” and that he wanted to speak about “a truth that isn’t often spoken in this part of the world.” He went on to offer a litany of lies, delusions, and exaggerations. Below, however, is the (fantasy) speech that I wish the secretary of state could have delivered on Thursday, if he truly wanted to be “blunt” and “honest” about U.S. involvement in the Middle East since 1945.
“It is a pleasure to be back here in Cairo. As America’s top diplomat, and as a former CIA director and four-term member of the United States Congress, not to mention a senior member of a U.S. administration whose president has admitted we have ‘a lot of killers’ and who has also condemned many of our previous interventions across the Middle East, I believe I am ideally suited to tell you all the unvarnished truth about the history and impact of U.S. involvement in this region.
It is an ugly truth that U.S. presidents have known for decades but have worked hard to conceal from the public — both in the United States and here in the Middle East. As long ago as 1958, a great Republican president, and an even greater U.S. general, Dwight Eisenhower, wondered why there was such a ‘campaign of hatred against us’ in this part of the world, ‘not by the governments but by the people.’ Yet the reasons for that ‘hatred’ had been laid out for him only a few months earlier by his own National Security Council: ‘In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress.’ U.S. interests in the area, added the National Security Council, ‘have led not unnaturally to close U.S. relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries.’
It is difficult to disagree with the National Security Council’s assessment. Take the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In February 1945, in the dying days of the World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia’s founding king, Abdulaziz, onboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. The need for democracy in the Gulf wasn’t on Roosevelt’s mind. On behalf of the United States, he struck a Faustian bargain with one of the world’s most repressive countries: We would provide them with security; they would provide us with oil.
That bargain has held for more than seven decades, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. It held after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals — but we invaded Baghdad in 2003, not Riyadh. It held after my predecessor Hillary Clinton admitted in a confidential memo that ‘donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’ It held after a Saudi-led coalition launched a war in Yemen, with U.S. military and intelligence support, which has killed tens of thousands of people and has caused, in the words of the United Nations, the ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis.’ It held even after U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul 100 days ago, on the orders — according to my former colleagues at the CIA — of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
Then there is the state of Israel. From the very beginning, we have stood with the Israelis against the Arabs — and, in particular, against the occupied and dispossessed Palestinian people. President Harry Truman, declaring U.S. support for a new Jewish state, said he had ‘to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’ Over the past 70 years, the United States has backed, armed, and funded Israeli governments, of both left and right, as they have bombed, conquered, occupied, colonized, and ethnically cleansed Arab lands.
We have never supported freedom or democracy for the Palestinians. Nor have we done so for the Iranians.In 2014, the previous U.S. administration resupplied Israeli forces with ammunition amid their bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 500 Palestinian children in the space of seven weeks.
In 2018, this administration went against both the international community and international law to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move our embassy there.
We have never supported freedom or democracy for the Palestinians. Nor have we done so for the Iranians. In 1953, the United States government authorized a CIA coup to overthrow the elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, because we believed he was too close to his country’s Communist Party. CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, arrived in Tehran to implement Operation Ajax, which involved fomenting riots against Mossadegh in order to put the tyrannical, but pro-American, shah of Iran back in full control of the country.
A year earlier, Kermit Roosevelt had been here in Egypt, masterminding another CIA intervention, Project FF, or ‘Fat Fucker,’ against King Farouk. The United States helped the Free Officers Movement overthrow the king and — perhaps with the exception of Gamal Abdel Nasser — has since thrown its full support behind military dictators in Cairo. Remember when the generals removed Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, from power in a coup in 2013? My predecessor John Kerry praised the Egyptian military for ‘restoring democracy.’
Then there is Iraq. Every president since George H.W. Bush has taken military action in Iraq; dropping bombs in Mesopotamia has become a rite of passage for the past five presidents of the United States. But our involvement in Iraq did not begin in 1990, when the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, infamously gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait; it began decades earlier.
In 1959, the CIA sent a six-man squad of assassins — including a young man named Saddam Hussein — into Iraq to try and kill then-Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim. They failed.
In 1963, however, a U.S.-backed military coup by the Baath Party succeeded in overthrowing Qasim. ‘We came to power on a CIA train,’ Ali Saleh Sa’adi, a minister in the Baathist regime that replaced Qasim, later admitted.
In 1980, according to my predecessor Alexander Haig, the Carter administration gave a ‘green light’ to Saddam to attack Iran. Ronald Reagan then escalated our support for the Iraqis, against the Iranians, and sent Donald Rumsfeld to shake Saddam’s hand. We not only turned a ‘blind eye‘ to the use of Iraqi chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Kurds; we helped them do it.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed as a result of the invasion. There is a direct line from our invasion to the creation of ISIS.By 2003, it was the United States that was invading Iraq, in defiance of international law and on the basis of false claims about weapons of mass destruction. As Trump, the current U.S. president, has observed, George W. Bush ‘lied‘ about WMDs, and his decision to attack Iraq was ‘the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country.’
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed as a result of the war and — as the previous U.S. president has conceded — there is a direct line from our invasion of Iraq to the creation of ISIS.
But what about the Arab Spring? How did the United States respond? In Syria, the U.S. government repeatedly called on the brutal Bashar al-Assad to stand down, and the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars arming some of the most vicious groups in the region in a disastrous attempt to try and topple him. More than seven years on from the start of the Syrian civil war, and more than 400,000 dead Syrians later, this administration has now decided to accept Assad’s rule of that country, and we are withdrawing our troops on the ground.
In Libya, the United States backed a U.N.-sanctioned NATO operation to protect the people of Benghazi; the operation morphed into a non-U.N.-sanctioned plan for regime change in Tripoli. Col. Muammar Gaddafi was raped and killed in the Libyan desert by U.S.-backed rebels. My predecessor Clinton greeted the news with a laugh. ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she declared. Today, Libya is a ‘Mad Max’ hell-scape, with open-air slave markets and multiple, warring ‘governments‘ and militias. It has also become a major transit point for tens of thousands of migrants heading for Europe.
In Bahrain, however, the United States backed the ruling royal family, not the revolution from below. This may or may not have been related to the fact that the U.S. 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain. Since 2011, thousands of Bahrainis have been beaten, tear-gassed, shot, detained, and tortured. In 2017, Trump told the Bahraini king, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, that ‘there won’t be strain with this administration.’ His words have since emboldened Bahrain’s prison guards.
This is the blunt truth that previous U.S. administrations have refused to share with you until today: We have supported dictators and despots while singing the praises of democracy; we have bombed, invaded, and occupied while calling for stability and security; we have been complicit in torture, ethnic cleansing, mass starvation, and the use of chemical weapons while pretending to be champions of human rights.
The post-war history of our role in this region is clear, undeniable, and shameful. Those who claim that the United States is a ‘force for good in the Middle East‘ are dishonest — or deluded. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be a greater insult to the millions of people who might be alive today in the Middle East had it not been for the involvement of the United States.
I want to thank you all for being here, and I want to dedicate this speech, in the Egyptian capital, to the 40,000 political prisoners — including U.S. citizens! — that your president and our close ally, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has locked up and tortured since 2014. May God bless them all; may God bless you all.
I now plan to return to Washington, D.C., and I expect to shortly receive the news that I have been fired by our president over Twitter.”
The post Mike Pompeo Lied About the U.S. and the Middle East. Here’s the Truth. appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump’s December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the anti-war wings of both parties, but largely provoked bipartisan outrage among in Washington’s reflexively pro-war establishment.
Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country’s most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump’s decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon.
But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump’s Syria withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.
That’s not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that “the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm’s way” far more than they agree with the pro-war view that “the U.S. needs to keep troops in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and maintain our foreign policy interests in the region.”
But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28 percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump’s announced intention to withdraw half of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping troops there than Republicans and independents.
This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan:
With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed. Among 2016 Trump voters, there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however, oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed.
This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post’s Ariel Edwards-Levy documented early this week, separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.
While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. “Those who voted for Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS,” Edwards-Levy wrote, “while Trump voters said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility.” (Similar trends can be seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump has moved away from his posture of the last two years — escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians, as he repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign — to his return to his other campaign pledge to remove troops from the region.)
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their “beliefs” based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party’s base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations, drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those policies once they became hallmarks of the Obama presidency.
But what’s happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he’s willing to allow the Bad Countries to take over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.
At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives, even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. By far the most influential liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents, while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a “national security liberal” who was “all about counterterrorism”).
All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It’s inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation — which will endure long after Trump is gone — is well under way.
The post As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party’s Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.
Kamala Harris makes the case for a 2020 run. Since arriving in the Senate two years ago, Harris has become a political superstar, earning a reputation for her tense grilling of Trump-administration officials. Her new book looks to be a setup for a looming presidential campaign, but “instead of weaving a political vision into the biography of its author, it assembles itself rather like a campaign pamphlet” and glosses over her track record as California’s top prosecutor.
Meanwhile, squeezing in some late Friday 2020 news is Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who told CNN she has decided to run for president.
The effects of the government shutdown are about to compound. As it drags into week four and becomes the longest ever in United States history, the federal government is reaching uncharted waters. Funds for food stamps will soon dry up for 38 million Americans. The federal-court system could soon run out of money, and a potential exodus of unpaid workers from the public could send the economy into a tailspin. These near-apocalyptic outcomes most likely won’t come to pass: “Come February, no one will have the political will,” said one former Obama-administration official who helped manage the 2013 shutdown.
Have you or others you know been impacted by the shutdown? We want to hear from you. Reply directly to this newsletter, or send us an email with your full name, city, and state to letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line The Daily: Shutdown Impacts.
What to watch and read. With Barry Jenkins’s film If Beale Street Could Talk earning awards-season accolades, James Baldwin’s eponymous novel—which inspired the movie—is being dusted off the bookshelf. In the book, which is set in 1960s-era segregation, “Baldwin demands black people not only to accept whites, but to do so with love, positioning black love as a vital instrument for white liberation and interracial renewal on a national scale.” The director M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film, Glass, is the latest in a trilogy featuring comic-book heroes who somehow exist in the real world. It toggles back and forth between silly and serious in a way that’s sure to delight his fans, while infuriating other viewers.
Snapshot
A dismantled sign sits leaning outside a Sears department store one day after it closed as part of multiple store closures by Sears Holdings Corp. in the United States in Nanuet, New York, on January 7, 2019. See more of Alan Taylor’s photos of the week here. (Photo: Mike Segar / Reuters)Evening ReadWhat can $5 billion buy in border security? Krishnadev Calamur explores:
“Drug smugglers have more than $5 billion to throw at the problem,” Theresa Brown, who studies immigration at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told me. “They will find another way.”
In fact, the overwhelming majority of drugs, weapons, migrants, and criminals cross the U.S.-Mexico border through one of 330 designated ports of entry between the two countries.
Part of the $5 billion could be spent on technology to detect drugs and weapons, which are concealed in compartments in cars or mixed with legitimate cargo in semi trailers and trains. It could also be used to hire more CBP officers to enhance detection and ease traffic delays caused by the time it takes to inspect vehicles that carry goods into the country.
What Do You Know … About Culture?1. Glass is the newest—and possibly the weirdest—film from this director.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. This artist apologized for working with R. Kelly on their 2013 duet, “Do What U Want.”
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel in this 2018 film, based on the author’s memoir of the same title.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: M. Night Shyamalan / Lady GAGA / Can YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
Poem of the WeekHere is a portion of “Nightfall” by Brad Leithauser, from our 2006 Fiction issue:
In Iceland, in early January,
when dusk begins at dawn,
alone in a wind-whipped shack,
I kneel as though cowering
before my little stove door.
Nights are immense, and my coal is black
as night.
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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The touching memorial at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday for murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was marred only by the undercurrent of inaction it implied. With each speech, more than a dozen members of Congress heaped deservedly kind words upon Khashoggi, praised the enduring tenets of press freedom, condemned efforts to stymie voices like Khashoggi’s, and demanded that Congress act. In what way? For the most part, they did not say.
Tom Malinowski, the freshman congressman from New Jersey, was the exception.
Malinowski met Khashoggi just a few months before his murder in October at a small gathering in Northern Virginia, he said. Khashoggi told the congressional candidate and former assistant secretary of state that he worried about the decline of “America’s moral voice” in the world, particularly in the Arab world.
[Read: Saudi Arabia’s Shifting Narrative on Jamal Khashoggi’s Killing]
“We talked about what that might mean for the courageous democracy activists from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Bahrain who could once count on America at least to try to restrain their regimes from persecuting them,” Malinowski said. “In my own mind I was worried about the safety of some of the brave people I had met in those countries when I was an American diplomat. I was not worried about Jamal. He was here. He was supposed to be safe.”
Malinowski, who was the State Department’s top human rights official during the Obama Administration’s second term, was previously the Washington director of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch—a crusader from the outside who exerted pressure on the U.S. government over domestic torture practices and U.S. diplomatic ties to foreign governments with questionable human rights records. In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Malinowski outlined a legislative agenda that, among other things, included “scrutinizing the U.S.-Saudi relationship amid Saudi Arabia’s devastating war in Yemen and following the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.”
[Read: For Trump, the Truth About Jamal Khashoggi Is Beside the Point]
Only one week into his congressional tenure, Malinowski looked like a veteran at the podium. He called on the Trump administration to use the Magnitsky Act to sanction Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for ordering the killing of Khashoggi, saying “we have given the administration all of the tools that it needs to do what is right, to say to Saudi Arabia that while you may choose your own leaders you might wish to consider the consequences of giving the keys to your kingdom for the next 50 years: to someone who will be forever tainted by this crime.”
Malinowski pulled no punches in calling out the Saudi leader.
“If the administration will not do what is right, Congress can—and I think Congress will,” he said. “We can and we should wipe the smug smile of impunity off of Mohammed bin Salman’s face and restore proper balance to our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”
The room hummed in agreement, but also with some surprise. Of the 14 members of Congress who spoke —including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and Chris Van Hollen, and Representatives Adam Schiff, Will Hurd, Steve Chabot, and Eliot Engel—Malinowski was the only one to mention the Magnitsky Act.
But, more significantly, he was the only one to mention the Saudi crown prince by name.
The Trump administration’s response to Khashoggi’s murder has been nothing short of ambivalent. In a bizarre statement in November, the president took Mohammed bin Salman’s word over the conclusion of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump said in the statement. The White House position has consistently aligned with the judgment of Mohammed bin Salman, despite the fact that the CIA determined that the crown prince personally ordered the assassination of Khashoggi.
[Read: Jamal Khashoggi's Murder Remains a Mystery]
At the American University in Cairo Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the former CIA chief, ignored the Khashoggi incident entirely in a wide-ranging speech on America’s Middle East policy. Instead, he praised Saudi Arabia for its role in containing Iran and stabilizing the region.
“Saudi Arabia, too, has worked with us to counter Iranian expansion and regional influence,” said Pompeo, who has planned a stop in Saudi Arabia in the coming days. “We, the United States, commend each of these efforts, and we seek for all nations to continue the work to constrain the full array of the regime’s malign activity.”
At the memorial, Pelosi questioned the administration’s logic. “If we decide that commercial interest should override the statements that we make and the actions that we take then we must admit that we have lost all moral authority to talk about any of the atrocities anywhere anytime,” she said.
Lloyd Doggett, Democratic congressman from Austin, Texas, offered a more acerbic rendition of that same sentiment.
“When those murders [of journalists] or torture or imprisonment are ignored, whether they're directed by a supposed ally or an obvious adversary, whether by a Crown Prince or the Kremlin or the Burmese military or an ayatollah or an Egyptian dictator or some tyrant who purports to be a left winger or any other third-rate thug,” Doggett told the room, “...the world becomes a little less safe for journalists. And indeed it becomes a little less safe for the rest of us.”
Despite a bitter January chill and unrelenting winds, the memorial drew a crowd. A hundred chairs were not enough, not with 15 cameras hugging the back and sides of the room. About two dozen stood for the proceedings, organized and emceed by journalist and author Lawrence Wright—a friend of Khashoggi’s who interviewed him for his book on Al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower” (Wright’s heartfelt tribute in The New Yorker, where he works as a staff writer, was published Wednesday night and previewed the memorial). The documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and former FBI special agent Ali Soufan were also behind the event, which was formally hosted by Warner, Schiff, and Chabot.
In addition to the members of Congress, speakers included press freedom advocates and Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan. They called for those responsible to be held accountable for killing Khashoggi. It’s a New Year, and if the Saudis thought Washington would move on by now, it seems they are mistaken.
But, the state of affairs seems bleak: Congress says it wants action, but does not take action; the White House absolves the Saudi crown prince of any and all guilt, and Secretary of State Pompeo has also chosen to ignore the CIA consensus rather than publicly contradict the president.
While follow-up action is not typically the byproduct of a memorial service, this memorial service was different. It transpired to say, We’re still here. We’re still demanding answers.
“[Khashoggi’s] daughters probably said it best,” said Klobuchar, “and I quote, ‘This is no eulogy, for that would confer a state of closure. Rather this is a promise that his light will never fade, that his legacy will be preserved within us.’ That's our job right now in Congress not only for what's going on around the world but what's going on in our own country.” If nothing else, the memorial was a reminder that we are far from closure.
Before concluding, Schiff, who co-chairs the Congressional Freedom of the Press Caucus with Chabot, told the audience that he co-founded the caucus “with a congressman from Indiana, a backbencher named Mike Pence.”
The caucus, which sponsored the memorial, was founded in 2006. The world is a starkly different place 13 years later. Schiff’s admonishment was understood, the disappointment implicit. An audible sigh, maybe even a slight chuckle at the irony, emitted within the room. Schiff did not need to say more. Heads shook in disapproval.
When the memorial ended, there was no catharsis. Audience members, many of whom knew Khashoggi personally, stood up and chatted. Friends greeted old friends, introduced new friends, shook hands. But there was no feeling of accomplishment in the air, only the sense that there is much more work to be done.
It’s Friday, January 11. Congress has adjourned for the weekend, ensuring that the current partial government shutdown will be the longest in U.S. history. President Donald Trump has been flirting all week with the idea of declaring a national emergency to unlock funding for his border wall, a move that some Republican senators support:
The State of Play: After a frenzied week of nationally televised speeches, meetings, and press releases, Republicans and Democrats are even more entrenched in their positions. “It’s as though the writers of Groundhog Day, Towering Inferno, and VEEP got together over a drink, and this is what they came up with,” one House Republican aide told Elaina Plott. Meanwhile, the president is defending his use of the word crisis to describe the situation at the southern border.
What Could Happen Next: The consequences of the current standoff will only get worse after today, when many federal workers miss their first paychecks. But Trump has one potent option left on the table: declaring a state of emergency. That the president can circumvent Congress to declare a national emergency shows just how much executive power has expanded.
2020 Watch: In her new book, The Truths We Hold, California Democrat Kamala Harris tries to endear herself to a diverse readership. But the potential presidential contender leaves out important details about her punitive track record as state attorney general, and lacks a soaring political vision, argues Hannah Giorgis.
Snapshot
Government workers and their supporters hold signs during a protest in Boston on Friday. (Michael Dwyer / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticCan Trump Use a National Emergency to Build a Wall? (Bob Bauer)
“The administration’s lawyers cannot even reach these questions, and the president cannot access funding on which the answers turn, unless he can proclaim an emergency.” → Read on.
Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency (John McWhorter)
“Trump’s admirers might see him as a straight shooter, focused on telling us what’s on his mind, too busy doing the right things to bother with niceties. The tragedy is that in his hurried, lexically impoverished blurts, Trump almost daily shows us that what’s on his mind is very little.” → Read on.
$5 Billion Could Buy a Lot of Border Security (Krishnadev Calamur)
“Part of the $5 billion could be spent on technology to detect drugs and weapons, which are concealed in compartments in cars or mixed with legitimate cargo in semi trailers and trains. It could also be used to hire more CBP officers to enhance detection and ease traffic delays caused by the time it takes to inspect vehicles that carry goods into the country.” → Read on.
Trump Sold $35 Million of Real Estate in 2018 (Dan Alexander, Forbes)
Exasperated Democrats Try to Rein in Ocasio-Cortez (Rachael Bade and Heather Caygle, Politico)
Left-Wing Group Creates Fund to Oust Texas Democrat From Congress (David Weigel, The Washington Post)
How the Left Will Learn to Love Trump (Noah Rothman, Commentary)
Is the President Making Middle School Worse? (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times)
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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When Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced their divorce on Twitter after 25 years of marriage, it sparked a big question: How would the couple divvy up their more than $130 billion in assets? Although other divorcing wealthy couples often settle their claims out of court and out of the public eye, writes the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker, this might not be the case for the Bezoses, who also reportedly never signed a premarital agreement. Pinsker talked to family-law attorneys about how the couple might split their money, and how these cases tend to shake out for other ultra-wealthy couples.
Some people tend to put others at ease right away when they walk into a room, while others do the opposite. Psychology researchers believe this is a measurable part of people’s personalities. It’s a trait called “affective presence,” writes the Atlantic senior editor Julie Beck, that shows how someone can make a positive or negative impact on others regardless of their actual feelings.
HighlightsAs anyone who has spent a lot of time with kids know, young children are nearly universally terrible at telling jokes. As the Tumblr page “Kids Write Jokes” documents, the jokes are often absurdist (“A man and a lizard walk into a bar and the barman says, ‘No lizards’”) or complete anti-jokes (“Why did the tiger throw up on the couch? He was sick”). As the Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters writes, these “jokes” say a lot about how children understand humor, and the trial-and-error nature of finding out what’s actually funny.
That men have more leisure time than women has been well-documented by sociologists. The gap is especially pronounced in married couples, as women, even though they’ve entered the workforce, still take care of most of the housework and child care. What are their husbands doing with the extra time? Mostly watching television, according to a government study on people’s schedules. Joe Pinsker talked to researchers who point to reasons why this gap still persists and why television is such a mainstay of men’s idle hours.
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 asks how to move on from a negative review received at work—even though the feedback was vague. Coworkers believe the reader can be “belittling or arrogant,” but the supervisor can’t divulge much else for the sake of anonymity.
Lori’s advice: Take this feedback as an invitation for some deep self-reflection.
When one person perceives another as being arrogant or belittling, often the missing ingredient is empathy. When working with couples, sometimes I’ll say, “Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to?” Even without the specific details, your supervisor is asking you to do just that.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Write to Us“My husband is a senior federal corrections officer at United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia. He has been working up to 18-hour days,” the Atlantic reader Tanya Louise Allen of Morgantown, West Virginia, told us. “We are terrified about what the future may hold. We are a one-income household.”
Have you or others you know been impacted by the shutdown? We want to hear from you. Reply directly to this newsletter, or send us an email with your full name, city, and state to letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line The Family Weekly: Shutdown Impacts.
Lady Gaga lies on an operating table, R. Kelly reaches under her sheet and toward her groin, and Gaga moans. Sedatives kick in, and Kelly and a crew of scantily clad nurses start gyrating on her sleeping body.
Yikes. So went the leaked footage from the never-released music video for Gaga’s 2013 single “Do What U Want.” At the time of its production, a source who’d seen the footage—which was shot by the fashion photographer Terry Richardson, who, like Kelly, had been denying sexual-assault accusations against him for years—told Page Six, “It was literally an ad for rape.”
Now Gaga has removed the song “Do What U Want” from iTunes and other streaming services and apologized for working with Kelly. “What I am hearing about the allegations against R Kelly is absolutely horrifying and indefensible,” she said in a lengthy Twitter note Thursday. “I’m sorry, both for my poor judgment when I was young, and for not speaking out sooner.”
[Read: R. Kelly and the cost of black protectionism]
The apology is a testament to Surviving R. Kelly, Lifetime’s six-part exposé about the girls and women Kelly has allegedly preyed on. While John Legend was the only high-profile musician to disavow Kelly in the documentary, pressure appears to be mounting on the R&B star’s former collaborators. Chance the Rapper and Phoenix apologized for singing with him, Omarion said B2K would no longer perform songs recorded with him, and Future gave a strained nonanswer when asked if he’d work with Kelly again.
Gaga’s statement is an unusual one, though, as is the song she has to answer for. The lyrics of “Do What U Want” are about surrendering to physical domination, and at the time they most clearly referred to the demands of fame: “You don’t own my life but / Do what you want with my body,” was a taunt to the ogling tabloids. Kelly’s involvement fit this theme, Gaga explained back then, in a manner that’s stomach churning to read now. “R. Kelly and I have sometimes very untrue things written about us, so in a way this was a bond between us,” she told reporters who asked about the accusations against him.
Those accusations were, thus, part of the art, coloring its meaning. Kelly’s involvement made it a song not only about fame, but also about alleged sex across creepy power differentials. This wasn’t really even subtext: Gaga and Kelly playacted an Oval Office affair at the American Music Awards. The video had him as a doctor groping a patient. Some muddled commentary on sexual line-crossing was clearly being made. So was an attempt at profitable controversy.
Gaga’s apology now seems to acknowledge that she worked with Kelly not in spite of the allegations against him but because of them. “As a victim of sexual assault myself, I made both the song and video at a dark time in my life, my intention was to create something extremely defiant and provocative because I was angry and still hadn’t processed the trauma that had occurred in my own life,” she wrote. “The song is called ‘Do What U Want (With My Body)’, I think it’s clear how explicitly twisted my thinking was at the time.”
In recent years, Gaga has spoken with increasing frankness about being raped by an unnamed music producer when she was a teen. Her 2015 single “Til It Happens to You” was about surviving assault, and she mentioned the song in her R. Kelly apology. Other singles, such as 2013’s “Swine” and 2016’s “Diamond Heart,” raged at some violative male pig. “Do What U Want,” she now suggests, was all along part of this lineage—the sound of a woman finding solace after the appropriation of her body, in “defiant and provocative” fashion.
But it wasn’t a dare she stood behind for long. Just months after “Do What U Want” debuted, Richardson’s video was shot and then shelved—because of “mismanagement,” Gaga said, but reportedly also to avoid blowback. Shortly after, Gaga recorded an alternate version of the song that swapped in Christina Aguilera’s vocals for Kelly’s. Now, five years after the initial release, she’s disavowing the tune entirely, and inviting perfectly valid criticism for sending royalties Kelly’s way all this time.
It’s a strange story, but also a cautionary one for “provocateurs” now pushing back against #MeToo. Disgraced men have reemerged as unabashed trolls, with Kevin Spacey playing the villain in a home movie and Louis C.K. telling extra-vile jokes. Other entertainers—facing tests of their relevance just as Gaga was in 2013—have talked up their own bravery in allying with dicey figures. Nicki Minaj, for example, cited Gaga’s work with Kelly when justifying her friendship and collaboration with the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, who was convicted of using a minor in a sexual performance. Kanye West rapped lyrics seeming to scoff at #MeToo on a posthumously released song by XXXTentacion, who was accused of brutal domestic violence.
Minaj’s single with 6ix9ine is her only true hit in awhile, and West’s XXX verse marked one of the rare times lately that the content of his music has been responsible for his headlines: signs that doing the “dangerous” thing of teaming with accused predators is a sure way to grab attention. But sooner or later, Gaga might warn them, there’s a price to pay for doing so.
There is still so much to unpack about Lifetime’s docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, a horrifying six-part examination of the sexual-abuse allegations that have followed the superstar singer for more than two decades. The stories of predation told by the women who appear on-screen—some of whom were related to people who worked for Kelly—are vomit-inducing. The heart sinks as one survivor after another describes being manipulated, controlled, and sometimes beaten, by Kelly, whose music career has largely remained in good standing despite the presence of such troubling accusations.
As awful as those accounts are, what’s most haunting is the resignation in these women’s voices. They seem to have arrived at the painful conclusion that regardless of the trauma they had endured, their experience would never matter the way it should have. “No one cared because we were black girls,” the writer Mikki Kendall says in Surviving, speaking to the prolonged indifference to Kelly’s alleged behavior.
While Surviving convincingly argues that Kelly’s celebrity was a significant driving force in helping him establish a protected, predatory pattern, the docuseries picks at an uncomfortable truth that has long existed in the African American community. Black girls and women are often on their own in fighting abuse and misogynoir.
As seen in the series, the black community formed a force field around Kelly, especially during his six-year child-pornography case, which eventually resulted in an acquittal in 2008. Kelly’s ardent supporters within the community seemed to completely dismiss his marriage to the then-15-year-old R&B star Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in 2001. Their marriage was treated as salacious gossip, not abuse.
One of the more uncomfortable moments in Surviving is when footage is shown of Kelly and Aaliyah appearing together on BET’s Video Soul Gold, ironically to promote her 1994 smash debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, which was produced by Kelly and Aaliyah’s uncle, Barry Hankerson. As soon as the two singers are seated, the host, Leslie “Big Lez” Segar, says with a big smile: “Let’s clear something up, because you know I’ve been getting the rundown on the street. Everybody seems to think that y’all are either girlfriend or boyfriend, or cousins, or friends. Let’s just get the record straight.”
[Read: Lady Gaga’s R. Kelly apology is a reminder that abuse isn’t provocative]
There is laughter, and the mood is jovial. No one seems to be thinking, We’re asking a 27-year-old grown man and a 15-year-old child about being in a relationship together. After more uncomfortable laughter, Aaliyah responds nervously: “No, we’re not related. … He’s my best friend … in the whole wide world.”
Kelly has denied the accusations against him for years, and even when there was a video that appeared to show the singer urinating in the mouth of an underage girl, the tape—referred to throughout the docuseries as the “pee tape”—became little more than a punch line. One of the most popular bits ever done on Dave Chappelle’s television show was the Kelly-inspired spoof “Piss on You.” The rapper Macklemore, in his single “Thrift Shop,” raps that he should have washed his mink because it “smells like R. Kelly’s sheets.”
The docuseries shows an army of Kelly’s supporters outside the courtroom during the child-pornography trial in 2008—many of them black girls and women—insisting that he was being unfairly punished. One woman even yelled directly into a camera that they—and you can guess who “they” is—only singled Kelly out because he was black and successful. Even black girls were willingly dismissing the trauma of other black girls.
Kelly, for his part, positioned himself as a victim even in the face of damning and disgusting evidence. Master manipulator that he is, Kelly always seemed to use the fact that African Americans generally remain distrustful of the criminal-justice system to trigger racial resentment as a way to provide cover for his alleged misdeeds.
In 2000, when the Chicago Sun-Times became the first outlet to report on accusations that Kelly was having inappropriate relationships with underage girls, Kelly collaborated with Jay-Z on the song “Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” Jay-Z was also embroiled in his own legal mess at the time, having been accused of stabbing the music executive Lance “Un” Rivera. Kelly boldly sang on the chorus, “Jigga, Kelly, not guilty. Try to charge me but I’m not guilty. I got, all, my mamis.”
Last April, the Women of Color branch of Time’s Up publicly supported the #MuteRKelly movement, a coordinated viral takedown of the singer that was started by Oronike Odeleye and Kenyette Tisha Barnes. The hope was that the campaign would finally put the pressure on Kelly’s record company, RCA, and other business partners to drop him for good. The reckoning had come for Harvey Weinstein. Now, activists hoped, it was Kelly’s turn.
In response to the campaign, Kelly’s camp issued a statement that was clearly designed to rally support by reminding African Americans of racial oppression. The statement read:
Kelly supports the pro-women goals of the Time’s Up movement. We understand criticizing a famous artist is a good way to draw attention to those goals—and in this case, it is unjust and off-target.
We fully support the rights of women to be empowered to make their own choices. Time’s Up has neglected to speak with any of the women who welcome R. Kelly’s support, and it has rushed to judgment without the facts. Soon it will become clear Mr. Kelly is the target of a greedy, conscious and malicious conspiracy to demean him, his family and the women with whom he spends his time.
Kelly’s music is a part of American and African-American culture that should never—and will never—be silenced. Since America was born, black men and women have been lynched for having sex or for being accused of it. We will vigorously resist this attempted public lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture.
Using the l-word—lynching—was a cheap, calculated move. Bill Cosby’s wife, Camille, employed a similar tactic, evoking the l-word after her husband was convicted of sexual assault last April. As did Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 when he called Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment claims a “high-tech lynching.”
As was the case with Hill, black girls and women often pay the price when black protectionism is misguided. Despite Floyd Mayweather’s long history of physically abusing black women—which included a 90-day jail sentence in 2011 for hitting the mother of three of his children—the boxer received more criticism from black people for showing support for Donald Trump than he did for hitting women.
The African American community has struggled to deal with the abuse of black girls and women because addressing this widespread problem ultimately means singling out black men, which many are hesitant to do because they don’t want to become another vehicle that contributes to their destruction.
But a community conditioning itself to accept abuse out of racial solidarity is not only unacceptable, it’s also further jeopardizing the safety and well-being of black women and girls. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, more than 20 percent of black women are raped in their lifetime, a “higher share than among women overall.” Black lives matter. But does that include black girls and women?
Since Surviving aired, many have posited that if any of Kelly’s alleged victims had been white, the criminal-justice system would have dealt with Kelly a long time ago. I’ll take things a step further and hypothesize that if Kelly had been white, the intra-community support for his victims would have looked different too.
Heavy snow across Central Europe, a partial solar eclipse in China, the Procession of the Black Nazarene in Manila, a sheep rescue in Turkey, the 2019 Dakar Rally in Peru, Carnival season in Spain, a Transformer on the streets of Bogota, a frozen harbor in China, the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Christmas fire in Saint Petersburg, and much more
Typically, when a president wants to make policy, he has to negotiate a deal with Congress. Because that hasn’t worked out for President Donald Trump in securing his border wall, he’s tried to find another way to lock down the $5 billion he wants to build it. “I have the absolute right to do national emergency if I want,” he told reporters on Wednesday. By Thursday night, administration officials were reportedly looking at reallocating funds earmarked for national-disaster relief in Texas and Puerto Rico, which were hit by hurricanes last year.
In making this move, Trump would explicitly attempt to circumvent the political process. But he would also be exploiting a long-standing fact about the U.S. government: Executive power has expanded, with Congress’s blessing, to the point that unilateral action like this may in fact be perfectly legal. Democrats are apparently looking into the possibility of a court challenge if Trump moves forward, but they may be banking on an uncertain legal stopgap. Ultimately, the impasse over the alleged national emergency at the border reveals the extent to which the American government now runs on executive authority, and how heavily legislators have come to depend on the courts to referee their political disagreements.
[Read: What the president could do if he declares a state of emergency]
National emergencies, as Americans know them today, are an artifact of another era of expansive executive power. As allegations from the Watergate scandal were closing in on President Richard Nixon, he began declaring national emergencies in response to everything from a postal strike to a trade imbalance, says Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Congress sought to regulate this presidential power, which had also been used liberally by prior presidents, with its 1976 National Emergencies Act.
But as Elizabeth Goitein recently wrote in The Atlantic, this law still left presidents with extensive power and little accountability. So-called emergencies have been left in place “for years on end” without congressional oversight; the president is required to do little to justify any action he takes. Trump’s possible use of the national-emergency mechanism might be novel, but “the national-emergency system has been ripe for abuse for a long time, and has been gently misused for decades,” Goitein told me. “The conversation is long overdue.”
In other words: The most remarkable thing about Trump’s national-emergency solution to the border-wall impasse is not that he is breaking laws, but that he’s working within them. “It’s the first time that he’s actually done something that looks like he talked to a lawyer first,” Scheppele said. “Trump is actually, weirdly, coloring within the lines Congress drew. And that’s an improvement over what he usually does.”
Democrats will likely sue Trump in court if he does in fact declare a national emergency. Legal scholars have debated who would win in that scenario, but “the strategy [Trump is reportedly] proposing,” of using a national emergency to reallocate previously apportioned funds, “is pretty legally sophisticated,” Scheppele said. Under the statute, the president has latitude to determine what a national emergency is, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, and courts have typically deferred to presidential judgment in this area.
[Read: FBI agents say the shutdown is a threat to national security]
In many ways, the reason this situation has escalated to this point is because of Congress’s inability to govern. Over time, lawmakers have increasingly relied on the executive branch—to which it has granted expansive power—to make policy. This is arguably both a cause and an effect of partisan tribalization, which also led to this deadlock: In recent weeks, Republicans have intentionally blocked efforts to reopen the government. In the past decade, despite many tries, legislators haven’t been able to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
In the absence of a functioning legislature, Democrats have become increasingly reliant on courts to fight Trump on everything from the ban on immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries to the proposed removal of transgender military service members. Their success has been mixed. “Everybody wants the law to provide the answer. But the answer here is a political answer,” Scheppele said. “The judges are not that likely to say no here.”
Still, there is the question of facts. Trump’s lawyers may have developed a successful technique for putting the border-wall policy in place, but if they are not acting in good faith, their actions could be damaging in the long run.
“The problem here is that virtually everyone, probably including the president himself, knows that there’s no evidence of any emergency,” says Marty Lederman, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department and a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University. Attempted illegal crossings over the southern border are down. Almost all known or suspected terrorists who are apprehended attempting to enter the country are caught in airports or at sea. Perhaps most importantly, the situation at the border doesn’t fit any plain-language definition of an “emergency”: It’s neither new, nor unanticipated, nor particularly fast-moving. In order to function, America’s legal system depends on lawyers, legislators, and judges to operate in the same fact-based universe. As that gets eroded, so does the power of the law.
[Read: The shutdown is making Senate Republicans squirm]
Trump often acts as a mirror for the American political system, reflecting back its vulnerabilities and excesses. Other presidents, including President Barack Obama, have been accused of massively expanding executive power. But certain checks “kept things from going really bonkers,” says Heidi Kitrosser, a law professor at the University of Minnesota: “norms of relatively responsible behavior, norms of some modicum of fact-finding, etc.”
Without those in place, the U.S. political system is remarkably fragile. And that’s what Trump has revealed. “The seeds of this problem are multifold, and they’ve been in the ground for quite a while,” Kitrosser says. “With the Trump presidency, we’re primed for them to really come to fruition.”
After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about timetables, Donald Trump is keeping his promise—sort of, with adjustments. On Friday, the military announced that it was beginning the process of withdrawing troops from Syria. This a few weeks after the president shocked Washington in December by declaring that he intended to get out, starting “now,” having vowed to do so on the campaign trail more than two years ago.
The fallout from that announcement was significant and bipartisan, and helped to spark the resignation of Trump’s widely respected defense secretary, James Mattis. And even as the Defense Department under Mattis’s successor sets about following the order to withdraw, it leaves behind many of the same problems Trump’s advisers say they’re trying to fix.
[Read: America, meet your (acting) secretary of defense]
Trump’s announcement in December was roundly condemned. U.S. allies in the counter-ISIS coalition, including France and the United Kingdom, were left scrambling to make their own plans. Even critics of the U.S. ground deployment in Syria, which as of now involves around 2,000 troops largely tasked with fighting the Islamic State and training local forces, characterized Trump’s plans as the right policy pursued in the wrong way. Withdrawing too fast would create a vacuum that U.S. foes, including Russia and Iran, would fill. It would fail to consolidate the U.S.-led coalition’s victory over ISIS, leaving the group space to rebuild and rearm. And it would leave some of the best U.S. allies in that battle—the Syrian Kurds, who did the bulk of the ground fighting—vulnerable to a Turkish government just over the border that sees them as terrorists and is bent on crushing their bid for autonomy.
The president ultimately relented to these concerns, at least rhetorically, and revised his “now” promise to something that looked more like a decent interval, one that might leave space to negotiate terms with the powers remaining in Syria. “Now” would instead be a “proper pace,” allowing for continuing the ISIS fight and “doing all else that is prudent and necessary,” in the president’s words. That, The New York Times reported, meant about four months.
[Dominic Tierney: The U.S. isn’t really leaving Syria and Afghanistan]
America’s Syria policy has been a mess ever since the revolution broke out in 2011. Barack Obama retreated from enforcing his so-called red line against the use of chemical weapons when Bashar al-Assad crossed it in 2013, but he later bombed ISIS targets in the country.
It fell to Trump, who was even more blunt than Obama in his skepticism of American involvement in the Middle East, to intervene with air strikes against Assad’s forces twice, retaliating against the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons.
All the while, though, the primary American mission in Syria was to defeat ISIS, and with declarations that the group had been crushed and some 98 percent of its territory retaken, the question naturally arose about what U.S. troops were still doing there.
But if anything, their mission looked set to expand. In September, National-Security Adviser John Bolton told reporters that the United States wasn’t leaving Syria “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” Trump advisers such as James Jeffrey, the special representative for Syria engagement, and Brett McGurk, then the special envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, kept reinforcing the message into December: As long as Iran was in Syria—which seemed an indefinite timeline, given the entrenched presence there of Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and how much Iran invested in keeping Assad in power even as its own economy suffered—the United States would be there to confront it.
Except that no one convinced the president to sign on. About a week after McGurk told reporters at the State Department that it would “obviously” be “reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now,’” the president posted a video to his Twitter feed saying pretty much that. McGurk resigned soon after Mattis did.
The bipartisan outcry that ensued forced the president to revise his announcement, again on Twitter. His advisers were dispatched to briefing calls and to Middle East reassurance tours, where they claimed that they were saying nothing inconsistent with the president’s own changing statements. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s effort to manage the dissonance was to say the goal hadn’t really changed, just the tactics being used to pursue it. He continued to insist that the United States aimed to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria. If there was no obvious way for the United States to do this with 2,000 troops, it is even more unclear how the U.S. will do so now.
Within hours of those remarks came the news that the withdrawal had already begun. This even though Bolton was still at work trying to get the Turks to promise not to attack the Kurds—a position that likely spurred Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to cancel a planned meeting with him this week (Erdogan claimed the cancellation was due to local elections). A U.S. defense official speaking to The Wall Street Journal summed it up: “We don’t take orders from John Bolton.”
[Read: In the Middle East, is Trump the anti-Obama or Obama 2.0?]
And still there was Pompeo, out on a limb in the Middle East, having just given a major address in Cairo warning that “when America retreats, chaos often follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds.”
Now the retreat is underway, though administration officials have so far refused to give a timeline about when it will actually be complete. It could be months, and conceivably a smaller force could stay in Syria for years. So far the military is still moving assets to the region to help with the logistics of removing troops and equipment.
Withdrawal or not, the morass in Syria remains, along with all the forces that Mattis had argued should keep the United States there. Pompeo may yet see his “chaos” warning come true.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump pledged to reduce illegal immigration from Central America, and since taking office he has paired that vow with professed concerns about not just the flow of asylum seekers into the United States, but the smuggling of drugs and the potential entry of terrorists, too. That, in his telling, is why he wants $5 billion from Congress for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
But what if there were other—better—ways of achieving the president’s goals than spending $5 billion on a wall? Here are a few possibilities.
Fix the Asylum SystemThe surge of asylum seekers from Central America has put further strain on an already stretched system that processes their claims, resulting in what is now a years-long backlog.
“The system is neither fair to legitimate claims nor timely,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., institute that studies migration.
[Read: A functional immigration system would look nothing like America’s]
An overhaul would involve hiring more judges and lawyers associated with the asylum process. This would reduce the backlog, allowing quicker deportations of those applicants whose claims have been denied. (At present, they are allowed to work legally in the United States until their case is heard by an immigration judge, which can take two to three years.) It would also have the effect of allowing Customs and Border Protection, the agency that first encounters the asylum seekers and more and more is being tasked with dealing with them, to focus on its core mission: “protecting the public from dangerous people and materials.”
“You’re not going to be able to ‘immigration judge’ your way out of the issue, but it’s going to help,” Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors restricted immigration to the United States, told me.
Upgrade Ports of EntryTrump has called the southern border a pipeline for “meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl.” But it is unlikely that a wall will deter drug smugglers. “Drug smugglers have more than $5 billion to throw at the problem,” Theresa Brown, who studies immigration at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told me. “They will find another way.”
In fact, the overwhelming majority of drugs, weapons, migrants, and criminals cross the U.S.-Mexico border through one of 330 designated ports of entry between the two countries.
Part of the $5 billion could be spent on technology to detect drugs and weapons, which are concealed in compartments in cars or mixed with legitimate cargo in semi trailers and trains. It could also be used to hire more CBP officers to enhance detection and ease traffic delays caused by the time it takes to inspect vehicles that carry goods into the country.
Tighten Checks Between Ports of EntryThe George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations spent billions on technology and personnel along the nearly 2,000-mile border to detect migrants crossing illegally and, for the most part, that appears to have worked. Attempts to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border fell from 1.6 million in the 2000 fiscal year to 400,000 in the 2018 fiscal year, the latest period for which data are available.
“If you look at what’s been done on the enforcement side, it is more robust and effective than it’s been before in U.S. history,” said Edward Alden, who researches immigration and other topics at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’re doing pretty much everything that can be done.”
[Gerald S. Dickinson: What Trump can and can’t do to get his border wall]
Indeed, there are few places for migrants to hide in between the ports of entry. These areas are vast and have little physical infrastructure. Existing monitoring technology, including sensors and drones, allows CBP agents to track migrants for days before they are apprehended. Additional tech could enhance the detection of migrants to provide even better results. More CBP personnel could also be assigned to combat human smugglers who often bring migrants across the border.
It is virtually impossible to stop all illegal crossings. The amount spent on this effort depends very much on how important politicians say illegal immigration is to them—and, perhaps more importantly, what level of illegal crossings is acceptable to them.
Barriers (Like a Wall)There is already more than 600 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico frontier. Barriers are effective not so much in stopping migrants, but in slowing them down. They work especially well in urban areas, where migrants can hide after crossing in order to avoid detection.
[Peter Beinart: Why Trump is trying to create a crisis]
Fencing along the border has been shown to be fairly effective in places such as El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, California. Any comprehensive plan to address border security would likely include a barrier, which in some parts of the frontier would be, yes, a wall. But a $5 billion wall between ports of entry is unlikely to have the impact the president says it will: stopping drugs, criminals, and illegal immigration.
Ultimately, funding for such issues lies with Congress. Border security and immigration have become hot-button issues in the United States, rendering a serious debate over priorities along the frontier with Mexico virtually impossible.
“There’s definitely a conversation to be had about what is actually needed to secure the border,” the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Brown said. “Unfortunately, we’re having a conversation just about a wall.”
The partial government shutdown that began during the quiet of the holidays is about to become the longest in the nation’s history. And on Friday, it will start truly hitting home for hundreds of thousands of federal employees: For the first time, their scheduled paychecks will not arrive.
The missed payments will represent a turning point in the three-week standoff, inflicting a damaging financial burden on federal workers and deepening the impact on the broader economy. But it would only get worse from there if the impasse dragged on indefinitely. A shutdown of unprecedented length—one that, in President Donald Trump’s words, could last “months, or even years”—would have unprecedented adverse effects on national life, reaching corners of American society that have previously viewed the constant partisan budget fights in Washington as an abstraction.
Already, the shutdown has shuttered many national parks and museums, cut off key sources of income for government contractors, delayed payments of housing subsidies, and slowed or stopped routine public-health inspections of food and environmental hazards.
If the shutdown were to continue for weeks or months, those effects would cascade, and the outcomes would be bleak: Halted payments of food stamps could force many of the 38 million people who rely on them into even deeper poverty, while delays in housing assistance could force scores of others out of their homes. Most of the federal court system will soon run out of money, and delays in the processing of home and farm loans could extend the shutdown’s impact throughout the country. Forcing hundreds of thousands of airport personnel, federal-prison guards, and other law-enforcement officers to work without pay for weeks or even months on end would further strain the system and could lead to an exodus of civil servants to the private sector in search of paying jobs, or into the streets in protest. And the ensuing economic instability could send the stock market into another tumble.
“When you have a shutdown, things start to break down pretty rapidly after you get a couple weeks in,” said Sam Berger, a former senior Obama-administration official who helped manage the 2013 government shutdown at the Office of Management and Budget. “Big programs start to run out of money. Things that people depend on run out of money.”
For those reasons, the prospect of major parts of the federal government staying shut for too much longer is virtually inconceivable—even when both parties have dug in as stubbornly as they are now. “Come February, no one will have the political will,” Berger predicted. “I don’t think this is going to be tenable over the long term, because the impacts just grow and grow and grow.” He told me that during the 16-day impasse over the Affordable Care Act in 2013, “we never anticipated a months-long shutdown, because we looked at what will happen.”
The chances that this parade of horribles actually comes to pass remain relatively small. As Berger suggested, mounting political pressure will likely cause one side or the other to fold before the worst happens. Senate Republicans have begun to waver on Trump’s insistence on funding for a border wall, and a presidential declaration of a national emergency to build the barrier without congressional approval could shift the fight to the courts and allow the government to reopen.
Meanwhile, some of the Trump administration’s recent moves signal that it would try to blunt the shutdown’s most painful consequences—efforts that could shield some Americans from its impact but that could stretch the strictures of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the executive branch from spending funds without appropriations from Congress. Earlier this week, the administration announced that it would dip into visitor-entrance fees to keep many national parks open and at least partially staffed, following widely circulated images of overflowing trash cans on the National Mall and other iconic locales. The Internal Revenue Service said that it would recall furloughed employees to process tax refunds that would otherwise have been delayed. And although funding for food stamps was due to run out at the end of January, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced that the department had found a way to cover the program through the end of February.
“We’re trying to mitigate the impact of the shutdown on everyday Americans instead of the opposite, which I’ve actually seen in the past,” Vice President Mike Pence told reporters on Monday. “And we’ll continue to do that in a manner consistent with the law.”
How much wiggle room does the administration have? Quite a bit, said Chris Lu, a former deputy secretary of labor in the Obama administration who is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. There is general agreement that the government has a fair amount of leeway to define what are essential services that need to continue for public health and safety. And paradoxically, that threshold could lead to more of the government reopening even if the shutdown continues. Lu gave the example of routine public-safety inspections on food. If they are stopped for a week or two, the impact would be minimal. But if they’re stopped for more than a month, the administration could determine that this in and of itself constitutes a threat to public health, leading them to restart even if Congress doesn’t act.
Every federal agency comes up with a detailed shutdown plan, but each department retains some discretion in determining what shuts down and what doesn’t, who works and who stays home. “A lot of this is fungible,” Lu told me. “A lot of this is a gray area as to what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable to use funds for.
“There’s always pots of money you can move around,” Lu added. “The question is how aggressive you want to be with that, and how much Democrats really want to check that.”
If it’s in the Trump administration’s interest to lessen the impact of the shutdown, it’s not necessarily in the interest of congressional Democrats to exacerbate it. After all, Democrats in the House have passed legislation to reopen the government—they’re on record trying to appropriate money for the administration to spend.
Perversely, Lu told me, efforts to mitigate a shutdown—both now and in previous years—tend to make them last longer. The less pain there is, the more tolerable they are—giving lawmakers and presidential administrations room to hem, haw, and delay. “If you really had a hard-and-fast rule that no appropriations means nothing can open, you would never have a shutdown at all, because the consequences would be so dire,” Lu said. “Because we’ve mitigated the worst negative impacts of a shutdown, I think we’ve hidden from the American people all the many ways that government touches their lives.
“In some ways,” he said, “that makes shutdowns easier.”
The Oscars have always been the guardians of mainstream film taste, for better and for worse. The definition of a “prestige movie,” a term often deployed with derision, is a film made to attract the votes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and that thus often tries to win the broadest consensus possible from a group that trends old, white, and male. This approach explains how Best Picture winners such as Driving Miss Daisy and Crash became eternal punch lines: They were two middlebrow films with myopic perspectives on race relations in America that were unfortunately enshrined in history thanks to both their Oscar wins and their respective defeats of better-remembered projects such as Do the Right Thing and Brokeback Mountain.
In the past few years, we’ve seen Oscar consensus begin to shift. Last year’s Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water, triumphed partly because it wasn’t as critically polarizing as other favorites such as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or Dunkirk. But it was still a gory, R-rated, sci-fi film about a romance between a woman and a fish man—the kind of thing that would have struggled to even attract nominations in years prior. In general, the trend of recent Oscar winners has pointed toward AMPAS embracing more boundary-pushing storytelling from exciting auteurs, with wins for films such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, Alejandro González-Iñárritu’s Birdman, and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. Perhaps that hint of progress is what makes the steamrolling success of Green Book all the more confounding.
Directed and co-written by Peter Farrelly, Green Book is a movie with the same blinkered blandness that defines those derided Oscar favorites of yesteryear. It’s a tale of a “true friendship” in the early 1960s between fast-talking wise guy Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (played by Viggo Mortensen) and the guarded but brilliant pianist Don “Doc” Shirley (Mahershala Ali). Though the particulars of its true-story script have been challenged by Shirley’s family, Green Book is pitching itself to audiences as a movie about the unlikely and astonishing bond between these two men—one a working-class, Italian American bouncer, and the other a well-educated, African American virtuoso.
[Read: The Golden Globes just threw a wrench into the Oscars race]
Initial buzz marked Green Book as a potential word-of-mouth sensation. It won the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award, a solid bellwether for Oscar attention, and got a sterling A+ CinemaScore, a metric that gauges how well a movie meets audience’s expectations. But Green Book has actually underperformed at the box office, making only $36 million in eight weeks of release. That’s less than Widows ($42 million) and Hereditary ($44 million), and only slightly more than Annihilation ($32 million), three challenging, critically acclaimed genre films that are being totally ignored this awards season.
So why is Green Book still barreling toward Oscar success? It keeps scoring major guild nominations—from the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the Writers Guild, and two from the Screen Actors Guild. It received seven Critics’ Choice nods and four BAFTA nods, and, of course, the film won three Golden Globes, including Best Picture (Musical or Comedy), last weekend. When Oscar nominations are announced on January 22 (voting began January 7 and ends a week later), Green Book will almost certainly be shortlisted for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Lead Actor, Supporting Actor, and possibly a few technical awards.
The easiest explanation for the impressive awards trajectory of Green Book (relative to its middling ticket sales) is its acting. As my colleague Christopher Orr noted in his review, the film is entirely elevated by the work of Mortensen and Ali, who have tremendous chemistry together and fully commit to the “opposites attract” notion of Tony and Don’s friendship. The actors manage to sell a premise that feels flimsier the more it’s scrutinized: Don is helping Tony understand that black people exist beyond whatever crude stereotypes he might imagine, while Tony is also helping Don … loosen up a little and not take life so seriously.
[Read: ‘Green Book’: A flimsy tale elevated by two great performances]
The stakes are tremendously lopsided, which Farrelly himself acknowledged in a Vanity Fair interview about the film. “Doc Shirley didn’t need a savior,” the director said. “Yes, Tony Lip got him out of some earthy problems, but Doc Shirley saved Tony Lip’s soul. He changed him. He made him a better human being.” That point of view is reflected by the film, which gives over more storytelling time to Tony (the film begins and ends with him and his family) and was co-written by his son Nick Vallelonga.
As Green Book continues to rack up awards success, Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga have both had to contend with revelations of past behavior. Farrelly—who is still best known as one-half of a brotherly directing duo (along with Bobby Farrelly) that specialized in ribald comedies such as Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary—apparently used to have a predilection for flashing his penis at people to shock them, including the Something About Mary star Cameron Diaz. “True. I was an idiot,” Peter Farrelly said in a statement about the old reports. “I did this decades ago and I thought I was being funny and the truth is I’m embarrassed and it makes me cringe now. I’m deeply sorry.”
Nick Vallelonga, meanwhile, has received criticism for an old tweet, sent in 2015, to Donald Trump’s account, about the now-president’s campaign claim that footage existed of people cheering the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, “where you have large Arab populations.” The claim has been thoroughly refuted, but Vallelonga agreed with it at the time, tweeting “100% correct. Muslims in Jersey City cheering when towers went down. I saw it, as you did, possibly on local CBS news.” Vallelonga has since deleted his Twitter account, with a representative telling Indiewire, “Not sure if any comment is actually needed here.” But Vallelonga released a longer statement on Thursday, apologizing to the team that made Green Book; to “all members of the Muslim faith,” including Ali; and to Vallelonga’s late father: “I promise this lesson is not lost on me. Green Book is a story about love, acceptance, and overcoming barriers, and I will do better.”
Political debates and outside controversies often bubble up as part of the sharp-elbowed nature of Oscar season. Vallelonga’s statement frames the reaction to the 9/11 tweet as a teachable moment, one in line with Green Book’s narrative of forgiveness and growth. Yet the original 2015 comment also speaks to the concerns that many critics, and some of Shirley’s family, had over the film’s storytelling limits. As Vallelonga’s apology indicates, there’s a particular lack of awareness and empathy suggested by the tweet, which feels especially charged given that the star of the movie was the first Muslim actor to ever win an Oscar. But the fracas over the tweet is perhaps a useful reminder that while Green Book is presented as a story of friendship that transcended perspectives, the film cares most about one character’s point of view—and redemption. The same could be said of many past Oscar winners, which is a reality that Academy voters might consider going forward.
When Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer finished their rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on Tuesday, it was not entirely clear what Democrats were hoping to accomplish. The dual remarks seemed largely like a rehash of familiar talking points.
But their effectiveness emerged Thursday when President Trump traveled to McAllen, Texas. On Tuesday, Pelosi, the House speaker, had said that “President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage and stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.” Schumer, the Senate minority leader, added, “This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear, and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration.”
[Read: What was the point of Trump’s Oval Office address?]
While reporters like yours truly puzzled over the point of the speeches, Trump heard it loud and clear. “Democrats have refused to listen to the border agents, and they say this is a manufactured crisis,” the president said during a roundtable about border security at the border between Texas and Mexico. He continued:
That’s their new sound bite. All over. I turn the television on—you know, I call it the opposition party. It’s called the fake-news media. And what happens is every network has “manufactured crisis. This is a manufactured crisis.” Every one of them. It’s like they, you know, send out to everybody, “Let’s use this sound bite today.”
Trump is wrong about the coordination, but as for the networks airing the line, that’s how sound bites work, as no one should know better than Trump: A politician says something, and then the press covers it. For more than three years, first as a candidate and then as the president, Trump has been the primary beneficiary of this dynamic, even (or especially) when he says things that are plainly false or offensive. And because the media’s foremost bias is toward novelty and flash, he’s been helped by his own knack for grabbing attention, as well as the diffusion of the Democratic Party, which has had no single leading voice.
Now Pelosi serves as the de facto head of the Democratic Party, and that is allowing her to play a role in setting the agenda, much to Trump’s chagrin. The result is that the president seemed on Thursday to be fighting the battle on Democrats’ territory, litigating whether the crisis was “manufactured,” rather than on his own, the purported need for a border wall.
“So it’s a manufactured—but it’s not,” Trump said. “What is manufactured is the use of the word manufactured. It is manufactured by them.”
Other speakers at the roundtable dutifully plied the same ground.
“To those of you who say this is a manufactured crisis, it’s a manufactured cover-up by your opposition. We had 500,000 people apprehended crossing the border from San Diego to Brownsville last year,” said Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Trump ally.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who often struggles with facts, opted instead for dudgeon. “For those who would like to put their heads in the sand and pretend it’s manufactured, it’s not only an insult and disturbing to those who lost loved ones, but it’s an insult to our country,” she said.
[Read: A frenzied week in Washington produced absolutely no progress]
The Democrats’ line about a manufactured crisis serves to take some heat off freshman members who are reportedly somewhat nervous over the ongoing shutdown. Many of them come from swing districts, and they didn’t intend for their first weeks in Congress to be consumed with a shutdown. It’s more advantageous to point a finger at Trump for fabricating a problem than it is to debate the merits of the wall, since few Americans really want to build the barrier.
This doesn’t mean Democrats will win the shutdown fight politically. Polling has consistently shown that more Americans blame Trump than they do Democrats, but the numbers haven’t shifted much over the three weeks the government has been partially closed.
Pelosi has many political skills, but public speaking isn’t her forte. She’ll never be as quick with a sound bite as Trump—almost no one is. But the fact that Trump is so focused on rebutting the “manufactured crisis” sound bite shows how winning the House has given the Democrats a more level playing field.
Depending on whom you ask, Kamala Harris is either a hip Hillary Clinton or a political Beyoncé. Since the election of Donald Trump, the 54-year-old California senator has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most visible, viral faces. In addition to speaking frequently about the ills of discrimination of any sort, the former prosecutor has of late courted a liberal fandom—and many retweets—with a series of anti-establishment displays.
In January 2017, immediately following news of the president’s travel ban, Harris denounced the directive as anti-Muslim and circulated a petition against its adoption. That July, she was repeatedly interrupted during a contentious exchange with then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions as part of the Senate’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. GIFs of the weary-looking senator became a digital shorthand for women’s frustrations with workplace belittling. She was widely GIFed again in September 2018, after doggedly questioning the embattled nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
In other words, Harris—the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who met, as she often says, “in the civil-rights movement” while attending graduate school in Berkeley—is becoming central to the Democratic Party’s attempts to woo young, hip voters, especially those of color. Like the 29-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Harris responds to the administration’s daily onslaughts with an energizing mix of frustration, tech-savvy wit, and determination. She is at once real and really profitable. There have been campaign whispers, to be sure, but also T-shirts, travel mugs, and phone cases.
The most recent publicity tool in the senator’s arsenal, however, is a more traditional offering. On Tuesday, Harris released her second book, titled The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. The memoir had been anticipated as unofficial evidence of the Democrat’s long-rumored intention of running for the presidency in 2020. At a book signing event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening, amid further rumors of her candidacy, the senator walked onstage to Tupac’s seminal anthem “California Love.” But unlike Harris’s many viral #resistance moments and meticulous snapshots of relatability, the memoir itself is a meandering work that lacks verve. More significantly, given far more than 280 characters to deliver a cohesive message, Harris doesn’t meaningfully reconcile her punitive track record as a California prosecutor with her more recent activist-adjacent positioning as a national Democratic darling.
The Truths We Hold traces Harris’s life and entrance into political office in 10 chapters. The book offers anecdotes meant to endear her to a diverse (or #woke) readership as well as glimpses into Harris’s political worldview; the resultant mix is somewhat muddled. Recounting her years as a district attorney, for instance, she tells a fairly cringeworthy story in which she responded to colleagues’ racist assumptions about an arrested man—his music taste was deemed evidence of his gang involvement—by interjecting that she, too, had a “tape of that rapper.” It’s the kind of ostensibly anti-racist gotcha! that might easily earn a “yass!” gif in response if it were a tweet, but doesn’t translate to any substantive shift in either policy or perception. (It’s also not a new anecdote.)
On the same page, she writes that she knew she’d run for district attorney in order to be there for both “the victims of crimes committed and the victims of a broken criminal justice system.” Harris then explains her signature approach to what she calls “progressive” prosecution:
For me, to be a progressive prosecutor is to understand—and act on—this dichotomy. It is to understand that when a person takes another’s life, or a child is molested, or a woman raped, the perpetrators deserve severe consequences. That is one imperative of justice. But it is also to understand that fairness is in short supply in a justice system that is supposed to guarantee it. The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.
It is, according to many of her supporters, an admirable goal. And for a career prosecutor, it’s a fairly understandable worldview. But the lofty language is a tough fit with Harris’s policy track record. As others have noted, her tenure as California’s so-called top cop reveals a series of choices that are often incongruous with the social-justice-inflected rhetoric of The Truths We Hold.
Under District Attorney Kamala Harris, the overall felony-conviction rate in San Francisco rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006, the highest seen in a decade. Many of the convictions accounting for that increase stemmed from drug-related prosecutions, which also soared, from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006. As California’s attorney general, Harris pushed a punitive initiative that treated truancy among elementary schoolers as a crime for which parents could be jailed. In 2014, she attempted to block the release of nonviolent second-strike offenders from overcrowded state prisons on the grounds that their paroling would result in prisons losing an important labor pool.
The following year, she defended the California state prosecutor Robert Murray after he falsified a defendant’s confession that was used to threaten a sentence of life in prison, and sided with state prison leaders in contesting a transgender inmate’s bid for gender-confirmation surgery. Twice in 2016, she brought criminal charges related to human trafficking against Backpage.com, an online classified website frequently used by sex workers, and later, as a senator, she co-sponsored federal bills that led to the site’s seizure, a move that sex workers and activists said threatens their survival.
In considering the gaps between this track record and the smoothed-over platitudes of The Truths We Hold, one story Harris tells is particularly instructive. Early in the book, she recounts an anecdote from a summer she spent as an intern with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in 1988. “I’ll never forget the time my supervisor was working on a case involving a drug bust. The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been swept up in the dragnet,” she writes. “Everything was on the line for this woman, her family, her livelihood, her standing in her community, her dignity, her liberty. And yet she’d done nothing wrong.”
In this story (which she also shared for a New York Times Magazine profile in which she repeated the anecdote about her rap tape), Harris considers a number of factors about the woman’s life that might mean a weekend spent in jail would have life-altering consequences: Does she work weekends? Is she going to have to explain to her employer where she was? Is she going to get fired? Of the woman’s children, Harris wonders: Do they know she’s in jail? The story concludes with the young Harris desperately lobbying a judge to review the innocent woman’s case that same day; fortunately, “with the pound of a gavel, just like that, she was free.”
Though helping to free this woman was indeed a victory, it’s telling that Harris carves out narrative space for this “defining moment” in her own career without dedicating any to the fate or backstories of the others arrested as part of the raid. The vanquishing of a fairly straightforward injustice is a compelling read, but it betrays the circumstances that propelled the anecdote’s other actors into the same courthouse. Harris never offers specifics of the larger story, and disappointingly, the text never questions their innate criminality.
Harris acknowledges in The Truths We Hold that drug crimes were and are among the most disproportionately prosecuted offenses. In her home state and across the country, these kinds of raids tend to target black and Latino populations, upending lives and communities with little evidence of harm committed. Harris’s 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, did little to incorporate the existential threat that these sorts of arrests posed to communities of color. “Virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat,” she wrote then. “This is as true in economically poor areas as in wealthy ones.” It’s an assumption with a glaring oversight.
In The Truths We Hold, the senator allots more space to those who may not “feel safer,” drawing rhetorically from recent activism, including the Black Lives Matter movement. She notes the deep bias baked into policing systems and affirms that the law does not treat all people equally. She endorses the legalization of marijuana (with caveats), despite having literally laughed at the thought in 2014, when her Republican opponent ran to the left of her on the issue. But Harris still writes about the routine upheavals of drug arrests with detached, uninspired prose (“The cases were as easy to prove as they were tragic to charge”) that can read as more facile than humane. A forthright explanation of her intellectual evolution, especially on criminal justice, would have more organically bridged the gap between the two texts.
The campaign book, of course, is a tricky text: A successful one must employ a nearly impossible mix of authentic backstory, humble retelling of career accomplishments, and accessible, soaring messaging about the nation’s future. Former President Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream is among the best of this genre: The 2006 book wove a convincing-enough narrative about the then senator’s political vision, but it also established him as a gifted prosaist. The Truths We Hold, by contrast, lacks the literary finesse that distinguished Obama as a memoirist and endeared him to voters. Instead of weaving a political vision into the biography of its author, it assembles itself rather like a campaign pamphlet.
Like Obama, Harris has already entered near-uncharted territory in her political rise. As the first South Asian American and only the second African American woman to serve as a senator, she has attracted both bigoted ire and something more slippery, a kind of political fetishization by virtue of her identities. In the contemporary landscape of liberal politics, Harris, along with the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Representative Maxine Waters of California, has become an avatar of the simplistic “Listen to black women!” rallying cry that emerged after postelection polling revealed black women to be the voting bloc most consistent in their support of Hillary Clinton.
By this logic, it is tempting for some to view Harris’s marginalized identities as evidence enough of her progressive politics. Throughout The Truths We Hold, Harris fans this ideological beatification without deeply interrogating its roots or its consequences. For those already inclined to find her highly tweetable brand of #resistance rhetoric appealing, the memoir offers up palatably anti-establishment quotes for possible tote-bag screen-printing. If only it presented a holistic political foundation instead.
In response to these past few items — “Let Them Eat Vacation Days,” “3 Simple Facts About the Shutdown,” and “Yet Another Reason to End the Shutdown” — furloughed federal workers write in about their experiences.
Vacation days aren’t the bonanza that they may seem. Last night the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, said in apparent seriousness that furloughed federal workers were “in a sense better off,” since they were in effect on “vacation” now and would eventually get back pay.
One veteran federal worker, who is also a military veteran, disagrees:
It's worth noting that even by Mr. Hassett's logic there's going to be workers that are considerably worse off, because an awful lot of federal workers carry "use-or-lose" vacation (I always did).
One of our friends did, in fact, have a lot of vacation scheduled for January that she was forced to take. Now she's furloughed instead -- and if the furlough ends in the next month, has to take that vacation right away. Which means she'll probably just go to work "on vacation" to clear out a backlog -- she's not getting "free" vacation days, she's getting screwed out of them.
Yes, it’s complicated. Another worker to similar effect:
Because the leave year ended January 5, and there is a maximum number of annual leave hours that can be carried forward, some of those furloughed employees were probably using "use or lose" leave. I am unsure whether the furlough would justify restoration of that leave for all those employees.
(My particular agency is permitting restoration, but that appears to be a agency decision, rather than a broadly-applicable OPM or OMB decision.)
So these employees might not have both leave and pay for furloughed time; they might have to forfeit the leave they were scheduled to take, and to suffer weeks without pay and without knowing whether they will ever get paid, before possibly being paid.
In addition, furlough is a non-pay status, and lengthy periods of non-pay status reduces a number of benefits. For example, accrual of annual leave stops after 80 hours in non-pay status. See this paper.
In my agency, people scheduled to retire during the furlough period are at risk of losing their final (time off) performance award, and having no option for restoration.
I've personally lost some leave hours of a yet another type, which also have no restoration provision.
“Our only mistake.” A federal employee on the lesson that this episode is teaching:
In "3 Simple Facts About the Shutdown", you conclude by saying: “But it’s hard to imagine a decent case for knowingly inflicting damage on hundreds of thousands of public servants, who have nothing whatsoever to do with this issue and whose only mistake was to have chosen a vulnerable line of work.”
Showing my bias [as a federal employee], I would suggest that the public servants’ only mistake was to commit themselves to public service, swearing an oath to bear true faith and allegiance the Constitution of the United States.
Had we chosen to put party before the Constitution, we could be welcomed (and currently paid) in the legislative branch or some other partisan position; had we chosen to put mammon before the Constituion, we could be paid in the private sector. It was our choice to put the Constitution and the country first that made us pawns.
But, perhaps you are right in saying that "a vulnerable line of work" is working to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty".
Twilight zone. The experience of past shutdowns:
As a retired Foreign Service officer, I deeply appreciate your attention to the current shutdown.
I served through three of the previous ones, in 1995-1996 and in 2013. I was the only person in my office required to come in during the two earlier shutdowns, in order to resolve a war involving a country with which I was working.
It was a deeply stressful time; after all, one can't pay today's mortgage with next month's money. And it was also a very lonely one; the darkened halls at the State Department were so empty that as I walked down them, the motion sensors would light each block of hallway ahead of me, like something out of the "Twilight Zone."
The memory of that experience is ugly, as will be the memories of federal employees suffering similarly now. They and the country they serve deserve better.
Agreed.
Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET on January 11.
On the afternoon of the failed launch, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and Dmitry Rogozin of Roscosmos had only known each other for a few days. Less than one mile from the launchpad, the heads of the American and Russian space agencies watched as the Soyuz system lofted the crew, one man from each country, into the blue sky over Kazakhstan.
But then, inside the crew capsule, alarms blared and emergency lights flashed. Instead of climbing into space, the capsule began to plunge back to Earth. In those stressful moments—before the capsule parachuted gently to the ground, before rescue crews arrived, before the would-be space travelers reunited with their family—each official considered what he might say if the failed launch ended in tragedy.
“If we’re going to strengthen the partnership with the United States and Russia on space exploration, I think this was probably one way to do it,” Bridenstine told me later, after he had returned to the United States. “Everybody became a lot closer on this day.”
[Read: An interview with the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine]
On the ground, the United States and Russia might have conflicting interests, but in space, 250 miles above Earth, they get along nicely. On the International Space Station, American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts share meals, routines, and a stunning view of our little planet. That same spirit of cooperation characterized the handling of the failed launch in October—the quick rescue response, the careful investigation of hardware, the eventual return to spaceflight less than two months later—and after Bridenstine’s visit to Russia, he sought to reciprocate the invitation. Bridenstine had addressed Rogozin’s alma mater, Moscow State University, and he suggested that in early 2019 Rogozin deliver a speech at his own, Rice University in Ohio.
But even in a bromance as sunny as this one, sometimes politics finds a way to creep in, and Bridenstine rescinded his invitation. And according to Russian media, Rogozin isn’t happy about it.
Some current members of Congress and former national-security officials, mostly Democrats, saw the proposed visit as a mistake, Politico reported, and more lawmakers soon joined the chorus of opposition. The issue: Rogozin is not a typical space-agency official. He’s an outspoken nationalist and a former deputy prime minister to Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for his involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Those strictures bar Rogozin from entering the United States, and here was Bridenstine, inviting Rogozin to an American campus and telling Russian media that he had convinced the Treasury Department to temporarily lift the sanctions.
“Rice University is located on the same street as the Johnson Space Flight Center, so I think everything will work out,” Bridenstine said while in Russia, according to TASS, the state-run Russian news agency.
Earlier in 2018, another sanctioned Russian official, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign-intelligence service, had come to Washington for a secretive meeting with then–CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Democratic lawmakers protested, accusing Donald Trump’s administration of undermining U.S. policy. But a meeting about space exploration must have seemed less fraught than one on counterterrorism. According to The Washington Post, Bridenstine, a former member of Congress himself, said he didn’t consult with the White House about inviting—and disinviting—Rogozin. He had hoped they could have “a strong working relationship that was kept separate from geopolitics,” he said.
[Read: When will astronauts launch from U.S. soil again?]
Space exploration is indeed insulated at times from politics, but it is not immune. In the middle of the 20th century, when nations began trying to reach orbit, space policy was foreign policy, thanks to the two-faced nature of the effort; rockets could launch both science instruments and bombs. But even as the focus of space policy has shifted to scientific discovery, world events and political changes have often derailed the United States’ and Russia’s best intentions.
As early as 1962, at the height of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev exchanged letters about working together on uncomplicated space matters, such as weather satellites. But earnest cooperation didn’t emerge until 1970, after Americans had landed on the moon and there was little left to compete over. President Richard Nixon had a new policy of closer relations with the Soviet Union, and he thought an international space project would be a political winner. (The world may have Hollywood to thank for this, too: According to historians, the Soviets warmed up to the idea after U.S. officials invoked Marooned, the 1969 film in which Soviet cosmonauts help rescue stranded American astronauts.)
Soon, talks led to a high-flying maneuver between American and Soviet spacecraft in 1975. Two capsules launched 10,000 miles apart, rendezvoused in space, and locked onto each other somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Astronauts and cosmonauts on either side opened the hatches and exchanged handshakes.
The mission was heralded as a historic moment of unity between spacefaring nations, and plans for collaboration picked up. Officials discussed the possibility of docking an American launch vehicle, the Space Shuttle, to the Russian space station, Salyut. But the election of Jimmy Carter slowed these plans. Unlike his predecessor, Carter disliked the idea of exchanging technical information. Then, in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and by the next summer the U.S. government was boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow instead of brainstorming space missions.
Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union did the most significant partnerships begin to take shape. In the early 1990s, the United States sought to build an international space station and invited Russia to join, along with Japan, Canada, and nine European nations. It was a self-serving decision; while showing support for a country in crisis, the United States would also gain access to impressive space technology, reduce costs, and employ former Soviet scientists and engineers who might otherwise work for enemy governments. That politically motivated choice, though, has led to decades of productive collaboration. Today the International Space Station has been continuously occupied, by rotating crews from both nations, for 18 years.
[Read: If everyone left the International Space Station]
The American-Russian partnership was tested in the spring of 2014, though. After Russia’s unlawful annexation of Crimea, the United States cut Putin out of global meetings and imposed punitive measures against his cronies. The disintegrating diplomatic relations raised concerns about the International Space Station. By then, the space shuttles that had transported Americans to space for decades were sitting in museums. The U.S. government now relied on the Russian Soyuz system, which cost American taxpayers $70 million a seat. NASA officials, flooded with questions, tried to assuage concerns, while Rogozin, in response to U.S. sanctions prohibiting work with Russian aerospace companies, wrote, “After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the U.S. delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.”
Before he traveled to Russia last year, Bridenstine was asked about this and other inflammatory tweets, including one in which Rogozin, annoyed that the United States had asked Romania to bar his plane from entering the country’s airspace, joked that he would fly in on a bomber next time. Bridenstine downplayed Rogozin’s combative remarks as the grit of any elected official, whether in the House of Representatives or the Duma. “Some of his language has historically been aggressive about the United States,” he told SpaceNews. “Some of my language has been aggressive about activities of Russia.”
Bridenstine’s professional relationship with Rogozin began with a beguiling incident last summer. The International Space Station crew discovered a tiny hole in the Russian segment that was leaking pressurized air into space. It appeared to have been drilled. While Russian officials investigated, Rogozin speculated to the press: “What was it: a defect, or some intentional acts? Where were these acts carried out? On the Earth or already on the orbit? Yet again, I am saying: We are not dismissing anything.”
The remarks quickly mutated into rumors of sabotage. Bridenstine and Rogozin scheduled a phone call, their first, and released a joint statement that promised no further speculation until an investigation was complete. Russian cosmonauts patched up the hole and even conducted a spacewalk to investigate it, but the cause remains unknown.
[Read: What the heck happened on the International Space Station?]
After Bridenstine’s bungled invitation to Rogozin, though, the burgeoning relationship between the space-agency leaders may be under strain. A Roscosmos spokesperson told Russian media that Bridenstine hadn’t talked to Roscosmos before the Post ran a story about Bridenstine’s decision to cancel. Rogozin criticized the decision in a television interview on Thursday, according to The Moscow Times, calling it a “disgrace” and “complete international lawlessness.” “We are waiting for an explanation,” he said, adding that Bridenstine is welcome to return to Russia.
The NASA administrator’s office did not respond to a request for comment on this claim.
This tension is particularly awkward in light of the precarious future of American spaceflight. Today Russia has leverage. The U.S. government still pays to launch NASA astronauts to the ISS, at $80 million a seat now. This arrangement has persisted far longer than American politicians would like, and in 2014, NASA awarded two American companies, Boeing and SpaceX, billions of dollars to develop transportation systems that would launch from U.S. soil. This effort, known as the Commercial Crew Program, is scheduled to finally get off the ground this year. The first SpaceX test flight, without a crew, is expected in February. If those flights go well, the United States could ditch its reliance on Russia.
Meanwhile, on the ISS, it’s business as usual. The current residents include an American and a Russian, working together, sharing meals, and splitting housekeeping chores such as vacuuming while their respective governments feud over matters from trade tariffs to election interference. Someday, like previous space stations, the ISS may be abandoned and deliberately plunged into the ocean. Or if future generations come up with some way to preserve it, perhaps in an orbiting museum, the ISS may keep circling Earth for centuries. Whether the station will be considered a vestige of long-lost cooperation or a mark of continued partnership depends on what happens below.
It’s likely you’ve never read, or even heard of, most of the books Atlantic writers have reviewed since the magazine was founded in 1857. Many have gone out of print; others have faded into obscurity in the decades since their original publication, sinking beneath waves of new works and new literary trends. But some have been buoyed into the upper echelons of literature and cemented as classics, must-reads, cultural touchstones.
Among the thousands of book reviews in the archives, some stand out as enduringly strange or significant: an 1886 appraisal of The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, for instance, or the 1967 reflection on reading Doctor Zhivago from Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. The contemporaneous reviews of books we now recognize as classics are also striking, preserving critics’ unmediated impressions of notable works before they came pre-marked with esteem and consequence.
The reception of such books in our archives is mixed: Atlantic contributors recognized Great Expectations as a “masterpiece” but found To Kill a Mockingbird “undemanding.” And a reviewer wrote that On the Road, now widely beloved and considered a defining work of its artistically rich era, “disappoints.”
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
To Kill a Mockingbird is “pleasant, undemanding reading” (1960)
“It is frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult. Miss Lee has, to be sure, made an attempt to confine the information in the text to what Scout would actually know, but it is no more than a casual gesture toward plausibility.”
+ 2016: “The elements of To Kill a Mockingbird … have been varnished by time”
📚 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee
📚 GO SET A WATCHMAN, by Harper Lee
“Lolita blazes … with a perversity of a most original kind” (1958)
“The novel’s scandal-tinted history and its subject—the affair between a middle-aged sexual pervert and a twelve-year-old girl—inevitably conjure up expectations of pornography. But there is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud.”
+ 2005: Lolita “keeps the promise of genius”
+ 2018: “Lolita will always be both ravishing and shocking”
📚 LOLITA, by Vladimir Nabokov
📚 THE ANNOTATED LOLITA, edited by Alfred Appel Jr.
📚 THE REAL LOLITA: THE KIDNAPPING OF SALLY HORNER AND THE NOVEL THAT SCANDALIZED THE WORLD, by Sarah Weinman
On the Road “is most readable” but “disappoints” (1957)
“Mr. Kerouac makes considerable play with [Dean’s] disorderly childhood, his hitch in the reform school, and his rootlessness, but his activities seem less a search for stability than a determined pursuit of euphoria. Dope, liquor, girls, jazz, and fast cars, in that order, are Dean’s ladder to nirvana, and so much time is spent on them that it is hard to keep track of any larger pattern behind all the scuttling about.”
+ 1998: “In the aftermath of the publication of On the Road … ‘everything exploded’” for Kerouac
📚 ON THE ROAD, by Jack Kerouac
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is “a wonderful study of the boy-mind” (1876)
“The local material and the incidents with which his career is worked up are excellent, and throughout there is scrupulous regard for the boy’s point of view in reference to his surroundings and himself, which shows how rapidly Mr. Clemens has grown as an artist.”
📚 THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, by Mark Twain
Great Expectations “is a masterpiece” (1861)
“In none of his other works does [Charles Dickens] evince a shrewder insight into real life, and a clearer perception and knowledge of what is called the world. The book is, indeed, an artistic creation, and not a mere succession of humorous and pathetic scenes.”
+ 1877: The story of Great Expectations “haunted Dickens’s imagination”
📚 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, by Charles Dickens
You RecommendLast week, we asked you to recommend stories of self-reinvention, resolve, and renewal. Connie Kennedy, of Iowa, put forward The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, in which, “coming from a childhood replete with example after example of living on the border of a disaster with parents stuck in fantasy, the author—through sheer determination—creates a completely different life for herself.” Another reader, Katelynne, suggested How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran, describing the book as “a masterpiece of sophomoric insight” in which “a teenage girl decides to re-invent herself solely on her will and talent.”
What’s a book you’ve read twice and changed your mind about? Tweet at us with #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by Annika Neklason. The book she’s reading on her commute right now is The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein.
Comments, questions, typos? Email aneklason@theatlantic.com.
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It was Thursday around lunchtime, and Lindsey Graham was over it.
“Right now I am going to the gym,” the South Carolina senator told reporters in the Capitol. “I have never been more depressed about moving forward.”
There was reason to be depressed. Thursday was day 20 of the partial government shutdown, and despite the flurry of speeches, meetings, and press releases that had marked these weeks, no end to the furlough was in sight. By Friday, the shutdown would be tied for the longest in U.S. history.
It’s unlikely, however, the gym offered the relief Graham was hoping for. Because while you can run as hard as possible on the treadmill—maxing out your pace, punching up the incline—you still won’t move forward.
That’s been the theme of this shutdown, a frenzied running in place that has left a growing number of federal workers unpaid, White House and congressional aides exhausted, and both political parties more deeply entrenched in their demands than ever.
On paper, this week seemed to foretell progress: multiple visits by the vice president to Capitol Hill, bipartisan gatherings at the White House, the president’s first address from the Oval Office, a visit via Air Force One to the border. Political leaders were keeping busy, or at least attempting to appear so. And yet by week’s end, almost nothing had changed, with Republicans and Democrats recycling their same arguments and proposals from nearly three weeks before, and with the president’s threat of a national emergency still looming over the negotiations.
“It’s as though the writers of Groundhog Day, Towering Inferno, and VEEP got together over a drink, and this is what they came up with,” said one senior House Republican aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press.
Taking a closer look at the many events of this week, however, it’s clear how they were never really designed for reaching compromise—but rather, for shoring up support within one’s own party.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence arrived with a cadre of aides and Secret Service agents to the Hill to update the House Republican conference on the status of the shutdown. Joining him were Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russell Vought.
[Read: Why Mike Pence couldn’t end the shutdown]
As the scenario might imply, it’s not often that such high-ranking officials simultaneously trudge across town to brief the lower chamber. Accordingly, several optimistic aides I spoke with ahead of the meeting mused that officials were there to lay out a path forward—whether to announce that a new deal with Democrats was in the works, or prepare lawmakers for the declaration of a national emergency.
Yet Pence and his cohort did not plant the seeds of a cease-fire. Instead, they reiterated a call to arms. “He’s investing in GOP solidarity,” a senior aide to a GOP member close to Pence told me that day. “Not deal making with Democrats.”
Indeed, at the time, the White House was antsy over cracks forming in the Republican conference, according to two House GOP aides with direct knowledge of communications from the West Wing, who asked for anonymity to discuss the private calls. On Monday and Tuesday, the sources said, President Donald Trump had phoned allies on the Hill asking for estimates on just how many Republicans could potentially defect and side with Democrats’ effort to reopen the government piecemeal. He tasked Pence with keeping that number in check.
For administration officials, Tuesday’s Hill visit was thus an effort to maintain a unified front, not present new paths toward reopening the government. According to aides in the room, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the private gathering, Nielsen spent much of the conference laying out crime statistics related to illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. It was a way to encourage GOP lawmakers that this was a crisis worth standing firm on.
The lawmakers received no guidance on when, or how, the partial shutdown may end. Which helps explain why Tuesday night was even more confusing for some Republicans: By the end of a day that saw a vice-presidential briefing and formal remarks from Trump in the Oval Office, officials were no closer to a solution.
[Read: There’s no winning for the networks]
According to a New York Times report, Trump told an off-the-record gathering of television anchors on Tuesday that he had little interest in delivering the speech that evening. It wasn’t hard to see why: Viewers tuned in to hear the president reiterate many of the same talking points that have fueled his lobbying for a border wall since the days of the campaign. He made no mention of whether he was considering declaring a national emergency, or whether talks were progressing with Democrats. A television special that put network executives and political observers in a frenzy left everyone still running in place.
Trump’s visit to the border in McAllen, Texas, on Thursday capped off the week of Kabuki theater. There, he met with Border Patrol agents and held a roundtable that included a display of cash, guns, and drugs seized at the border. But Trump had expressed disinterest ahead of this event, too: “It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the president lamented to the television anchors on Tuesday, according to the Times, “but I’m still doing it.”
All the while, House and Senate Democrats have continued to dig in on obstruction. On Wednesday, the day before the border visit, Trump met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in an apparent last-ditch effort to reach an agreement. The president asked Pelosi whether she would be willing to deliver wall funding within a month if the government was reopened immediately. When she swiftly said no, Trump ended the meeting.
With negotiations still at a stalemate, a national-emergency declaration—followed by Trump likely reopening the government—may yet be inevitable. For even some of Trump’s staunchest allies in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, however, the outcome is less than ideal. Three senior aides to HFC members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to press, articulated to me their bosses’ concerns. “The dread is that it will immediately be tied up in the courts, and that we will lose,” confessed one. “Meanwhile, the government has reopened and Congress is off the hook to figure this out.”
After a week of no change, though, it may be Republicans’ only out that also allows them to save face with Trump’s base, and indicate, ahead of 2020, that they fought to secure the president’s key campaign promise. That is, at the very least, how Lindsey Graham seems to see it. A few hours after that presumably unsatisfying gym session, Graham became the first lawmaker to urge Trump to declare a national emergency. In other words, to move forward. “Mr. President, the Democrats are not working in good faith with you,” Graham tweeted on Thursday. “Declare emergency, build the wall now.”
When blue-collar workers go on strike, demands such as wage increases and better hours are usually the objective. But when nearly 8,000 Marriott International employees marched outside hotels for two months in late 2018, one request stood out among the rest: protection against the automated technology that’s remaking the hotel industry.
Marriott employees are right to worry. Over the past few years, the service industry has started hacking worker schedules by outsourcing human duties to machines. Automated experiments include robots that take over bartending and salad-making duties on cruise ships and in airports, and that deliver food to hotel guests’ rooms. More hotels are offering automated check-in via app or even—in China—via facial recognition. Alexa-enabled speakers in hotel rooms let guests ask for sightseeing tips and order toothbrushes without talking to staff.
The Marriott workers’ priorities included updated language for health care and buyout packages. But they also wanted assurance that their jobs would not be filled by robots.
“You lose the humanness,” said Kirk Paganelli, a waiter and bartender at a Marriott property in San Francisco. Paganelli worked in the service industry for 23 years before joining hundreds of Marriott employees across the Bay Area in a 61-day strike. In an emailed statement, a Marriott spokesperson told The Atlantic most of the new technology being added to hotels, such as Alexa, "is about personalizing the guest experience and enhancing the stay [and] hasn’t necessarily had significant impact on workers."
“People go to a bar to vent, to have experiences, to ask questions,” Paganelli said. “How are you going to do that with a robot?”
Worker demands also included implementing new technologies they say will increase safety, such as GPS-enabled panic buttons to combat harassment and motorized cleaning carts, which are less physically stressful for maids. Unlike employees at fast-food chains and coffee shops, which are both undergoing automation pains of their own, many hotel workers see a lifetime career in their industry. Paganelli, for example, said he hopes to retire from his job at Marriott. That means he can’t afford to ignore changes coming five or even 10 years down the line.
[Read: Low-wage workers aren’t getting justice for sexual harassment]
Rather than fully replacing human workers with The Jetsons–style robots, the service industry is more likely to adopt a system of partial automation. Simple tasks will be automated so that workers’ hours can be cut down, or so that a two-person job, say janitorial services or manning the front desk overnight, can be assigned to one person aided by a robot.
Such tech-enabled labor reshuffling may appear to “save” time for the businesses that engage in it. But that time is also taken away from workers in the form of hours cut. These changes are difficult to quantify at a large scale because they may not be reflected in employment numbers or even in hourly wages, but in the hours each employee works weekly. “Robots aren’t taking your job” Brennan Hoban of the Brookings Institution wrote last year, “just your paycheck.”
Of course, automation is only one technology remaking the industry. More and more, hotel guests opt for food-delivery apps such as Grubhub or Postmates over room service. They’re generally cheaper, and chains sometimes offer coupon codes for guests who decide to order out. But hotel workers have complained that when apps eclipse room service, hotel chains staff fewer room-service workers.
Food-delivery apps aren’t automation, but the choice between room service and Grubhub represents a give-and-take between gig-economy workers and employees. For smaller hotels especially, it may be more cost-effective to offer coupon codes to guests in lieu of staffing around-the-clock room service. That makes things cheaper for both the hotel and the guest, but workers miss out on hours and opportunities for tips.
There are historical parallels for time-saving tech and its relationship to exploitation, some of which reach back to the slave era. In “The Automation Charade,” the writer Astra Taylor criticizes a video from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation highlighting Jefferson’s personal dumbwaiter, a small mechanical lift used in Jefferson’s home that sent food and wine from the kitchens directly into the dining room. The device made dining more expedient than carrying food up several flights of stairs, but the video’s narrator reveals its second function: The meals prepared by Jefferson’s slaves could be served without guests seeing them, “making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic,” Taylor writes. The dumbwaiter’s purpose was to expedite food service, but its effect was to conceal, and thus abet, slavery. Here, removing the human element made it easier to hide labor and bondage.
[Read: Service workers forced to act like robots meet their match]
Jefferson’s dumbwaiter has an eerie echo in a phrase coined by Detroit’s black autoworkers in the 1970s. In 1975’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, the historians Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakas interview black autoworkers at the city’s Chrysler plant, who coined the term niggermation to capture how employers credited automation for the breakneck speed at which plants produced new cars. That process concealed the exploitation of Chrysler’s majority-black workforce, which faced intense demands and poor working conditions.
The concealing effect continues even with the very artificial intelligence credited with powering automation: Much of it comes from low-wage work. The facial-recognition technology used to automate hotel check-in, for example, relies on patterns and templates fed by millions of images of people’s faces. These databases are often furnished by universities, which may pay students to scrape the internet for pictures or enroll themselves. The self-driving cars that may one day deliver groceries to your door are monitored by human test drivers, who are paid hourly wages to sit in the front seat while the car pilots itself, taking over control in case of emergencies. Automation, again, masks time.
When the Marriott strike ended, workers were granted many of the protective measures they sought. Crucially, all employees will receive 165 days’ notice before certain automated technology is implemented, as well as the option for retraining if their job is affected enough that their hours change. Employees will also be given severance if, ultimately, their position is eliminated. This won’t save Marriott’s workers from the larger tech trends remaking the service industry, but it does give them more time to prepare for an uncertain future.
The iPad in the lobby and the salad-prep machine in the kitchen represent a shift in the relationship between workers and their employer. Automation may not be a nuclear strike against the service industry, wiping out all of its jobs. Instead, it may quietly reduce the time, pay, and visibility employees are given as they complete their increasingly vulnerable jobs.
Earlier this week, Chrissy Teigen posted a video on Instagram of herself posing artfully on the beach while her husband captured an endless stream of photos, including multiple angles and poses.
“Thank u for always supporting my Instagram dreams,” she wrote. “This train only moves because of you(r phone) … you are the tracks that lay the foundation … creating a direct path to hope and possibilities of likes and curated content. what u do is important. I will never take u for granted, my king.”
Like Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lopez, Meghan Markle, Beyoncé, and many influencers, in order to capture the perfect ’gram-worthy shot, Teigen relies on the help of her “Instagram husband.” When you start looking, you’ll see Instagram husbands everywhere you go. Over the Christmas holiday, a friend of mine posted a photo of an exotic beach littered with beautiful women. Standing about 10 feet away from almost all of them was a man holding a camera snapping photographs. “Instagram husbands working hard out here,” he wrote.
An Instagram husband can be any gender and sexual orientation, and he doesn’t have to be your actual husband. “Instagram boyfriend, or husband, is a loose term for whoever is the invisible person behind the camera of all of your Instagram photos,” Kaitlyn Tiffany recently explained on Why’d You Push That Button?, a podcast about technology. It’s the person who will stop traffic to get the perfect shot, or stand endlessly in the rain while you pose for photos.
In 2016, the editor Meredith Haggerty enlisted an Instagram husband, really just a woman she had hired through an app, to follow her around a fashion show and snap pics. “In this progressive age, love isn’t about gender, it’s about finding that special someone who can take flattering pictures of you,” she wrote. A Taco Bell ad released last fall parodies this concept. “I am an Instagram boyfriend,” a man says while hanging off a carousel to get the perfect shot of his girlfriend. “Wing murals, candids, staged candids, I get them all.”
Though people have almost always relied on other people to take photos of themselves, Instagram and influencer culture has transformed that duty into a near-full-time job. In 2015, a fake PSA produced by Jeff Houghton solidified the term and went massively viral. With nearly 7 million views, the video profiles the men “behind every cute girl on Instagram.” They bemoan having to delete all the apps on their phone to make room for more photos and transforming into “a human selfie stick.”
In the three years since that video was shot, however, the term has evolved. The joke of the Instagram-husband video was that these men are miserable. You’re meant to sympathize with the men, who are presented as begrudging participants, and laugh or scoff at the women for forcing them to do something as “trivial” as taking endless photos. But Instagram and the digital landscape it created have shifted massively since the video was released. Those women people laughed at for taking endless photos in front of a brick wall are now influencers—people who leverage a social-media following to influence others and make money—and are worth millions. And while men used to be seen as begrudging participants, more so-called Instagram husbands are embracing the term and becoming an integral part of their partner’s business.
[Read: Rising Instagram stars are posting fake sponsored content]
One man on the front lines of this movement is Jordan Ramirez. When Ramirez, a tech entrepreneur, married Dani Austin, a lifestyle influencer with a quarter of a million followers, in 2018, the influencer world was still new to him. While Austin was jetting around the world shooting photos, picking outfits, scouting locations, producing YouTube videos, and growing her audience, Ramirez had a separate and unrelated career in the tech–start-up world.
But when they got married, their lives began to blend and Ramirez started to reassess his own career goals in light of his wife’s success. Though he had snapped photos and helped her on some projects previously, it wasn’t until they got married that he embraced the role of Instagram husband.
Because of the grueling, 24/7 nature of most influencers’ job, being an Instagram husband in 2019 doesn’t just entail taking a few iPhone photos while you’re out. Ramirez, like many other spouses who work in a full-time Instagram-husband capacity, has taken on operational and business aspects of his wife’s influencer business and taught himself photo editing to help with production.
Ramirez said the decision to pivot his career into a full-time Instagram husband was not an easy one. “A lot of the husbands [of influencers] are in the same spot as I was,” he said. “You’re faced with a choice. You can have your own thing, but typically her business is thriving and you don’t want to be that distant from your wife as she’s traveling.” He also worried about devoting his life to a new and unstable industry. “I was raised in a generation like, Here’s what the atomic household looks like. You’re supposed to go out and be a banker, doctor,” he said. However, as Austin’s career has flourished, so too has Ramirez’s.
In September, Ramirez launched The Instagram Husband Podcast, which is focused on telling the stories of the men behind the camera and redefining what it means to be an Instagram husband. Despite the fact that more partners are taking on this role, Ramirez worried that no one was examining the people who play the more behind-the-scenes role in an influencer’s life.
Ramirez holds balloons in the background as his wife celebrates 200,000 followers. Ramirez hopes the podcast can break down misconceptions and critique stereotypes. He admitted that when Austin first began to achieve mainstream success, he felt jealous and even inferior. He said it can be hard for some men when their wife finds fame. Just going out shopping with Austin can sometimes lead to him spending an hour taking photos of her with fans. But Ramirez said that once he learned to embrace her success and fame, rather than resent it, things shifted. “I know there’s a ton of other Insta husbands, and many also come from business backgrounds. Their wives are probably successful too, and maybe they’re feeling the things I felt,” he said. But, he added, being an Instagram husband “isn’t demeaning yourself; it’s about building something with your wife.” Ramirez said he’s purchased instagramhusband.org and plans to potentially launch a Facebook group where Instagram husbands can connect.
As more public figures open up about the critical part their Instagram husband plays in their success, even if it’s tongue-in-cheek, the role becomes more normalized. The lifestyle and travel influencer Lindsay Silberman’s husband, Matthew Stevens, even went so far as to change his Instagram handle to @InstaHusband. “I started by helping her take great pics, helping to edit them, then come up with captions, then come up with places to take the pics—helping her build what is now her business,” he said. “I’ve become completely immersed in not only the photos but also the business side of Lindsay’s work. I’ve taken on a role that encompasses not just taking pics, but reviewing contracts, reaching out to brands, going to events. We’ve become a tag team.”
Like Ramirez, Stevens said his goal is to challenge the perception of what an Instagram husband is. “People will look at a husband or boyfriend taking photos of his girlfriend like, ‘Oh, look what he has to do for his girl who isn’t even a model,’” he said. Stevens said he uses his Instagram account to play on that and parody it. “We’re changing that whole conception of the Insta husband as someone who just follows his wife around and takes pics. It’s actually someone supporting a business and his wife along the way,” he said.
Silberman said she’s shocked by how many men are getting involved in the influencer space through their wife. “So many of the women I follow who are super successful in this business have hired their husbands,” she said. “The workload gets to a point where you just can’t do it alone, and who do you trust more to be a part of your business than your husband?” Silberman said having an Instagram husband is also valuable because he knows you better than anyone else. He’s with you in the hotel room, you’re comfortable with him behind the camera, and he spends enough time with you that he knows your perfect shots and angles.
#ighusband at work #raadstravel #andesmountains #dressupbuttercup #chile
A post shared by Ted Raad (@raadted) on Nov 22, 2016 at 8:28pm PST
“Matt understands what I do; he understands the nuances of it. When I travel and I need to bring a lot of clothes or wake up in the morning to get the right light, he understands,” she said. A vacation doesn’t mean “laying on a beach drinking piña coladas. That’s not how you get the great photos. It is work.”
[Read: Instagram’s wannabe stars are driving luxury hotels crazy]
Having an Instagram husband is also a smart financial move. Influencers who don’t have a dedicated or supportive partner usually have to hire professional photographers, some of whom charge exorbitant day rates. Things get even more complicated when traveling to places where it’s not easy to find a local photographer who understands your style or needs, or who you’d want to double up with in a hotel room. Some influencers are one another’s Instagram husbands, traveling in duos and taking endless shots for one another. Others rely on a tripod or strangers. Silberman said life without her husband around would be markedly harder. “A lot of the girls who I follow are single or their husbands aren’t as involved. I give them so much credit. It is so hard. It’s hard in general, but it’s doubly as hard if you don’t have a right-hand person with you at all times,” Silberman said.
As more Instagram husbands step out from behind the camera, they’re also gaining a following of their own. Thomas Berolzheimer co-runs the business of his wife, Julia Engel; she’s a lifestyle influencer with 1.2 million followers. Berolzheimer has 64,000 Instagram followers of his own, debatably making him an influencer in his own right. Many fans are quick to follow an influencer’s Instagram husband for a behind-the-scenes peek at their life. Ted Raad, the husband of Dede Raad, a lifestyle influencer with nearly half a million followers, changed his bio to read “Professional IG husband” and often posts unfiltered shots of his wife. He also curated an Instagram Story dedicated to documenting fellow Instagram husbands in the wild.
Stevens said he has lurked on the #InstagramHusband hashtag on Instagram and connected with other men that way after interacting with their photos. “It’s almost this silent brotherhood right now,” he said. “It hasn’t become a full community yet, but it’s on the verge of breaking out … And I think it’s gonna be huge.”
When the recently arrived White House counsel Pat Cipollone took up his post, he could have had no illusions that the president he served would make his professional life easy. Just weeks into the job, he has been asked to provide legal support for the president’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border that would enable him to divert funds to the payment of “a wall.”
We don’t yet know whether President Donald Trump is committed to this course. He omitted any mention of an emergency declaration from his Oval Office address on the border “crisis” on Tuesday. Then, after an unsuccessful meeting with the Democratic leadership to resolve the wall and government-shutdown issues, the president returned to the possibility of assuming emergency powers, declaring that they were available to him as his “absolute right.” On Thursday morning, Trump put the odds of his taking this action at “maybe definitely.” He told reporters that his lawyers were “100 percent” behind his exercise of this “absolute right.”
It is possible but exceedingly unlikely that Cipollone is that optimistic about the president’s chances of prevailing on this issue or so eager to please that he would give this or any other controversial legal position that Trump favors a “100 percent” seal of approval. A White House counsel must develop his recommendations from the particular perspective as an institutional lawyer—as counsel to the president and not personal consigliere to Donald Trump. He certainly must take the president’s policy imperatives very much to heart. He will not want to give the president a “no” if there is a plausible “yes” he can offer. But his institutional responsibilities would shape his analysis and identification of the available legal options. The counsel might start with what the president wants. But his goal cannot be to just end there.
[Adam Serwer: Trump the toddler]
This institutional perspective would compel a counsel in a matter such as this to separate the critical questions into two parts. One would be concerned with the legal merits of the case: Is there a reasonable, good-faith basis for the president to declare this emergency and proceed to avail himself of legal authorities with which to fund the wall? Of course, acts that are reasonable and taken in good faith cover a broad range of possibilities, and the critical question is how reasonably and with what degree of good faith this position could be maintained.
And this relates to the second level of analysis, which is forecasting the prospects that the president can sustain his position in litigation. It is a question not only of whether the president wins or loses but of other institutional costs of inviting a legal challenge of this significance and failing. Curious as it may seem, this analysis would have to take into account the effect on the president’s fortunes of bringing this particular case as the clock runs down on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and Cipollone reportedly prepares for other major conflicts over the president’s “absolute rights” and privileges.
Very experienced and skilled scholars and commentators have shown that there are paths toward a plausible, but certainly not “100 percent” invincible, legal theory for invoking an emergency and accessing funding for the wall. Of course, lawyers are trained and employed to make arguments, and sometimes they are skilled in creating the illusion of real substance out of what is largely a frolic. It is rare that some argument cannot be made about the meaning of terms such as essential to national defense, military construction projects to support the use of the armed forces, or even fence, which appear in the statutes on which the president might base his funding of the wall upon the declaration of an emergency.
But there is the rub. The administration’s lawyers cannot even reach these questions, and the president cannot access funding on which the answers turn, unless he can proclaim an emergency. The statute in question, the National Emergencies Act, does not give a president unreviewable discretion to decide however he chooses whether an emergency exists. Quite the contrary: The statute indicates that the president may proclaim only an emergency that exists in fact. The law provides:
With respect to Acts of Congress authorizing the exercise, during the period of a national emergency, of any special or extraordinary power, the President is authorized to declare such national emergency. Such proclamation shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.
The law refers to a “period of national emergency” separate from the president’s choice to “declare it.” The president is not compelled to recognize the emergency in this fashion. He must do so, however, if he is seeking to gain access to the authorities, such as spending funds for military construction.
In sum, a president has the discretion to declare an emergency, not to create one. This distinction is critical. Congress did not attempt to define what constitutes an “emergency,” but this is not evidence that it left the choice without limits to the president. Rather, as one commentator wrote, the absence of a definition reflected “the assumption … that genuine crisis is readily identifiable by everyone in the polity.” Hence the law’s reference to “the period of a national emergency,” which would be clear to all, and which would then—and only then—be subject to the president’s declaration at his or her discretion.
[Read: What the president could do if he declares a state of emergency]
This is the reading most consistent with the plain wording of the law but also with Congress’s reasons for enacting the statute: Concern about the adequacy of controls on the presidents’ invocation of emergency powers. Among the limits the legislature devised was automatic termination of an emergency one year after it was declared, subject to the president’s choice to renew it. Congress also specified a procedure by which it could approve joint resolutions to terminate an emergency at any time.
Nothing in the statute or the legislative history suggests that in the event Congress did not resort to these controls, the president was free to do as he wished. It is, in fact, inconceivable that in 1976, when Congress enacted the statute, it was providing carte blanche to the president to ignore the separation of powers and spend freely anytime Congress somehow failed to take the procedural measures to stop him.
After all, Congress then, as now, faces the normal collective-action problems in responding speedily, not to mention on the pace a president can set. A president can declare an emergency, and immediately exercise the special authorities that this declaration affords, much faster than Congress could be expected to act to consider, and if it chooses, to rein in the executive. Congress surely knew this much when it was legislating on these matters in reaction to the imperial presidency in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate.
Moreover, the suggestion that congressional execution of the joint resolution is the only check on the president requires imagining that Congress fell into a trap of its own making. The statute provides that even if Congress acts to terminate an emergency, the termination will not affect “any action taken or proceeding pending not finally concluded or determined on such date [of termination]” or “any action or proceeding based on any act committed prior to such date.” In other words, some of what the president has done by the proclamation of an emergency cannot be undone. Congress will always have to play catch-up and can never fully catch up.
This is not a reasonable reading of the statute, nor is it an appropriate assumption about Congress’s protection of its own constitutional authorities. It is critical to bear in mind what is at stake here: Congress has exclusive control of the power to appropriate. The expenditure of federal funds without lawful congressional authorization is a criminal offense. Congress could have written into the law the president’s unfettered discretion to determine the existence of an emergency. It did not. Courts will not lightly read into the law what Congress does not expressly provide on an issue central to the constitutional separation of powers.
Moreover, the more questionable the case for an emergency, the more unlikely that a court would read the statutory authorizations as broadly as the administration would like. You can only push the courts so far. A president who’s trying to advance the most aggressive case for deference to his judgment about an emergency may succeed on that front, and then fail to convince the courts that even with the emergency in place, he has clear statutory authorization for the particular project—in Trump’s case, of course, the construction of the “beautiful” steel wall with slats that enable stateside observers to peer through to the other side.
[David Frum: Trump has defeated himself]
So the first problem the president faces is seeking to exercise discretion under this statute that he does not have. The second is that some of what he has said about the “emergency” undercuts the very claim that there is one. In fact, the president has periodically declared that things are going quite swimmingly at the border, as he did in remarks in meetings with congressional leaders:
A lot of the wall is built. It’s been very effective. I asked for a couple of notes on that. If you look at San Diego, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent once the wall was up. El Paso, illegal traffic dropped 72 percent, then ultimately 95 percent once the wall was up. In Tucson, Arizona, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent. Yuma, it dropped illegal traffic 95 to 96 percent.
Now, of course, the administration will argue that these comments merely showcase the virtues of the wall. If walls work in San Diego or Tucson or El Paso, they can be expected to work with similarly spectacular results elsewhere.
The downside of this argument, however, is that to take the president at his word, the administration is making do quite nicely without the declaration of an emergency—and he has pushed his point hard. At Christmastime, he advised the American public that “our country is doing very well … We are securing our borders,” after tweeting two weeks before that, “Border Patrol and our Military have done a FANTASTIC job of securing our Southern Border …” What, then, supports the need for the use of extraordinary authorities in the name of an “emergency”?
Trump is not helped in answering this question by his other, repeated public utterances on the subject. He and his spokespersons have repeatedly made false statements about the terrorists, drugs, human trafficking, and ordinary criminals crossing over into the United States on foot at the southern border. These claims have been debunked by fact-checking just about everywhere, including at his own State Department. So he starts off in a bad place when claiming legal authority to proclaim an emergency, having both bragged that he is doing quite well without one and then misrepresented the grounds that might exist for such a proclamation if he nonetheless decided to issue it.
Finally, courts will not fail to note the considerable evidence in the president’s public statements that he is looking to the national emergency as a tool to resolve a conflict with the Congress. He has said that one way or another, he is going to build the wall, and the shutdown was the first bare-knuckled maneuver to break the stalemate in congressional negotiations. Now he’s speaking of an emergency. It is, on its face, a negotiating gambit, apparently also a political rallying cry. But because he is treating the declaration of an emergency as a tactic, he has added considerably to his difficulties in having his “emergency” taken seriously by the courts.
The president’s predilection for trampling on his own case brings to mind his unhappy experience with the travel-ban litigation caused by his statements on Twitter and on the campaign trail. Eventually, after considerable trimming and adjustment, the administration was able to do better with a revised executive order and a superseding proclamation. These cases tested difficult questions about the extent to which the president’s public utterances—including statements on the campaign trail—invite the examination of the true motives behind executive action.
That Trump eventually survived this scrutiny in the travel cases will have little relevance to his efforts to concoct a national emergency now to support his wall-building project. In the travel-ban cases, the Supreme Court found that he was operating under an immigration law that “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” The National Emergencies Act only “exudes” deference to his decision to proclaim an actual emergency. Moreover, none of the tricky issues presented by campaign-trail statements made prior to the election are present in this instance. Trump has issued a steady stream of statements as president. No one has to engage in any raw speculation or psychological testing to ferret out his motives. He has said what he has said, in clear terms and consistently. These are not slips of the tongue, but one statement after another, most of them separately—and all of them in the aggregate—damning to his legal position on the existence of an emergency.
[Read: The shutdown is making Senate Republicans squirm]
Commentators looking for illuminating constitutional precedents typically begin with the Youngstown Steel and Tube Co. case, in which the Supreme Court rejected President Harry Truman’s claimed authority to direct the secretary of commerce to seize steel-producing facilities. The majority in that case produced two opinions, and other justices wrote as well, so it is fair to say that teasing out lucid doctrine from that case is no simple matter. However, it has become clear over time, from the more developed historical record, that the Court was decisively influenced by the evidence that no steel-shortage crisis existed. There was no emergency, and the Court was aware of this.
And so, for that matter, was the Truman White House. One staff memorandum that later came to light openly acknowledged public skepticism about the claim of emergency and conceded that it was well founded: “The fact is that the public has never believed this contention, and in the face of recent releases of steel for racetracks and bowling alleys, they are even less likely to believe this now.”
For this reason, Maeva Marcus, a leading historian of the case, has written, “The Court simply was not convinced that the crisis confronting the nation was sufficiently grave to justify the president’s assertion of power.” The factual circumstances surrounding the president’s claim of authority drove the Court’s decision. Marcus notes approvingly one commentator’s view that “the legal arguments between the two divisions of the Court [in Youngstown] were consequently of little significance; the vital disagreement was over premises.” The Truman administration’s key premise was an emergency shortage in steel production—and there was none.
Trump has manufactured for himself the same problem from which Truman suffered: an absence of presidential credibility. It is possible, of course, that the courts will let Trump off the hook, giving him more of the benefit of the doubt than Truman enjoyed. Trump would purportedly be acting pursuant to a statute, not on an expansive claim of inherent, constitutional authority. But it is also true that when Truman misrepresented the emergency steel shortage, he was at least leading a nation at war.
It is also worth noting that Trump is repeating another mistake that Truman made. Like his distinguished predecessor, he is flaunting his view of the unqualified “absolute right” to declare this emergency. It never serves presidents well to enter into these constitutional tests with a show of arrogance, especially when their legal footing is far from secure. If Trump doubts this, he might ask legal veterans of the George W. Bush administration how they fared before the courts in advancing confrontational positions on rule-of-law issues in the War on Terror.
These are the considerations that would have to weigh heavily on a counsel’s practical assessment of the likelihood of success on the merits of any proclamation of emergency on the border. Then the question is what he might say if the president responds to an assessment so far below the “100 percent” that Trump is angling for by insisting that he cares little, or not at all, about the merits. After all, Trump may well see it in his interest to show his resolve on the wall, declare the emergency, and leave it to the courts to settle the question. If he loses, well, he’s done his best, and there will be judges to blame.
[Read: Trump’s wall could cost him in 2020]
So what might the White House counsel say when the president is unaffected by the prospect of losing, and sees political advantage in pressing ahead?
In the first instance, while it would be a long shot with this president, the counsel might try stressing the institutional costs of taking a losing case into court. It is not only the prospect of a loss, but also how he will lose, that the counsel might urge him to consider. The courts could issue a limiting interpretation of the law that hinders the exercise of this emergency authority in the future, wholly unrelated to the current controversy over the wall. Once legal actions of this nature take flight, there is no way of knowing where they might land. Sometimes the gamble is worth it, but in this case, with a defeat highly likely, the consequences for the presidency should weigh significantly in the decision-making process.
In this instance, the losing president would also be a weakened president who leaves a legacy of a weakened presidency—and the president cannot bear the thought of being weak. But the president, if motivated by narrow political interests, could well bat this objection away.
That would be a mistake, even from the vantage point of his narrow self-interest.
In the very near term, Trump will be contending with the findings of the special counsel in the Russia investigation. It appears from press reports that his expanding office of lawyers is getting ready for battle. His attorneys have reportedly constructed a litigation strategy that would involve advancing aggressive constitutional positions on executive privilege to prevent disclosure of what could be crucial portions of the Mueller findings. This is not the only baggage that Cipollone may have to carry into a courthouse. He will presumably stand with the president’s personal lawyers in asserting that the president, free to command the law-enforcement machinery as he likes, enjoys immunity from liability for obstruction of justice. He may have to defend the president’s issuance of pardons in the Russia matter as the president insists that an unfettered, unreviewable pardon power is also his “absolute right.”
A president fighting on all these fronts has only so much capital and credibility to spend, and with his relentless attacks on the courts, he has spent much of it down. A White House counsel would have to inform him that he might ill afford an unnecessary loss on a tenuous claim of emergency authority, further depleting whatever capital remains.
Of course, even if Trump forgoes a test of emergency powers, he may have a fatal lack of credibility, not to mention a losing hand, on the issues coming his way in the months ahead. But the White House counsel might urge him to carefully consider whether he wants to make his road through the courts even harder. If all of Trump’s sweeping claims are added together, including now his readiness to contrive “national emergencies,” the president will appear in the litigation as an out-of-control executive in urgent need of judicially administered discipline.
A White House counsel can make this argument in good conscience as an institutional lawyer, in the current and long-term interests of the presidency. But it is also an argument plainly pitched to the president’s self-interest. It may not succeed, but there may be no other ground on rule-of-law issues on which the White House counsel to Donald Trump can be heard.
The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump. Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.
Trump’s writing suggests not just inadequate manners or polish—not all of us need be dainty—but inadequate thought. Nearly every time he puts thumb to keypad, he exposes that he has never progressed beyond the mentality of the precollegiate, trash-talking teen.
A few days ago, he wrote the following about the partial government shutdown:
I remain committed to finding an agreemnet that reopens our Government and ensures that our Nation’s borders are safe and secure. I urge Congress to rejoin me in Washington to immediatly pass appropriations legislation …
The eccentric capitalization (“Government,” “Nation’s”) marks this as written by Real Donald Trump, because he is fond of using caps in a fashion that’s part Benjamin Franklin and part Little Rascals. Sadly, the misspellings only reinforce that sourcing, accompanied elsewhere in the missive by “commonsense” and “shut down.”
[John McWhorter: The unmonitored president]
One must not automatically equate sloppy spelling with sloppy thinking. Quite a few admired writers are not great spellers before editing. The problem here is that he neither checked the tidiness of this message before it went out to the public, nor asked anyone else to take that step, about an issue as dire as an interruption of governmental services (Governmental Services?). Such negligence is of a piece with Trump’s general disregard of norms, details, and accuracy.
Ted Cruz is totally unelectable, if he even gets to run (born in Canada). Will loose big to Hillary. Polls show I beat Hillary easily! WIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2016Press statement @WhiteHouse says 1 goals of @POTUS Israel trip is "promote the possibility of lasting peach" pic.twitter.com/HE1l2lThg8
— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) May 22, 2017Trump’s blindness to the basics of adult-level composition is so amply documented that it might now seem normal, which is why it’s instructive to contrast Trump with Harry Truman. He wrote to his future wife, Bess, in 1912:
Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high-school dictionary handy. I even had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself. The English language so far as spelling goes was created by Satan I am sure.
Truman’s unquestioned attendance to spelling dictionary correctly contrasts neatly with Trump’s casually distributing misspellings like “agreemnet,” especially because Truman was the last American president who did not have a college degree. Truman, writing to a loved one, wanted to get the word dictionary right; Trump, writing to the entire nation, is happy with a half-dozen flubs in one terse tweet. The sheer lack of focus on Trump’s part, and by extension, the staff who should be vetting messages like this, is stunning.
Saving this for postority. pic.twitter.com/wmnanHjPWF
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) January 21, 2017One could call this critique a mere matter of formalism. However, Trump-talk is more than typos. In his actual speech, Trump presents an oddly abbreviated rendition of English, reminiscent of languages when they are dying out or compromised in some way.
For example, Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall.”
[Ben Zimmer: Why Kirstjen Nielsen sounds like the Hulk]
Trump’s love of “doing” might indicate his professed expertise in deal making. One does—colloquially, at least—“do” a deal, and Trump supposes that Brexit and the border wall will result from “dealing.” But this very assumption reflects an inability to grapple with the complexities of state matters. He simply cannot accept—cannot grasp—that international diplomacy could possibly require more subtlety than a real-estate transaction. His phrasing suggests someone taking in nothing from the urgent happenings around him, someone refusing to read his briefs or anything else.
Truman is useful again, in that he had a hankering to catch, at least once in his life, Lucia di Lammermoor. Not that he was any great fan of classical music, mind you: “I have never seen Lucia and I am curious to know how much torture one has to endure to get to hear the sextet,” he wrote to Bess. However, you only go around once, and Truman had a basic desire to experience something beyond himself and the ordinary—to grow. Trump—have we ever seen him even tap his foot to music or give any sign of enjoying it?—doesn’t learn from what is around him; he does not grow. A president should.
It’s not only do that Trump overuses. “Absolutely, we could call a national emergency because of the security of our country,” he said recently. Once again, Trump goes for the gutbucket, one-size-fits-all Anglo-Saxon grunt word: call. “Call” a national emergency? Like calling a foul or a time-out in a dodgeball game? Most would prefer declare here; it’s hardly a $10 lexical oddity, but simply the verb most conventionally used with emergency.
More to the point, to “call” an emergency is different from “declaring” it. There is an almost juvenile perspective in the idea that an emergency be “called,” as if a few people huddled and made a quick decision amidst some sporting match. A declaration, by contrast, implies more deliberation, and the views of more people, about matters of more importance. Trump appears to be mentally in a Queens public schoolyard in the 1950s with guys “calling it” in assorted ways.
Even if Trump imagines this “call” as being preceded by the appropriate sober deliberations, overall Trump’s vocabulary reveals a grievous vagueness—which masks an even more grievous specificity. His use of “very” is illustrative here. During the campaign he said, “I have a very, very powerful plan that’s on my website … ” and that “I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin, and I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Russia” given that Putin “has very strong control over a country.” In a tweet last year, he crowed:
Chrysler is moving a massive plant from Mexico to Michigan, reversing a years long opposite trend. Thank you Chrysler, a very wise decision. The voters in Michigan are very happy they voted for Trump/Pence. Plenty of more to follow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2018“Very wise,” “very happy” (and very high on typos for a single tweet)—Trump uses this word less as an intensifier than as the linguistic equivalent of a sartorial accessory. It is similar, of all things, to a word in Chinese that technically means “very” but is so often paired with adjectives that it has come to mean, simply, “an adjective is coming.” In the same way, to Trump, very is a kind of hat to plunk on an adjective he’s about to use, to make it pop a bit.
Very aside, why doesn’t he use the words other people would use, such as productive rather than good in “good relationship with Putin” or comprehensive rather than powerful in “powerful plan that’s on my website”? Claims that he is exhibiting signs of dementia are, in my view, premature and unnecessary. A more economical analysis is that Trump actually intends the words he uses, in all of their inadequacy.
What moves Trump is the idea that important people like him, and thus that their relationship is “good”—not that their relationship might be productive, that is to say, might yield something of value for the country. Trump is moved more by power itself than what power can accomplish, or what underlies it, and so comprehensive doesn’t come to him. Similarly, to Trump, to “call” something is about him calling the shots or blowing a whistle; a declaration, usually quieter and effected via consensus, has less appeal. Yet Trump senses, on some level, that the adjectives he intends are somewhat inept in the presidential context. His solution: to dress them up with very, substituting rhetorical volume for substance.
Trump’s admirers might see him as a straight shooter, focused on telling us what’s on his mind, too busy doing the right things to bother with niceties. The tragedy is that in his hurried, lexically impoverished blurts, Trump almost daily shows us that what’s on his mind is very little.
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