Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman New York representative, joins Intercept reporters Ryan Grim and Briahna Joy Gray for an in-depth conversation about her approach to politics and social media, her thoughts on the 2020 presidential election, and her out-of-nowhere congressional campaign. As a new member of the House Financial Services Committee, she’s already shaping the conversation with her call to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. Former North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller, a progressive Democrat who served for years on the Financial Services Committee, joins the conversation to talk about the challenges Ocasio-Cortez will face there.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Podcast Special: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Her First Weeks in Washington appeared first on The Intercept.
The shutdown might be over for now, but President Donald Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency still looms. The continuing resolution passed Friday afternoon does not contain funding for a border wall, and the president has suggested that if Congress doesn’t compromise on a funding plan within three weeks, he may still proclaim a national emergency at the border.
When Trump first threatened to use emergency powers to unlock $5.7 billion for his $20 billion border wall project, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. came out strongly against it — but not for humanitarian reasons or because he is concerned about an unmistakable creep toward authoritarianism. Rather, Rubio worried that normalizing the call for a state of emergency might make it easier for politicians to act on a genuine existential threat: “If today, the national emergency is border security,” said Rubio, “tomorrow, the national emergency might be climate change.”
Rubio is right to worry. Climate change is a legitimate emergency, unlike Trump’s border “crisis,” which is a fabrication sewn of foam-mouthed racism and vain partisan panic. Security and militarization at the border has increased steadily over the last decades; border crossings have been in decline for years; and most heroin smuggled over the border comes through legal border crossings, not the areas that are targeted for a wall.
Meanwhile, overwhelming scientific evidence says that climate change could take hundreds of millions of lives and trigger a global economic collapse in the next several decades, making anything we might recognize as human civilization physically impossible.
It’s not as if migration and climate are unrelated, either: Climate change is poised to cause the largest mass migration in human history, as millions are forced to leave homes rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels, unbearable heat, and declining crop yields. Trump’s border and immigration policies, in other words, are climate policies, and efforts to restrict access to temperate parts of the world will be a defining political issue of the next century.
In addition to being justified, declaring a national emergency on climate change wouldn’t be all that novel. As Jeffrey Toobin pointed out in the New Yorker, the National Emergencies Act has been invoked 41 times since it was passed in 1976, and there are 31 emergencies currently in effect. What constitutes an emergency has never been clearly defined, and most of those currently in place allow the White House to place sanctions and restrictions on countries whose policies it disagrees with, such as regulating vessels that might enter Cuban waters or mobilizing the military as George W. Bush did in the days after 9/11.
Concerns about the expansion of executive authority are well-placed, but meeting the climate change goals recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change requires a level of mobilization that our balkanized, partisan government may be ill-equipped to handle. After all, decarbonization isn’t just about building a symbolic infrastructure project. It would involve transitioning every sector of the economy off fossil fuels at lightning speed. The sheer amount of administrative collaboration involved — across government agencies, industry, and civil society — is staggering, and would require massive levels of government investment and going toe-to-toe with one of the world’s most powerful industries.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently called the threat of climate change “our World War II.”Because of the effort and exigency involved, climate scientists are urging a “wartime footing” to decarbonize the economy over the next 16 years. They’re increasingly joined by politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who recently called the threat of climate change “our World War II” at a recent Martin Luther King Jr. Day event.
If climate change is our World War II, why shouldn’t our politicians should act like it?
As it became increasingly likely that the U.S. would enter World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers were eager to build up the country’s manufacturing capacity. But after years of feeling threatened by New Deal reforms, executives weren’t keen to have the state tell them what to do. Congress was also hesitant to appropriate more money to defense and have the state play a stronger role in directing industrial activity, mindful of public pushback to similar measures that were enacted during World War I.
But the cause of winning the war — an “unlimited” national emergency, as Roosevelt called it right before U.S. entry — was considered too important to be derailed by corporate executives or political squabbling. Declaring a limited national emergency in 1939 allowed the White House to begin its Protective Mobilization Plan, shifting resources to Britain’s Royal Navy, expanding military ranks, and building out industrial capacity to produce things like military aircrafts. Once Roosevelt declared a full national emergency after Pearl Harbor, federal agencies’ role in the economy was able to greatly expand. The government could now control prices and wages while directing industry leaders to meet manufacturing needs. Firms that refused to go along with government orders faced a federal takeover. By 1945, around a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing had been nationalized.
No doubt, this is the kind of outcome that terrifies Rubio. But without it, it’s not clear that the war effort would have been successful. And the pending battle against climate change is one that none of us can afford to lose.
There are serious risks to expanding executive authority. While Roosevelt’s war mobilization was ultimately critical to defeating Axis powers and ending the Depression, it also gave him the authority to intern over 100,000 Japanese-Americans, and wars abroad have reliably been an excuse to suppress civil liberties at home.
Because of these risks, and because leveraging the National Emergency Act sidesteps our democratic processes, it should be treated as a nuclear option. Such tools exist to intervene where our democratic processes fail. That said, there’s reason to suspect they already have.
Eighty-one percent of registered voters, an overwhelming majority, support a Green New Deal, and a record number of Americans are “very worried” about climate change. If the will of voters were democratically weighted, climate action would be a bipartisan priority. But we live in an oligarchy, where extreme wealth depresses the popular will. Energy executives are willing to throw tens of millions of dollars into blocking comparatively small-bore climate policies, blanketing airwaves with as much disinformation as is needed to get the job done. BP alone spent $13 million to defeat a modest carbon fee in Washington state last cycle. The resistance to an economy-wide mobilization like the Green New Deal will be orders of magnitude greater.
The climate crisis advances at the behest of a small handful of of executives and the politicians bought by them. Left unchecked, it will make any kind of organized global community impossible — let alone democracy. In such a context, it’s hard to argue that the status quo is more democratic than the alternative. The question for the next Democratic president, then, is whether they are prepared to put up at least as much of a fight to save the world as Trump has to build his wall.
The post Climate Change, Not Border Security, Is the Real National Emergency appeared first on The Intercept.
A Vale foi alertada sobre falhas nos procedimentos de controle e manutenção da barragem que se rompeu em Brumadinho, mas omitiu as informações para a população. Em seu Relatório de Impacto Ambiental, apresentado em 2017, a empresa cortou uma tabela importante que alertava para os riscos, produzida para um relatório de 2015. O documento de 2015 é o mesmo que serviu de base para a versão mais recente, de 2017, apresentado sem as informações sobre os riscos da barragem.
Os problemas na barragem foram identificados por uma consultoria contratada pela mineradora, a empresa Nicho Engenheiros Consultores Ltda, uma firma de Belo Horizonte com atuação nesse mercado desde 1990. O Intercept conversou com o dono da Nicho, o engenheiro Sérgio Augusto da Silva Roman, que assinou o estudo de impacto de Brumadinho como responsável técnico. A Vale precisava dos laudos para expandir a mineração em Brumadinho.
Questionado sobre a ausência das informações na versão divulgada ao público geral em 2017, Sérgio Roman diz que “não foi por omissão, mas porque não cabia mesmo”. Perguntado por que não cabia esse tipo de informação mesmo depois da tragédia ocorrida em Mariana, em 2015, o engenheiro justificou assim: “A população não ia entender porcaria nenhuma”.
Foto: Mauro Pimentel/Getty Images
O documento é o Estudo de Impacto Ambiental (EIA), exigido de qualquer empreendimento que afete o meio ambiente. A papelada é a base dos processos de licenciamento. É a partir do documento e de vistorias próprias e eventuais pedidos de esclarecimentos que os órgãos de controle ambiental autorizam obras ou, se for o caso, determinam o cumprimento de “condicionantes” – medidas práticas que devem ser tomadas para que, aí sim, as licenças necessárias sejam dadas pelo governo. É um processo lento, geralmente proporcional ao tamanho do empreendimento.
Entre as mais de duas mil páginas redigidas a partir do trabalho de uma equipe de 27 profissionais, a Nicho listou falhas de segurança nas barragens da Vale em Brumadinho. Os problemas afetavam diretamente a Barragem I, a maior do complexo do Córrego do Feijão, justamente a que estourou no dia 25 despejando uma quantidade equivalente a 4.800 piscinas olímpicas lotadas de lama tóxica sobre funcionários da própria Vale e residências espalhadas na zona de mineração da empresa.
O estudo de impacto descreve, a partir da página 1.041, os métodos geralmente usados na indústria para controlar a segurança de barragens. Um monte de termos técnicos para basicamente dizer que alguns elementos são simples de observar (como fissuras superficiais e erosões), enquanto outros, praticamente invisíveis, demandam uma atenção muito maior e o apoio de instrumentos. O problema é que, segundo a consultoria contratada pela Vale, os instrumentos da gigante mundial da mineração não estavam em perfeitas condições.
Relatório de 2015 identificou medidores de pressão que não estavam funcionando.
Uma geringonça chamada piezômetro é essencial para a medição do nível da pressão exercida pelos rejeitos e pela água sobre a estrutura das barragens. O relatório diz que a Vale tinha 78 deles para medir diferentes pontos das barragens, mas quatro deles eram antigos (instalados oito anos antes) e “alguns foram danificados ou suspeita-se não estarem funcionando corretamente”. A pressão dos rejeitos sobre a parede de contenção é justamente o motivo mais evidente do rompimento. Pelo relatório, portanto, a Vale não poderia ter certeza, à época, de que a pressão estava sob controle, já que vários medidores eram antigos, estavam danificados ou sequer funcionavam. Perguntada, a empresa não respondeu se trocou os equipamentos.
Outro instrumento importante são os drenos, que conseguem medir a vazão da água. Nesse caso, indica a Nicho nas suas observações, “vários drenos encontram-se secos” – ou seja, não estavam medindo vazão nenhuma.
Numa espécie de puxão de orelha na mineradora, os especialistas da Nicho registraram que, “como princípio, a manutenção deve ser executada imediatamente após a identificação do problema evitando-se sua progressão, conjugação com outros e ameaça à segurança das Barragens I e VI”. Como os problemas foram encontrados naquele momento, era sinal, portanto, de que não havia reação imediata da Vale aos problemas (ou ao menos sobre parte deles).
Empresa que fez o estudo deu um puxão de orelha na Vale.
Para apresentar às autoridades ambientais o impacto que determinado empreendimento terá no meio ambiente (árvores, rios, animais e também seres humanos), as mineradoras contratam empresas de consultoria independentes, com equipe formada por especialistas de diferentes áreas (de biólogos a geólogos, passando por engenheiros), para detalhar os possíveis impactos ambientais gerados pelas suas atividades. É uma exigência legal. Mas também uma relação de conflito de interesses intrínseca já que, no fim das contas, o objetivo do estudo é convencer o poder público a liberar as obras.
No caso da Vale, que desde 2003 explode montanhas na região do Córrego do Feijão em busca de minério de ferro, a contratada para produzir os laudos é a Nicho. Em agosto de 2015, portanto meses antes do rompimento da barragem da Samarco (controlada pela Vale) em Mariana, a Vale apresentou às autoridades ambientais de Minas Gerais mais de 2 mil páginas redigidas pela Nicho detalhando todo o projeto de expansão da operação de Brumadinho.
O Copam (Conselho Estadual de Política Ambiental, órgão de Minas Gerais responsável pela concessão da licença) nunca pediu esclarecimentos sobre os problemas apontados em relação à Barragem I.
Calhas entupidas e até formigasO engenheiro Sérgio Augusto da Silva Roman, da Nicho, que assinou o estudo de impacto de Brumadinho como responsável técnico, explica que a observação dos problemas se deu em vistoria presencial, mas que não caberia à sua empresa fazer uma análise mais pormenorizada da estrutura. “Nós que fazemos licenciamento só recebemos o projeto pronto. Pressupõe-se que todos os critérios técnicos e de segurança tenham sido obedecidos”, disse.
“A gente faz observação, [aponta que] tem tal problema. Mas dificilmente numa mina que já está operando o órgão ambiental vai dizer que não pode operar mais”, afirma. A barragem que estourou estava em operação desde a década de 1950. Segundo Roman, caberia ao órgão técnico pedir à Vale mais esclarecimentos, complementação de informações, para fazer uma análise mais profunda antes de conceder a licença. “Se o órgão ambiental diz que não tem problema, não sou eu que vou dizer que tem”.
Entre outros problemas encontrados, estavam também o acúmulo de sedimentos em calhas onde deveria escorrer água pela encosta da barragem e a presença de formigueiros na estrutura inclinada que liga o topo dela ao chão (se há formigueiros, sinal de que as formigas estavam penetrando no solo).
E, por fim, um outro problema de falta de prevenção: a Vale não produzia relatórios mensais de segurança das barragens. A empresa responsável pelo Estudo de Impacto Ambiental recomendou, então, que a Vale ou empresa contratada por ela passasse a emitir “mensalmente um parecer escrito sobre a condição das barragens, à luz dos resultados do monitoramento”.
Sobre o controle das barragens, a Vale afirmou em comunicado divulgado na última sexta-feira que vinha fazendo inspeções quinzenais na barragem e registrando suas observações em sistema controlado pela Agência Nacional de Mineração, órgão federal criado recentemente para regular o setor. A última inspeção foi realizada três dias antes do rompimento e, segundo a mineradora, “não detectou nenhuma alteração no estado de conservação da estrutura”.
Apesar dos problemas apontados, a empresa contratada pela Vale concluiu em 2015 que, “de acordo com inspeções realizadas pela Pimenta de Ávila Consultoria (2010), análises de documentos e monitoramento disponibilizados pela Vale, constata-se que a estrutura [da Barragem I], na situação atual, se encontra em condições adequadas de segurança”.
‘A população não vai entender porcaria nenhuma’Dois anos depois do primeiro estudo, em maio de 2017, a Vale e a Nicho apresentaram aos órgãos ambientais uma nova versão do documento, agora já batizado como Relatório de Impacto Ambiental (RIMA). Não era de fato um novo relatório. Era apenas uma versão resumida do estudo feito anteriormente, com as mesmas conclusões e uma capa mais bonita. Em vez de 2.114 páginas, eram 238.
Como a Vale explica, esse novo relatório “trata das principais conclusões sobre a região e o empreendimento, sendo apresentadas de forma resumida e clara para que a população entenda o projeto, bem como as consequências ambientais de sua implementação”. E sugere que as pessoas interessadas leiam o Estudo de Impacto Ambiental, com suas mais de duas mil páginas cheias de jargões do mundo da mineração – mas que só ficaria disponível para consulta pública, segundo a própria Vale, depois da aprovação do empreendimento pelos órgãos competentes. A divulgação de estudos de impacto ambiental antes da aprovação do empreendimento é vetada por uma resolução do Conselho Nacional de Meio Ambiente, de 1986.
Faria falta a leitura completa, porque, no resumo, a Vale e a Nicho esqueceram de informar à população sobre as observações críticas feitas pela equipe de especialistas aos procedimentos de controle e manutenção das barragens. Na verdade, as barragens, embora sejam parte importante do projeto de expansão, são comentadas apenas em uma página do relatório (pág. 36). E sem referências críticas.
Foto: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images
As barragens mereciam um maior destaque no relatório. A Vale pretendia aumentar seus lucros explorando os rejeitos depositados na Barragem I. Explicando de maneira simplificada: geralmente os restos não aproveitados do processo de transformação do ferro bruto extraído das montanhas em produto comercializável vai para a lata de lixo – ou seja, para as chamadas barragem de rejeitos, uma espécie de fossa sanitária gigante a céu aberto.
Acontece que, desde antes da tragédia ambiental de Mariana, a Vale tenta obter a aprovação do governo de Minas Gerais para poder mexer nessa barragem já lotada (e, portanto, inativa) para drenar rejeitos para uma nova etapa de processamento.
Nesse novo processo, os rejeitos seriam transferidos a partir de um duto de cerca de 1,5 km de extensão, a ser construído, para que fossem transformados em “pellet feed” (um minério super fino, com menos de 0,15 mm de espessura). Trata-se de um minério menos valorizado, mas, ainda assim, é dinheiro. Como a equipe da Nicho Engenheiros citou no Estudo de Impacto Ambiental, um pesquisador da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais analisou a importância econômica desse reaproveitamento de rejeitos pelas mineradoras e apontou que essas intervenções são feitas de forma “que seja traduzida em maior margem de lucro”.
Antes que essa transferência pelo chamado rejeitoduto começasse, a Vale pretendia colocar retroescavadeiras em cima da barragem (que é resistente no topo) até quando fosse possível (ou seja, antes que as escavadeiras começassem a afundar na lama movediça). Para que as escavadeiras pudessem fazer o trabalho em segurança, o nível da água no fundo da barragem de rejeitos deveria ser diminuído gradativamente.
Como se viu, a Vale pretendia mexer num gigante adormecido. No início de dezembro passado, a companhia finalmente conseguiu autorização para fazer isso. Pouco mais de um mês depois, a barragem inativa que a Vale teve autorização para colocar retroescavadeiras em cima se rompeu e sua lama tóxica matou dezenas de pessoas.
Tudo certo, segundo a ValeAs investigações oficiais sobre o desastre ainda estão apenas começando, então não se tem informação definitiva sobre os procedimentos de controle e prevenção que vinham sendo efetivamente realizados pela Vale em Brumadinho. A mineradora tem dito que fez tudo certo e que as barragens eram seguras.
Em comunicado divulgado horas após o rompimento da barragem, a Vale informou que a estrutura “possuía Declarações de Condição de Estabilidade emitidas pela empresa TUV SUD do Brasil, empresa internacional especializada em Geotecnia”. A última declaração tinha sido emitida em setembro passado, segundo a mineradora, referente “aos processos de Revisão Periódica de Segurança de Barragens e Inspeção Regular de Segurança de Barragens”. Ainda segundo o comunicado da Vale, “a barragem possuía Fator de Segurança de acordo com as boas práticas mundiais e acima da referência da Norma Brasileira”.
O Intercept enviou alguns questionamentos para a Vale na noite de domingo, mas, até o fim da manhã de hoje, a empresa ainda não respondido três de nossas perguntas:
A Vale produzia o parecer mensal de segurança das barragens I e VI, conforme recomendado pela equipe responsável pela produção do Estudo de Impacto Ambiental do projeto de expansão da Córrego do Feijão/Jangada? Em caso positivo, a companhia pode fornecer uma cópia dos três últimos pareceres? Caso esses pareceres não tenham sido produzidos, qual a justificativa da companhia para o não cumprimento da recomendação presente no EIA?
A Mina Córrego do Feijão foi objeto de alguma fiscalização ambiental nos últimos três anos? Em caso positivo, a empresa apresentou às autoridades ambientais o relatório previsto no Parágrafo 5º do Artigo 7º da Deliberação Normativa COPAM nº 87, de 17 de junho de 2005?
Por que a Vale apresentou, em 10 de maio de 2017, uma versão resumida do Relatório de Impacto Ambiental originalmente apresentado em 4 de agosto de 2015, sem referências às observações críticas sobre a Barragem I?
Vamos atualizar a reportagem com as respostas, se elas vierem.
Bombeiros se esforçam para encontrar sobreviventes após o rompimento da barragem.
Foto: Mauro Pimentel/Getty Images
The post Vale sabia de problemas na barragem e omitiu os riscos em documento público appeared first on The Intercept.
More than two years after Donald Trump’s inauguration ushered in sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration enforcement system, accounts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting undocumented immigrants in and around New York courts have increased by 1,700 percent, according to a new report.
The expanded courthouse operations have been coupled with increased reports of New York-based immigration agents using physical force to take undocumented immigrants into custody, the Immigrant Defense Project said Monday.
“ICE operations increased not only in absolute number but grew in brutality and geographic scope” from 2017 to 2018, the IDP report found, with plainclothes agents in New York relying on “intrusive surveillance and violent force to execute arrests.”
Included in the new report are accounts of New York-based agents grabbing people off the street as they attempt to go to or leave court, shuffling them into unmarked cars, and refusing to identify themselves as bewildered family members look on.
“This report shows that ICE is expanding surveillance and arrests in courthouses across the state, creating a crisis for immigrants who need access to the courts,” Alisa Wellek, IDP’s executive director, said in a statement. “We cannot allow ICE to turn New York’s courts into traps for immigrants.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Relying on a network of attorneys, legal organizations, and a publicly accessible hotline, IDP has tracked ICE enforcement tactics for years. According to the organization, Trump’s ascent to the White House was followed by a surge in courthouse arrests unlike anything advocates in New York had ever seen, with the total number of arrests reported in 2017 and 2018 numbering 374, compared to 11 in 2016.
IDP has also tracked ICE tactics outside courts and in New York communities, releasing an interactive map in 2018 documenting the agency’s increased use of predawn raids and ruses — often involving ICE agents pretending to be New York City police officers — in order to arrest undocumented immigrants.
Last year not only saw an increase in reported courthouse arrests in New York City, IDP’s latest report found. The organization also documented courthouse arrests in new locations, including several upstate New York counties, and what the advocacy group described as the targeting of “particularly vulnerable immigrants including survivors of human trafficking, survivors of domestic violence, and youth” at court.
“In the vast majority of operations, ICE agents refused to identify themselves, explain why an individual is being arrested, or offer proof that they have reason to believe that the individual they’re arresting is deportable,” the report said. “This occurred despite the fact that internal agency regulations require them to provide this information.”
The increase in courthouse arrests in New York followed the issuance of a new directive on such operations, signed by former ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan, who once told lawmakers that undocumented people should live in fear of his agency.
Echoing the administration’s anti-“sanctuary city” rhetoric, the January 10 directive argued that “courthouse arrests are often necessitated by the unwillingness of jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE in the transfer of custody of aliens from their prisons and jails.”
The directive went on to say that family members and friends encountered during a courthouse arrest “will not be subject to civil immigration enforcement action, absent special circumstances,” and “ICE officers and agents should generally avoid enforcement actions in courthouses, or areas within courthouses that are dedicated to non-criminal (e.g., family court, small claims court) proceedings.”
According to the IDP report, ICE has not only expanded courthouse arrests since the directive was issued — its New York agents have also arrested family members present during operations and carried out arrests in noncriminal courts.
Physical Assaults by ICE AgentsIn November, The Intercept published video, originally obtained by IDP, of ICE agents and New York state court officers arresting an undocumented man outside the Queens County Criminal Court. Included in Monday’s report, the man’s arrest is part of a broader pattern described by IDP as “one of the most striking changes in ICE operations” in 2018.
“Over the past year, IDP has received reports of ICE agents tackling individuals to the ground, slamming family members against walls, and dragging individuals from cars in front of their children,” the report said. “They have also pulled guns on individuals leaving court. In one incident, ICE officers physically assaulted an attorney who was 8 months pregnant.”
In one case documented in the report, a mother and son were leaving Brooklyn’s criminal court when two men in plainclothes grabbed the son and began dragging him toward an unmarked car. Fearing that she was witnessing her son’s kidnapping, the woman asked the men who they were but received no answer. A third officer, according to the report, showed up and shoved the woman against the wall, repeatedly telling her to “shut up.”
“The officers then drove away, leaving his mother sobbing on the street, panicked that her son had been kidnapped,” the report said. “She did not know it was ICE agents who arrested him until she received a call from her son in an ICE processing facility later that day.”
A second incident documented in the report also invoked the sense of kidnapping in progress.
“A man was leaving the Brooklyn Supreme Court with his attorney and family when he was suddenly surrounded by plainclothes ICE agents,” the report said. After throwing him against a wall and refusing to identify themselves to his attorney, the agents bundled the young man into an unmarked car with no license plates.
According to the report, “several bystanders witnessed the commotion and one woman, believing that the man was being kidnapped, called 911.”
The IDP is now pushing for legislation — the Protect Our Courts Act — to put an end to ICE’s use of courthouse arrests in New York. According to Wellek, the IDP executive director, “The New York state legislature must act now to pass the Protect Our Courts Act to prevent ICE from continuing these harmful practices.”
The post ICE Courthouse Arrests in New York Increased 1,700 Percent Under Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that.
The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It’s an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They’re not completely sure where the data is coming from.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, “Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school).”
To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations — creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city’s real-world patterns but that “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people,” as Bowden told The Intercept.
The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.
If Sidewalk Labs has access to people’s unique paths of movement prior to making its synthetic models, wouldn’t it be possible to figure out who they are, based on where they go to sleep or work?Last month, the New York Times revealed how sensitive location data is harvested by third parties from our smartphones — often with weak or nonexistent consent provisions. A Motherboard investigation in early January further demonstrated how cell companies sell our locations to stalkers and bounty hunters willing to pay the price.
For some, the Google sibling’s plans to gather and commodify real-time location data from millions of cellphones adds to these concerns. “The privacy concerns are pretty extreme,” Ben Green, an urban technology expert and author of “The Smart Enough City,” wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Mobile phone location data is extremely sensitive.” These privacy concerns have been far from theoretical. An Associated Press investigation showed that Google’s apps and website track people even after they have disabled the location history on their phones. Quartz found that Google was tracking Android users by collecting the addresses of nearby cellphone towers even if all location services were turned off. The company has also been caught using its Street View vehicles to collect the Wi-Fi location data from phones and computers.
This is why Sidewalk Labs has instituted significant protections to safeguard privacy, before it even begins creating a synthetic population. Any location data that Sidewalk Labs receives is already de-identified (using methods such as aggregation, differential privacy techniques, or outright removal of unique behaviors). Bowden explained that the data obtained by Replica does not include a device’s unique identifiers, which can be used to uncover someone’s unique identity.
However, some urban planners and technologists, while emphasizing the elegance and novelty of the program’s concept, remain skeptical about these privacy protections, asking how Sidewalk Labs defines personally identifiable information. Tamir Israel, a staff lawyer at the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, warns that re-identification is a rapidly moving target. If Sidewalk Labs has access to people’s unique paths of movement prior to making its synthetic models, wouldn’t it be possible to figure out who they are, based on where they go to sleep or work? “We see a lot of companies erring on the side of collecting it and doing coarse de-identifications, even though, more than any other type of data, location data has been shown to be highly re-identifiable,” he added. “It’s obvious what home people leave and return to every night and what office they stop at every day from 9 to 5 p.m.” A landmark study uncovered the extent to which people could be re-identified from seemingly-anonymous data using just four time-stamped data points of where they’ve previously been.
There are also lingering questions about how Sidewalk Labs sets limits about the type and quality of consent obtained. As the past year’s tsunami of privacy breaches has shown, many users do not understand how closely they are being tracked and how often their data is being resold to advertisers or third parties or programs like Replica. “We need to do a better job in ensuring the type of express consent commensurate with sensitivity of data is actually being enforced when data is collected,” Israel noted. Consent has historically been defined by broad and vague terms of service, leveraging companies’ knowledge of intricate technical details at the expense of users too pressed for time to read — let alone understand — their jargon-laden privacy policies. The Times investigation found, for instance, that “the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading.” Even while they may retain a broad right to sell or share location data in an opaque privacy policy, many apps do not explicitly tell their users that they are doing so.
It’s difficult to evaluate who might be consenting when it’s not clear where the data comes from. Sidewalk Labs explains that Replica’s data is purchased from telecommunications companies and companies that aggregate mobile location data from different apps. “We audit their practices to ensure they are complying with industry codes of conduct,” said Bowden. “No Google data is used. This extensive audit process includes regular reporting, interviews, and evaluation to ensure vendors meet specified requirements around consent, opt-out, and privacy protections.”
Yet because the exact sources of data have not been revealed, it is unclear whether Replica draws from the ranks of unregulated apps that profit from indefinite privacy policies to continuously collect users’ precise whereabouts. Publicly available documents from cities piloting or purchasing Replica offer conflicting information about Replica’s exact sources of data. A document from the Illinois Department of Transportation describes Replica’s data sources as “mobile carrier data, location data from third-party aggregators and Google location data, to generate travel data for a region.” This data sample, it adds, “is not limited to Android devices” and “is collected from individuals for months at a time, allowing for a complete picture of individual travel patterns.” In Portland, documents filed with its city council state that the data is sourced from “Android Phones and Google apps.” Officials at the Portland Bureau of Transportation told Oregon Public Broadcasting that some of the sources of Sidewalk Lab’s mobile location data may also come from other sources, not yet known to them. Minutes from a regional transit planning meeting for Kansas City suggest that it’s possible for Replica “to get data on things like Uber & Lyft,” while a city PowerPoint states that the tool is “based off of Google data.”
At stake with Replica is the value that can be produced by aggregating data about our movements and then selling it back to governments. The program was originally pitched by Sidewalk Labs “to support the development” of Quayside, the controversial “smart” city planned for Toronto’s eastern waterfront. (A Sidewalk Labs spokesperson told The Intercept that there are no plans to bring Replica to Toronto.) Yet Torontonians have been watching Replica’s plans closely. Some see the project as an example of the way the proprietary tools and techniques developed by Sidewalk Labs at Quayside might be exported — or imported — to other cities, without creating any additional economic benefits for the residents who have produced this data.
“Replica is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism, profiting from information collected from and about us as we use the products that have become a part of our lives,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project. “We need to start asking, as a society, if we are going to continue to allow business models that are built around exploiting our information without meaningful consent.”
The post Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones appeared first on The Intercept.
Two previous posts—“When the Top U.S. Tax Rate was 70 Percent—or Higher” and “Who Is Paying Their ‘Fair Share’?”—went into the endlessly complex and newly politically relevant question of the “fairness” of the American tax system.
The question is complex for obvious reasons. It’s politically relevant as evidence comes in about the effects of the Trump-Republican tax cut of 2017, and as Democratic proposals come forth to raise top-bracket tax rates again—for instance, as high as 70 percent (which was their minimum level between 1932 and 1982).
A huge torrent of mail has arrived, of which I expect this will be the next-to-last sampling. Not the very last, because there’s a technical issue I want to understand better before posting information about it. But next-to-last, because there’s a limit on fresh perspectives.
Here we go, with numbered entries and a brief blurb on the perspective each one represents.
1) “Stop saying that high marginal tax rates ‘Made America Great’ in the first place.” Several previous reader-messages have stressed the high tax rates during America’s post-World War II growth decades, as a sign that higher top-bracket rates could be valuable once again. Here is a long, detailed response to that argument, from a reader on the West Coast:
The argument, if you can call it that, over the top marginal tax rate vs national economic well-being is—in my opinion—a correlation vs causation pissing match that takes as its subject an issue of secondary or tertiary importance at best.
It’s fun to bash the tennis ball back and forth across our contemporary social and political divides about the rich and rates, but the absolute, fundamental fact about the United States after the Second World War (which seems to be the consensus Lost Golden Age) was that it had been dealt not only all the aces in the global economic poker hand, but most of the face cards as well. To recap:
The physical industrial capacity of the most advanced industrial economies of Europe and Asia ranged between meaningfully damaged and nearly destroyed. The United States by contrast had just invested tremendous amounts of human energy in the construction of productive infrastructure that no one ever attacked. The United States suffered less than 3 percent of the war’s combatant deaths and less than 1 percent of the total global death toll. Considering combatant deaths only, the US suffered in absolute terms about one fifth of the deaths of Japanese soldiers, less than one tenth the deaths of German soldiers, and less than one twentieth the deaths of Soviet soldiers. US military deaths were fewer than those of Yugoslavia. These numbers of course skew even further in the U.S.’s favor when considering total deaths including civilians, and then again when considering total deaths as a percentage of prewar populations. The United States was the refuge of choice for scientists and other intellectuals who fled Europe, i.e. there was a tremendous brain drain in the U.S.’s favor The U.S. had the advantage of significant natural resources in energy and materials (oil, coal, metals). Ethnic tensions were controlled e.g. via the violent subjugation of black Americans, to take only the most obvious and terrible example. The U.S. had as ready markets all the degraded and destroyed industrial economies of the world to export its goods to, with unprecedented demand for capital goods to rebuild those economies.In sum, for a good twenty and arguably thirty to forty years after the war, the U.S. had by far the largest and most advanced industrial infrastructure in the world, the least damaged and probably best-educated workforce, social cohesion built not incidentally on the repression of ethnic minorities, nearly free energy from oil & coal, and buyers around the world in urgent need of America’s manufactures.
That is the primary set of facts about America the Great that we should keep always front of mind. It seems of little relevance, in light of that combination of facts, whether the top marginal rate in 1955 was 50 percent or 70 percent or 90 percent. The U.S. would have had to shoot its golden goose in the head at point blank range, possibly more than once, in order to kill it.
I am not far-seeing enough to predict all the consequences, intended and otherwise, of changes made now to the tax code or even of changes to the distribution of the tax burden. What I know is that the global competitive landscape has changed permanently, and bears little resemblance to that of 1955.
I would submit that asking “what is the relationship between top tax rates and economic growth in the U.S.” ignores more or less every factor of primary economic importance. A better place to start might be by asking “are there periods in economic history, in the last twenty years or prior to WWI (say), in which we can cleanly (?) observe the impact of dramatic changes to the tax burden paid by the capital-holding and capital-allocating class upon the economic performance of one or more industrial economies participating in high-level import-export competition with other like economies."
2) “Yes, the economy has changed since the 1950s. It’s changed by becoming more unfair.” A reader makes a contrary argument, about the shifts in the economic landscape since the post-war growth decades:
I think one of the main reasons for having a 70-90 percent tax on the highest income people is to reinstate a feeling of fair play in this country. This has been lacking in the last 40 years ever since wages have stagnated for most of us, taxes on the wealthy have gone down, and the wealthy have taken control of the government via lobbying, Citizens United, etc.
Every game needs equal opportunities and fair rules equally applied to everyone. If it doesn't people get tired of playing and tip over the board. That's what's happening to this country and around the world.
The rich people's claim that "upskilling" (a Davos term) workers will reduce the wealth gap and income inequality is a fallacy.
I'm an M.S. level biochemist with an MBA and some okay computer skills working as a knowledge worker, and making a solid middle class income, and my fellow employees and I are lucky to get a 2.5 percent yearly raise, while we see the top managers make hundreds of thousands a year and up to over a million/year and get big bonuses.
You can't get too much more upskilled than me or my colleagues, and we're still falling further and further behind the wealthy.
3) Yes, it really is more unfair. Continuing the argument in #2, from another reader:
In discussing the changes in average tax rates for the (as reference
points) the bottom 50 percent and the top 1 percent of incomes, it is also useful to keep in mind the changes in incomes for those groups. Since 1980, median household income (half make more, half make less) has been essentially flat. Labor productivity (and resulting GDP growth) has continued at near the historic (since 1800) rate, but virtually all the additional income has gone to the top 10 percent, and most of that to the top 1 percent.
The share of all income going to each of the four lower quintiles (the bottom 20 percent of households, the next 20 percent, etc.) has decreased since 1980. The portion going to the top 20 percent has, of course, increased (and, to repeat, most of that has gone to the top 1 percent).
The point of all this is that the situation is even more serious than
would be suggested by the data sent by other readers. The bottom 50 percent are paying a higher percentage of an essentially unchanged income, while the top 1 percent are paying a lower percentage of vastly higher incomes.
Higher (marginal) tax rates for the very well off would be part of a program to address income inequality, but only part. The discussion,
though, should also explicitly include the dramatic (and apparently growing) increase in income inequality since 1980.
4) Rebuild America, through more public spending. An extension of arguments #2 and #3, from another reader:
If I were a Democratic strategist, I would point to our nation's once great and groundbreaking infrastructure, started / built / rebuilt largely under FDR and in the few decades immediately post-WWII and which is so desperately in need of upgrades or even basic maintenance these days and I'd brand today's conservatives as freeloaders sponging off the hard work of Americans from the past—including conservatives from Eisenhower's time, who realized patriotism meant a certain level of sacrifice by all for the good and safety of all.
5) “The things I remember were roads, tall buildings, universities and research.” Finally for today, from a reader who is a small-business owner in North Carolina.
In the 1950s the marginal income tax rate was high. But we were in the height of the cold war. So, in those days was the money taken in taxes turned back into our “military/industrial” economy in a way that grew the overall economy?
[JF note: through some of the early Cold War years, military spending neared 10 percent of the GDP. In recent decades, it’s been closer to 5 percent—of a much larger GDP. But whether those big defense budgets helped the long-term U.S. economy, rather than distorting it, has been a long-term source of serious contention. In the mid-1970s, Seymour Melman, of Columbia, wrote his influential book The Permanent War Economy, arguing that large military budgets would be a significant long-term drag on American economy. I see that I wrote a review of this book for the New York Times, when it first came out nearly 45 years ago.]
And is the difference that today that a high percentage of taxes are used for income transfer between rich and poor and younger and older? And therefore with much less GDP impact?…
And what about local property taxes? In the postwar as the South industrialized what was the contribution of industrial property to the tax base vs. the individual property tax on a home? As far as I know companies weren’t bribing, and whining for all sorts of tax concessions because they were so special. Could it be that when corporate ownership was still local they may have even had a bit pride in paying the taxes and seeing the civic improvements they paid for?
I was born in North Carolina in 1959. But as I started work in the early 1980s I got the impression people in other parts of the country were surprised that I had shoes. The things I remember were roads, tall buildings, universities and research. A state proud to show progress from subsistence to the modern age. Today there seem to be people that want to take us back to 1950, or maybe more realistically, 1850.
How did we get to where we can’t even maintain what our ancestors built, much less build for our own time?
U.S.-China tensions are boiling, as trade talks resume. The Justice Department stoked the flames with China by levying charges of bank fraud and obstruction of justice against an executive at the Chinese telecom firm Huawei. The crisis could pose a major impasse for Beijing’s goal of transforming the country into a technology powerhouse.
In the U.K., Prime Minster Theresa May’s Brexit headaches are never-ending, as she looks to the Brussels again for concessions on her country’s formal plan to leave the EU. This week looks to be yet one more crucial test of her leadership, which has weathered a string of high-profile cabinet resignations and no-confidence votes.
One thing is clear about 2020: Everyone’s already testing the waters. Kamala Harris sent an early signal to her Democratic primary opponents that she’ll be tough to outmaneuver, drawing a crowd of 22,000 for her inaugural campaign rally. Another, very different type of candidate is also floating his name for the presidency—Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a global behemoth, who is mulling a run as an independent. That has raised the hackles of Democrats who think he would instead help Trump win reelection, but David Frum argues that Schultz’s exploration may just be “the help America needs.”
The best films after week one at Sundance: The festival has long been a launching pad for flicks to find mainstream success—and Oscar accolades. Of the 17 movies our critic David Sims viewed during the festival’s first week, The Farewell stuck with him the most. It’s a humor-filled drama that tells the story of the director Lulu Wang’s family, who try to prevent a grandmother from finding out about her terminal illness during a family reunion. Late Night has ginned up the most buzz, in part because it stars and is written by Mindy Kaling, but also because Amazon forked up an eye-popping $13 million for the rights to the film.
Evening Reads
(Jun Cen)
Thousands of years ago, 50,000 acres of glacial ice crusted Venezuela’s peaks. By 1910, maps showed that these glaciers had shrunk to 2,500 acres. By 2008, fewer than 80 acres remained.
Now, amid political and economic chaos in Venezuela, scientists are racing to study the one small remaining glacier.
“This past fall, the only trained microbiologist left in the laboratory was Johnma Rondón, the second-youngest researcher on the entire Vida Glacial project team. Rondón, who helped identify the microbial strains from the glaciers as part of his doctoral dissertation, was responsible for maintaining the strains stored in the freezers in Yarzábal’s lab—no easy task in a country where power failures are frequent.”
→ Read the rest.
(Natural History Museum Rotterdam)
A Dutch man’s drug- and alcohol-induced decision in 2016 to swallow a live catfish led to a frantic visit to the emergency room, but the grisly practice of gulping down a fish has a surprisingly long backstory as a party game. The tradition stretches back to 1939, and it took off from there:
“A Harvard sophomore won local notoriety—and job offers from multiple circuses—that same year after swallowing 23 goldfish in just 10 minutes. Soon students at other schools were vying to break the record, and the Intercollegiate Goldfish Gulping Association (IGGA) was established to determine and enforce competition standards. There were only two rules: first, that each fish measured three inches long, and second, that the fish be kept down for at least 12 hours after consumption.”
→ Read the rest.
(Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP / Getty)
The above photograph depicts demonstrators in this city on January 20, 2019, protesting an agreement to rename which neighboring country?
(For answers, scroll down to No. 9 in this gallery of striking images from around the world.)
Dear Therapist
(Bianca Bagnarelli)
Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. This week, Ginger from Rochester, New York, writes:
“I’ve been dating Adam for two and a half years. I’m 33 and childless, and he’s 48, divorced, and the father of three kids. We seem to keep having the same fights about his needy ex-wife and the negative impact she has on our relationship.”
→ Read the rest, and Lori’s response. Have a question? Email Lori anytime at at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult throughout the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Monday, January 28. Federal employees are back to work today after the 35-day partial government shutdown, but the economy took an $11 billion hit, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now invited President Donald Trump to deliver the State of the Union address on February 5, after the planned January 29 address was postponed following the government shutdown standoff.
The Latest: National-Security Adviser John Bolton announced that the U.S. is imposing sanctions on a Venezuelan state-owned oil firm as part of an effort to oppose President Nicolás Maduro. Last week, in a decidedly un-Trumpian move—off Twitter, amid concerted diplomatic efforts—the administration recognized the country’s opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as its legitimate president.
A Show of Strength: California Senator Kamala Harris officially launched her presidential bid on Sunday at a massive rally in Oakland—part of her team’s broader plan to start the campaign season off strong. But presidential races are all about timing, one Democratic adviser told Edward-Isaac Dovere, “and traditionally being the first to peak is not the right time.” Meanwhile, the former Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, is taking a different approach as he ponders running in 2020—as an independent.
Behind the Scenes: “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil,” the senior adviser Stephen Miller reportedly once told Cliff Sims, an obscure former administration staffer who’s now written a new tell-all book about the chaos of working in the Trump White House. The Atlantic obtained an early copy of the book, which is filled with such jaw-dropping details.
Democratic Senator Kamala Harris speaks as she formally launches her presidential campaign at a rally in her hometown of Oakland, California, on Sunday. (Tony Avelar / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticTrump’s Lawyers Need to Worry About More Than Winning (Bob Bauer)
“Trump’s lawyers have the professional independence and ethical responsibility to do what they can to divert him from this path, or any other, that leads to serious harm to the nation’s democratic processes and institutions.” → Read on.
Trump Is Destroying His Own Case for a National Emergency (Elizabeth Goitein)
“A president using emergency powers to thwart Congress’s will, in a situation where Congress has had ample time to express it, is like a doctor relying on an advance directive to deny life-saving treatment to a patient who is conscious and clearly asking to be saved.” → Read on.
The Terrorism That Doesn’t Spark a Panic (Adam Serwer)
“But there’s one spike in violence that the president rarely acknowledges or even mentions, and it’s the rise in far-right terror that has accompanied his ascension to the White House.” → Read on.
The Ex-Starbucks CEO May Save the Democratic Party From Itself (David Frum)
“If you seriously believe that the Trump presidency presents a unique threat to American democracy, you want the safer choice, not the risky one. You want the candidate with the broadest possible appeal, not the most sectarian.” → Read on.
◆ How Every Member Got to Congress (Sahil Chinoy and Jessica Ma, The New York Times)
◆ Poor Southerners Are Joining the Globe’s Climate Migrants (Lewis Raven Wallace, Environmental Health News)
◆ Why We Need to Be Wary of Narratives of Economic Catastrophe (Jeremy Adelman, Aeon)
◆ The Foolish Quest to Be the Next Barack Obama (Bill Scher, Politico Magazine)
◆ Iowa Nice: Hawkeyed Experts Say Elizabeth Warren Hit Ground Running (Ben Jacobs, The Guardian)
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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Every year since the Sundance Film Festival began, in 1985, the founder and figurehead, Robert Redford, has kicked off the event with a discussion of the featured movies and the state of independent cinema. Named after one of Redford’s most iconic characters, the annual Utah gathering was designed to foster filmmaking talent outside of the studio system. But this year, Redford made something clear: He no longer needs to be in the spotlight. After a brief introduction, he stepped aside at the opening press conference. “I think we’re at a point where I can move on to a different place,” he said, ceding the stage to the executive director, Keri Putnam.
Sundance has debuted films from some of indie cinema’s most prominent voices over the past 30-plus years, including Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, Todd Haynes, and recent Grand Jury Prize winners such as Damien Chazelle and Ryan Coogler. But in stepping back, Redford is acknowledging the welcome ways in which the festival continues to evolve: Some 40 percent of this year’s movies were directed by a woman, and 36 percent were made by people of color. Meanwhile, 63 percent of the accredited press come from “underrepresented groups,” Putnam said.
[Read: What to expect at this year’s Sundance Film Festival]
Since arriving at Park City last week, I’ve seen 17 movies, cramming in screenings in search of breakout hits, exciting new voices, and less heralded gems that could easily get lost in the mix. Sundance is a place for movies to make a splash and get picked up for large sums of money by big studios, but it’s also where unproven directors can debut work alongside veteran filmmakers. In fact, some of the strongest projects I’ve seen so far come from names I’d never heard before.
The Farewell (A24)The most outstanding movie I saw during the festival’s first, packed weekend of programming was Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, the second film from the Chinese-born writer and director, who moved to the United States at a young age. The Farewell dramatizes an incredible personal story, one that Wang told on an episode of This American Life: Her grandmother is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and her extended family decides to keep the news secret from the matriarch during a big reunion. Awkwafina plays an American-raised granddaughter Billi, whose desire to tell her grandmother what’s really happening is tied to her larger unresolved sorrow over leaving her homeland as a child.
The script is packed with mundanely funny observations, its family dynamics are keenly observed, and Wang is a confident presence behind the camera, playing her intergenerational ensemble off each other and rarely resorting to impassioned speeches to make her points. This is no My Big Fat Greek Wedding–type broad comedy. There’s humor in every scene, but a kind rooted in the unspoken bond between Billi and her grandma (played by Zhou Shuzhen), and the very different connection Billi has with her parents (Tzi Ma and Diana Lin). The indie-studio heavyweight A24 acquired The Farewell for a reported $6 million, possibly setting the stage for the movie to get the sort of wide audience and Oscar success that prior projects like Room, Moonlight, and Lady Bird enjoyed.
The splashiest buy at the festival thus far came from Amazon, which ponied up $13 million for the rights to Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night, a buzzy satire of life in the world of comedy written by and starring Mindy Kaling. She plays Molly Patel, an untested writer who’s hired by the sharp but disaffected talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) after the program is criticized for not employing female writers. The film is way too stuffed with plot—Newbury is trying to rescue a show in decline, Molly is trying to establish herself, and there are a few unnecessary story twists. But as a Devil Wears Prada–like tale of an intense boss-employee relationship, it works. The movie’s actual joke-writing could be sharper, and at times it feels like Kaling is shying away from really tackling the structural sexism of her industry, inexplicably giving her character an absurd fairy-tale origin story (she’s hired from a job at a chemical plant, rather than from the comedy world). But Thompson’s performance is imperious and cutting enough to keep the whole project afloat.
Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (A24)For the last few festivals, Netflix and Amazon have scooped up multiple projects at Sundance. But this year, the companies seem to have throttled back, relying more on their own productions. As a result, A24 has been the biggest powerhouse here, screening several movies worth recommending. Chief among them is Joe Talbot’s debut feature The Last Black Man in San Francisco, co-written by and starring his friend Jimmie Fails. The film is a whimsical, sometimes heartbreaking story of how gentrification has swallowed up the duo’s beloved hometown. Fails plays a character based on himself who surreptitiously moves back into his old family home while it stands empty on the market—his way of trying to reclaim a place in a neighborhood he can no longer afford. Talbot supplies painterly visuals and a somewhat abstract storytelling style, while Fails and Jonathan Majors (who plays the protagonist’s best friend) give deftly funny, melancholic performances.
Tom Burke and Honor Swinton-Byrne in The Souvenir (A24)Another splendid A24 title is The Souvenir, a coming-of-age drama directed by Joanna Hogg, a British filmmaker who has drawn acclaim but little attention overseas for her previous movies Unrelated, Archipelago, and Exhibition (all of which star a young Tom Hiddleston). The Souvenir is based on Hogg’s life in her early 20s—the experience of trying to be a director in 1980s London and falling in love with an older, arrogant, but undeniably compelling man.
Honor Swinton-Byrne (the daughter of Tilda Swinton) is a revelation as Julie, Hogg’s surrogate, while Tom Burke plays her on-again, off-again lover Anthony; Swinton herself contributes a lovely, restrained performance as Julie’s mother. Hogg lets crucial plot information trickle out slowly, and the quieter moments of the couple’s relationship are as important to depict as the big, emotionally harrowing fights. When The Souvenir’s two-hour running time draws to a close, you’ll likely feel as though you’ve lived Julie’s life, painfully and powerfully. A24 will release the film this year, and a sequel, amazingly enough, is set to start shooting this summer.
Ashton Sanders as Bigger Thomas in Native Son (HBO)HBO snapped up the rights to Rashid Johnson’s Native Son, which was scripted by the acclaimed playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and adapted from Richard Wright’s 1940 novel. Parks has updated the searing tale of Bigger Thomas (Ashton Sanders) for the present, and what’s most compelling about her screenplay is what she’s excised. Though the book’s chief horrifying act of violence remains, other major plot points have been moved around or taken out entirely, in an attempt to account for the way things have changed in the last 79 years.
Certain elements of Wright’s story, which follows a young African American man living in Chicago who accepts a job as a rich businessman’s driver, feel just as relevant now as they did decades ago. In retaining those details, Parks is underlining the enduring, racist inevitabilities of life in Chicago that originally angered Wright. Sanders (who did terrific work in the middle section of Moonlight) is mesmerizing, but the film struggles to keep hold of his character in the final act, as things swerve into irrevocable darkness and what initially felt insightful becomes a bit of a slog.
Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein in The Report (VICE Studios)If Native Son is polemical, then Scott Z. Burns’s The Report is entirely clinical, a thoroughly researched, hard-hitting recounting of the Senate investigation into the Bush administration’s legacy of torture. Burns is a writer who has crafted several candid (but excellent) screenplays for Soderbergh, including The Informant, Contagion, and Side Effects. In his feature-film debut behind the camera, Burns aims to be sober and workmanlike. Adam Driver plays the movie’s deeply effective moral center: Daniel Jones, the real-life researcher who compiled the report for Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening). In doing so, Jones runs into CIA intransigence and hemming and hawing from the Obama administration, the latter of which is represented in the film mostly by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm). Nobody gets away clean in this movie, but Burns lets everyone have their say rather than reducing them to cartoon villains (à la Adam McKay’s Vice).
Perhaps the strangest project I’ve seen so far at the festival is Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, a wrenching drama about a child actor living with his alcoholic father. This actor, Otis (played by Noah Jupe), is an obvious avatar for Shia LaBeouf, who got his start as a Disney Channel star before becoming a blockbuster icon and then spiraling into substance abuse and depression. The personal connection is clear because LaBeouf wrote the screenplay, and because he plays the character based on his own father, a former rodeo clown with a stringy, receding mane. In flash-forwards to the present, Lucas Hedges plays an older Otis, reckoning with his father’s abuse. The whole experience is akin to being in therapy with LaBeouf as he works through major revelations. Har’el (an obvious talent) translates close-to-the-bone emotional content into a stark vision of life balanced on a knife-edge, with just enough humor and heart to keep things from feeling too miserable.
As for the rest of the festival, there will be premieres for Netflix’s gonzo art thriller Velvet Buzzsaw, Chinonye Chukwu’s much hyped prison drama Clemency with Alfre Woodard, the Lupita Nyong’o–starring dark comedy Little Monsters, and the oddball comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon. Studios will also start to settle on their major acquisitions, and the competition prizes will be awarded, firing the starting pistol on 2019’s movie season many months before next year’s Oscars are on anyone’s mind.
Efforts to find remaining survivors have ramped up in towns devastated by the collapse of a huge dam, which released a torrent of muddy iron-ore waste in Southeast Brazil. On Friday, the dam, owned by the Brazilian mining company Vale, collapsed near the town of Brumadinho, sending tons of sludge down into the valley below, damaging or destroying houses, farms, and vehicles. Authorities have reported at least 60 deaths, with another 290 people still listed as missing—and warnings have been issued about another dam nearby that is also at risk of failure.
The Starbucks founder Howard Schultz is the Twitter villain of the hour. If hot takes actually generated heat, Schultz would already have been vaporized under the onrush of magma. His offense: contemplating a run for president as a self-funded independent centrist.
Many people could raise a legitimate complaint against this expensive plan, starting with Schultz’s heirs. But the Twitter complaints arise from concern not that Schultz is about to waste his money, but that he might spend it effectively. He might weaken the Democratic candidate in 2020, and thereby help reelect President Donald Trump.
Actually, this complaint reveals why Schultz’s exploration is just the help America needs. Schultz seems to intend to run as a compassionate businessman concerned that the Democratic Party is veering too far to the left. In an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he complained of promises of free health care and free college tuition.
[Read: Ex–Starbucks CEO could get Trump elected]
These complaints have been mocked as the selfish preoccupations of the superrich. If that were true, however, Democratic activists would have no reason to fear Schultz’s candidacy. America’s new progressive majority could roll right over Schultz’s plutocratic message.
The trouble is that, while there is clearly a strong anti-Trump majority in America, that majority is not so progressive. The crucial final piece of the anti-Trump coalition—the difference between 2016 and 2018—is that Trump has alienated a lot of people, especially women, who normally vote Republican.
College-educated, comparatively affluent, fiscally concerned: These are the voters who delivered George H. W. Bush’s former congressional seat in Houston to a business-minded Democratic candidate, Lizzie Fletcher. These are also the voters who balked the hopes of Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. They are not a majority either, nothing like it, but they are indispensable to defeating Trump. And whether or not they would ever actually vote for Howard Schultz, they are nodding along to his words.
The early Democratic presidential contest has been an exercise of lefter-than-thou politics, culminating in the earnest consideration of 70 percent tax rates and wealth confiscation for émigrés.
[Read: 10 new factors that will shape the 2020 Democratic primary]
You can understand the temptation: Trump seems weak, perhaps already doomed. Why compromise with the faint of heart? Give the American people a choice, not an echo!
This is the logic of factional politics. You want the smallest possible majority, most easily dominated by its most mobilized minority. That’s how the Tea Party thought during the Obama years, that’s how the Trump campaign evolved in 2016. Sometimes it can work, at least if you catch a lucky bounce.
But if you seriously believe that the Trump presidency presents a unique threat to American democracy, you want the safer choice, not the risky one. You want the candidate with the broadest possible appeal, not the most sectarian. Trump will be beaten not by his fiercest enemies, but by his softest supporters. You want to appeal to them, detach them—not chatter on social media about how you’d like to punch their kids in the face.
I have no idea whether Schultz can accomplish that mission. Probably not. But if Schultz at least delivers a timely reminder that somebody must accomplish that mission—and that Democratic self-indulgence will be Trump’s most indispensable resource in 2020—then he will have served his country well.
Several years ago, a couple from Twitter contacted Star Ritchey with a request: They wanted permission to put her name in their will. Ritchey had never met the couple before, but they wanted her to inherit their dogs.
“They don’t have kids, but they have bulldogs, and they reached out and said, ‘If something happens to us, we don’t know what would happen to them,’” Ritchey told me. “They said they knew that even if I couldn’t keep them, I’d get them to a good rescue.” The couple had decided Ritchey was right for the job because of her favorite hobby, which is posting about her own beloved bulldogs—the Frenchies Emmy and Luna—on Twitter.
After Ritchey started her Twitter account in 2013 as a fun way to occasionally tell the world how much she loved her previous dog, the English bulldog Georgia, she quickly got pulled into a realm of social media she didn’t know existed: bulldog Twitter. There people bond over their shared devotion to their dogs, share pictures and stories, and often meet in real life. Posting from her dog’s account quickly became a normal part of Ritchey’s day.
Then, in 2016, her relationship to that social-media circle evolved from simple fun to something deeper: Georgia was diagnosed with cancer. Ritchey had to navigate new emotional terrain with people who normally wouldn’t be involved.
[Read: How dogs make friends for their humans]
Posting enough about your pet that strangers become emotionally invested in them might seem a bit absurd, but as the barrier between online and offline life vanishes, it’s only natural that more elements of people’s emotional lives begin to migrate to digital spaces. Even for those who don’t maintain accounts specifically dedicated to their pets, a world in which our lives are more public and interconnected than ever presents a challenge. What should you share as your pet’s health inevitably starts to deteriorate, and what happens when you tell thousands of people that something you love is dying?
The best-known version of digital pet cosplay happens on Instagram, where the visual nature of the platform helps some particularly cute and well-photographed pups rise to fame beyond their roles as adored family pets. Dorie Herman is the steward of one such clan of pups, the Kardoggians. She started out with Chloe, who passed away last year, and now she has Cupid and Kimchi—three senior rescue Chihuahuas with a following of 161,000 people.
When you have an older dog, medical problems come with the territory, but that doesn’t make them any easier to share. “When something’s wrong with [your pet], it forces you to say it out loud, which makes it a little too real sometimes,” says Herman. In addition to the well-being of her pets, she worries about how their health affects the strangers who are emotionally invested in them. “If I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t want to worry them, or for people to feel like I’m manipulating their emotions,” Herman says. She’s careful to wait until she has concrete information from her veterinarian before saying anything publicly.
Once Herman began to post about Chloe’s medical problems, people on Instagram who loved her dogs gave her an incredible amount of comfort. “I’ve never felt more surrounded by love and care,” she says. Although it’s been months since Chloe’s death, fans are still grieving with Herman. “People reach out and ask me how I am, and tell me they were looking at pictures of her and missing her,” she says, which makes her own grief less isolating. “I can talk about my dog to so many people who actually know who she was and loved her the way I loved her.”
Hilary Sloan, the dog mom to the Bean family of Instagram-famous rescue pups (and a former co-worker of mine), sees her dogs’ health problems as a way to educate her six-figure following about their own pets’ health. “I have a lot of access, and that’s the privilege of my platform,” she says. “I wouldn’t hoard that knowledge—that’s not who I am as a person. I love dogs.”
She and her husband recently lost Louis, an elderly Cavalier King Charles spaniel who rarely appeared on her account (he didn’t like dressing up, Sloan says). The couple experienced the same outpouring of support Herman did when Chloe died. Now the family is treating 11-year-old Ella Bean for thyroid problems and adding frequent posts about pet health, including videos from vet checkups and live Q&As about things such as doggie CBD and acupuncture. “I chose to share Ella’s condition because maybe someone else will notice their dog changed,” Sloan says. “Maybe they’ll do what I did and get blood work right away instead of waiting.” (Ella is doing great, if you’re worried.)
But you don’t have to own a bona fide furry influencer for the internet to rush to your aid in pet tragedy. When Georgia was sick, Ritchey, the bulldog owner, decided to share what her family was going through with her friends on Bulldog Twitter—her dogs have a few thousand followers—and she was overwhelmed by the depth of support she received. “Even my husband, who doesn’t do their social-media stuff, would sit for hours and read through these messages,” she says. The outpouring wasn’t limited to tweets. “We had more flowers sent to our house than you could imagine. People were going to Mass, doing things for her at their church,” says Ritchey.
[Read: The movement to bury pets alongside people]
Lisa Lippman, the lead veterinarian for Fuzzy Pet Health in New York City, thinks sharing an aging pet’s health struggles online is a good impulse that can help viewers be vigilant about their own pets’ health. Seeing someone, whether a friend or influencer, guide a pet through medical treatment on social media can make it easier for people to identify problems in their own animals. “A lot of people start to say, ‘Oh, they’re slowing down,’ or ‘[They] aren’t their old selves,’” she says. “Often we can attribute those things: It’s not old age; it’s arthritis or some other ailment that we can treat, if we know about it and if people visit their vets.”
No one wants to contend with a loved one’s mortality or give people bad news, but in a community built around short life spans, the promise of eventual grief is the price of entry for loving an animal, even if it’s not your own. “We have cried over so many dogs we’ve never met in the past five or six years,” says Ritchey. Maybe in that shared experience of decline and loss, people find it a little easier to lean on one another. Georgia may have passed away, says Ritchey, but she lives on in the friends Ritchey made because of her, such as the couple who included her in their will: “She was just a little bulldog who was our world, but somehow she meant a lot to everyone else, too.”
As trade talks between the United States and China resume this week, there is optimism that the world’s two largest economies can reach a deal to end their destabilizing dispute: With the Chinese economy slowing and President Donald Trump in need of some good political news, both sides face pressure to compromise. A settlement, if it happens, would probably calm jittery investors and remove some economic uncertainty.
But not so fast. A truly comprehensive trade pact will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to reach.
That’s because many of the problems Washington wants resolved in China will require more than a few regulatory tweaks. The bureaucratic harassment, theft of intellectual property, and overt favoritism toward local firms that make doing business in China such a nightmare for American chief executives are caused by the very way the Chinese economy works. Changing them means changing China’s basic economic system. Beijing’s leaders cannot possibly achieve such an overhaul in the short term—assuming they even want to.
[Read: China and America may be forging a new economic order]
“It is going to be a very long haul to get the changes the U.S. considers to be required because that really would force China to fundamentally alter the way it organizes itself,” Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner at Gavekal Research and the author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, told me.
At its heart, then, the trade dispute is about far more than tariffs and deficits. It is a contest of two very different national ideologies. Though the Trump administration has deviated from this somewhat, the United States believes that openness—political, economic, and social—creates prosperity, resolves disagreements within society, and promotes the diversity that spawns innovation and progress. China—or, more accurately, its leadership—sees government control as critical to developing the economy, achieving social peace, and forwarding the best interests of the nation overall. Americans tend to think open, free markets that are operating in a fair regulatory environment produce the best economic results. Beijing, on the other hand, doesn’t trust market forces and instead wants the state to play a more direct role in achieving the economic outcomes it determines are necessary for the country.
The Trump administration is, rightfully, demanding a slew of reforms to Chinese practices it considers “unfair.” Washington wants Beijing to cut back on the subsidies and other financial support it lavishes on favored industries, to stop compelling U.S. firms to disgorge their commercial secrets, and to widen access to China’s lucrative home market for foreign companies.
But what is “unfair” in American eyes is simply a matter of daily business in China. Sure, China’s spectacular ascent was sparked by capitalist reforms that opened the economy to private enterprise and international trade and investment. Its economic system, which its leaders call “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” relies on a much heavier role for the state than any true capitalist could stomach, though. Large swaths of the economy remain well under the thumb of meddlesome state planners and bureaucrats, and their web of permits and restrictions. Many of the country’s critical industries, from automobiles to banking to microchips, are to a great degree in the grasp of state-owned enterprises or heavily supported by state aid, or both.
As a result, what Trump is demanding is extremely difficult to achieve: a “level playing field” for American firms. In fact, nothing of the sort actually exists in China, even for Chinese companies. The state has a nasty tendency to favor its own, with government-controlled businesses enjoying a smorgasbord of official assistance, including tax credits, low-interest loans from state banks, and other subsidies that give them an undue edge in local competition. That leaves private Chinese companies and entrepreneurs often facing the same kinds of hurdles to doing business that foreign ones face.
Zhang Chunlin, a specialist at the World Bank, recently argued that Beijing should adopt the principle of “competitive neutrality” for Chinese state and private companies. Doing so, he wrote, could require “separating government from the enterprise” and ensuring that regulations are applied evenly to all companies, no matter who the shareholders might be.
[Read: Donald Trump’s real endgame with China]
That would prove a tall order. Chinese bureaucrats are simply not trained to treat all comers equally and fairly. Even the most prominent Chinese companies suffer from arbitrary and erratic state intervention. Tencent Holdings, one of China’s premier technology companies, helplessly watched its stock price tumble last year after regulators randomly blocked a newly launched, and popular, video game.
Altering the current state-heavy system, from Beijing’s standpoint, also comes with risks. Without cheap credit and freebies, some state companies would be pushed to the wall, while a withdrawal of the help and protection Beijing offers certain companies and industries could set back the very sectors the government wants to develop.
The whole purpose of Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” program is to build up cutting-edge industries including robotics, medical devices, and eco-friendly cars, often with ample state support. A 2018 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington calculated, for instance, that the Chinese government lavished more than $58 billion on the country’s electric-vehicle sector from 2009 to 2017, on everything from research and development to buyer subsidies; that represents an astounding 42 percent of the industry’s total sales. “Much of this commercial activity,” the report’s authors concluded, “would not exist without the heavy, visible hand of the state.”
Of course, China would not have to completely end all subsidies as part of a trade deal. With electric vehicles, the government is already phasing them out and allowing greater participation by foreign companies. But that’s happening only after some Chinese firms had already become solid competitors. “They are going to open up—when they’re ready,” Mark Newman, a senior analyst based in Hong Kong at the brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein, told me.
Getting what Trump wants, therefore, requires a shake-up of the entire relationship between state and business in China: thoroughly reforming the financial system, reprogramming the minds of bureaucrats to act impartially, and introducing some form of rule of law and a functioning court system so companies have recourse against state action.
[Annie Lowrey: Does Trump even understand how tariffs work?]
All of this could benefit China in the long run. There is an argument that state largesse leads to wasteful investment that ultimately hampers innovation. But it is doubtful that the current regime of President Xi Jinping is willing to make such significant changes. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has placed a premium on strengthening Communist Party control over the economy, and despite frequent rhetoric about “opening up” and free trade, he has shown few signs of resuming more liberal reforms that would diminish state dominance.
“Xi has clearly nailed his colors to the mast of a much more state-directed economy,” said Gavekal’s Kroeber. “I’m pretty skeptical that there will be significant movement by China on these large-scale structural issues the U.S. is talking about.”
None of this bodes well for the future of U.S.-China relations. The potential short-term downside to meeting Trump’s demands should not be an excuse for Beijing to continue its unseemly trade practices. But it does mean that whatever emerges from trade talks runs the risk of being no more than a small step in resolving economic tensions between Washington and Beijing. More worrying, their differences may never be fully bridged—only a wholesale change in Beijing’s thinking can avoid an economic showdown with potentially terrible consequences for these two great powers, and everyone else.
Stephanie Land’s new memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, is a bracing one: When Land was 28 and unexpectedly got pregnant, she threw out her plans to study creative writing at the University of Montana in favor of raising her child. But with little support from the father and no close relatives who could help out in any meaningful way, Land soon found herself in a homeless shelter in Washington State with her tiny daughter, Mia.
In the years following, Land took on a series of low-paying jobs, familiarized herself with the convoluted system of government benefits, and eventually found relatively steady work cleaning houses with a maid service, all while still hoping to one day earn her degree. Most of Maid chronicles those years, the ones Land spent scrubbing toilets during the day and completing college credits online and writing essays and blog posts on her laptop after Mia had gone to bed.
Maid is a wide-ranging work, about not just the social and emotional realities of being poor, but also the monetary and opportunity costs of single parenthood and the secret lives of houses when only maids are around to get to know them. I spoke to Land about what she saw during those years and what life has been like ever since for her and for Mia, who’s now 11 and a half.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ashley Fetters: In Maid, you point out that maids often spend their days in the homes of wealthy families while raising their own children in poverty, and a recurring theme of the book is that families like the ones whose homes you cleaned misunderstand what poverty is really like. What were the key things they misunderstood?
Stephanie Land: I think they didn’t know how much I was actually struggling. I kept it hidden from my friends and especially my clients—I never wanted to evoke sympathy from them or have them feel sorry for me. But I also didn’t want them to know that I was on food stamps, or anything like that. That’s sort of stigmatized, almost as thievery. When you’re being trusted to be alone in someone’s house, you don’t really want them to think that about you [laughs].
I don’t think they really knew just how hard the work was physically—how much it took a toll, how often I was sick, how often my daughter was sick. How much I desperately needed them to not cancel at the last minute. How disappointing that was when they would say, “Oh, you don’t need to come today, I’m just going to stay home from work.” For me, that was like, Agh! I’m losing 40 bucks!
Fetters: So much of the book is about your relationship with your daughter and the sacrifices you made on her behalf. How did you talk to your daughter about the book as you were writing it?
Land: She’s kind of grown up with me writing about her. I originally had a blog, and when I started publishing pieces, first in a local magazine and then online, she loved it. She loves knowing that her picture is in The Washington Post. She wants to be famous.
The book, I haven’t let her read it yet. I let her read just one of the chapters, where she gets the ear tubes put in her ears. I want to be with her when she’s reading it. I want to talk her through some of what I think are the heartbreaking scenes, like at the beginning of my pregnancy, the conflict [over whether to terminate the pregnancy] that was there. I want to be the one to talk to her about that.
Fetters: One thing your book does so well is talk through the logistics of why raising a family when you’re paycheck to paycheck is so hard—how difficult it is to prove you need the housing and the child-care grants necessary to even hold a steady job, and how much bureaucracy is involved. Was that an aim of yours, shedding light on the logistical challenges of poverty in the United States?
Land: Originally that stuff was all really boring to me—it was so ingrained in my daily life. But my editor encouraged me to bring more of that stuff out. She was like, Wait, what happened between you living in the homeless shelter and getting an apartment? And I was like, Oh, well, I was in transitional housing, I had to do this and this, and she was like, Where is all of that? That needs to be in there!
I went back and reread [Barbara Ehrenreich’s] Nickel and Dimed, actually, and most of that book is her trying to find housing. And then I saw that through a different lens, like, Oh, I guess that is kind of evocative because it’s not normal. And so I did write more about it, in kind of an exhausting way—I wanted it to feel exhausting, as exhausting as it is. But my mission from the start has always been trying to prove how hard it is to be poor, and a lot of that is because everything takes so much work. It’s expensive to be poor. And all this is wrapped around this stigma that you’re lazy.
[Barbara Ehrenreich: It is expensive to be poor]
Fetters: Maids, as you point out in the book, get a very intimate kind of insight into other families’ lives, and a lot of the families whose homes you cleaned were, despite their wealth and their comfortable living, having struggles of their own. Since so much of the book is about how psychologically and physically damaging it can be to not have enough money, how do you square that with this other lesson you learned: that simply having enough money doesn’t necessarily make you happy?
Land: I think a lot of that [latter part] was my own disenchantment. I assumed that once you had that house on the hill with the fenced-in yard and the garage, that a lot of the things I struggled with would just disappear. And it just showed how naive I was.
But I also came across parents of kids who were addicts, or in jail, and they were kind of bewildered that it was happening to them. It was surprising to me, too. It felt to me like those types of situations were only for low-income people, not respectable people who are involved in the community. It was always something that the town would whisper about, but it wasn’t marking them in a similar way that it would mark me. If something happened to me like that, then that would just be another thing people could point to as a bad decision that I made and say, “Why should we help you? You brought this on yourself.” There were a lot of freedoms that they seemed to have that I never would have.
Fetters: The book ends on a really positive note: You and Mia have just moved to Missoula, Montana, and you’re starting school to get your degree. What happened next? What have the years since been like for you and Mia?
Land: At the end of the book, I’m actually still on food stamps. Still cleaning houses and struggling to go to school. We struggled for a long time, probably up until 2016. That’s when I was finally off of food stamps. And even that was just out of stubbornness. I was barely [qualifying], and I just decided to not apply anymore, because I couldn’t take the reapplication process. As a freelancer, it’s really hard to prove your income and prove that you’re working.
There were a lot of times when I thought we were going to lose the place we lived. There were weeks when I was incredibly hungry. The book ends on a really happy note because it’s a moment of celebration; it was a huge accomplishment for me to move. But it wasn’t necessarily like, We’re here and everything’s fine.
Exactly where President Donald Trump was getting the illegal-immigration numbers he tweeted on Sunday morning was anyone’s guess. His acting chief of staff, appearing a short while later on CBS’s Face the Nation, couldn’t say. But the timing of his tweets suggests a play to shore up support among hard-liners who have excoriated him for caving on Friday to Democrats and ending the partial government shutdown without securing a dollar for his wall along the southern border. Ann Coulter, Representative Steve King of Iowa, and other right-wing figures had blasted the president’s immigration proposal last week as “amnesty.” Perhaps, as negotiations commence during a three-week shutdown reprieve, Trump wanted to signal his continued devotion to their cause.
[Read: The shutdown deal is the same one Trump previously rejected]
To be sure, the millions of people living in the United States without authorization present a major policy issue that both parties have grappled with for decades. But ever since Trump made illegal immigration the central focus of his campaign, he’s been citing statistics that are inflated, misrepresented, or even invented. On Sunday he took his flights of fancy to a new high as he mischaracterized Texas voter data and made a claim about undocumented immigrants that contradicts his own Department of Homeland Security.
“There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country,” he wrote in the second of five Sunday-morning tweets on the subject. While it’s impossible to precisely count unauthorized immigrants, informed estimates have consistently placed the level at less than half of Trump’s figure. Just last month, the DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics released its latest appraisal based on Census Bureau data: “DHS estimates that 12.0 million illegal aliens were living in the United States in January 2015.” Unless the undocumented population somehow increased by more than 100 percent in three years, Trump’s figure isn’t close to being accurate.
[Read: How immigration became so controversial]
Outside government, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center estimated there were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants in 2016. Even FAIR, the hard-line immigration group that supports Trump’s agenda, pegged the number at “approximately 12.5 million” in 2017. Date-restricted internet searches did not turn up earlier references to the president’s specific figure. He also claimed that illegal immigration thus far in 2019 has cost the country “$18,959,495,168.” Trump wildly inflates even the largest estimates of such costs, but his use of supposedly exact figures prompted The Washington Post’s chief fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, to write, “Nothing screams fake numbers [louder] than false precision.”
The president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, nonetheless defended his boss’s claim on Face the Nation. “I’m not exactly sure where the president got that number this morning,” he said, but he argued that the total may have grown because people kept entering the country illegally in recent years. However, this ignores the net decline over that same period as more unauthorized immigrants depart than arrive, especially among Mexicans.
Mulvaney also said he has “seen ranges as high, I think, as 30 or 40 million.” While reputable estimates based on census data consistently put the number at about 11 million, a demographic simulation last year by Yale University business-school professors came up with a theoretically predicted range of 16 million to 29 million. That study drew extensive coverage in conservative media but widespread rejection among subject-matter experts; the nonpartisan Immigration Policy Institute called it a “thought experiment … based on seriously flawed assumptions,” such as applying border-crossing trends from one period to other periods that did not have comparable data.
Hard-liners argue that illegal immigration poses a threat not just to the country’s economy and culture but also to its democratic process. Trump fed that concern with another Sunday-morning tweet that mischaracterized Texas voter data reported Friday: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,” he tweeted an hour after the topic appeared on Fox & Friends, the chummy morning talk show he often watches.
Read: [Donald from D.C. calls in to “Fox & Friends]”
As The Texas Tribune explained, the Texas secretary of state’s office compiled a list of 95,000 registered voters who at one point provided documentation such as a green card or a work visa suggesting that they were not citizens. Of that group, the state said 58,000 had voted at least once from 1996 to 2018.
However, the office used capital letters in a notice to county officials, emphasizing that the names should be considered “WEAK” matches. In many cases, immigrants may have registered and voted after becoming citizens, as is their right, so these numbers alone don’t prove any illegal voting at all. “People get naturalized,” Chris Davis, the president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, told the Tribune. “It’s entirely too early to say that” 58,000 non-citizens voted. In other cases, the matches may be false positives, as in 2012, when a controversial effort by Florida’s Republican leaders questioned the citizenship of a Brooklyn-born World War II veteran.
Yet the president seized on the report in support of his long-held but never-substantiated claim that voter fraud is rampant in America. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg,” he tweeted. “All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant.” Trump has a long history of casting doubt on the integrity of U.S. elections, most notably claiming that the only reason he lost the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million ballots was “the millions of people who voted illegally.” There are isolated cases of illegally cast ballots; for example, a Mexican-born permanent legal resident in Texas was convicted of voter fraud last year. But as PolitiFact documented and numerous investigations have concluded, there is no evidence of widespread illegal voting in the United States.
“This is the worst f—ing job I’ve ever had.”
So snapped John Kelly on a March morning in the West Wing, according to a new book by Cliff Sims. The chief of staff was sitting in his office, a light-filled space where the White House swimming pool was just visible beyond French doors. “People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I’ve had since I walked into this place,” Kelly told the small group of aides in front of him. “And the president knows it, too.”
One of those aides in Kelly’s office was Sims himself. In title alone, Sims was unexceptional—a communications adviser most notable for helping the White House in its efforts to overhaul the tax code. But by virtue of an uncommonly close relationship with President Donald Trump, starting on the campaign, Sims enjoyed access to many of this administration’s most telling moments—witnessing, for example, the former four-star Marine general come unglued under the demands of serving as Trump’s gatekeeper.
[Read: Serving Trump revealed who John Kelly always was]
Sims recounts this scene and dozens more in Team of Vipers, his 384-page tell-all, which goes on sale Tuesday and was obtained by The Atlantic. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Kelly’s expletive-filled rant captures the spirit of this administration, at least as drawn by Sims. The book is filled with insights into some of the most defining elements of Trump’s White House, including the president’s strained relationships with former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the rampant infighting, and the mechanics—such as they were—that underlay key policy decisions. The result is a cutting account of an administration steeped in turmoil from the outset.
That theme alone is unsurprising. It’s hardly newsworthy, for example, that the Trump-Ryan relationship was fraught. But Sims, in his up-close perch, vivifies the friction. He writes of the evening that Trump watched on television as the speaker criticized his remarks in the aftermath of the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. From his private dining room off the Oval Office, “jaw clenched,” Trump yelled for his secretary to get Ryan on the phone. He then stood, clutching the remote control “like a pistol.” When his secretary gave him the go-ahead, Trump snatched up the phone.
“Paul, do you know why Democrats have been kicking your a— for decades?” his tirade began, as Sims tells it. “Because they know a little word called ‘loyalty.’ Why do you think Nancy [Pelosi] has held on this long? Have you seen her? She’s a disaster. Every time she opens her mouth another Republican gets elected. But they stick with her … Why can’t you be loyal to your president, Paul?”
His voice grew louder. “You know what else I remember? I remember being in Wisconsin and your own people were booing you. You were out there dying like a dog, Paul. Like a dog! And what’d I do? I saved your a—.” (A spokeswoman for the former speaker declined to comment.)
It was a stunning scene, the president verbally shredding the speaker of the House, a member of his own party. And all the while, Sims was listening from the entryway, the improbable wallflower of the West Wing.
[Read: What is Ivanka Trump’s role in the White House? ]
In likely no other administration would such an obscure staffer see all that Cliff Sims did. But as Sims told me in a series of interviews, “I just wasn’t gonna move to Washington and work in this White House without trying to put myself in the middle of everything.”
That kind of ambition is common in D.C. newcomers, but Sims benefited from a White House whose norm-shattering first year included few limits on who could hang around the Oval Office. Sims just happened to take full advantage.
Sims, then 32 years old, was brought into the White House after his successful run coordinating messaging on the campaign. There, he learned many of Trump’s quirks: how he preferred filming against dark backdrops because he didn’t like the way his hair looked against white ones. How it was best to always have a travel-size bottle of Tresemmé Tres Two hair spray on hand, just in case. And, perhaps most important, how Trump craved “normal” conversation. “I always tried to interact with him like a normal person,” Sims told me. “In between whatever work we were doing, I would look for opportunities to talk about what was in the news, or tell him about the latest gossip from entertainment or politics, or whatever.”
A level of ease and familiarity developed between the two, such that Trump wanted Sims in the room for meetings on a wide range of issues. He was present one afternoon in January 2018, for instance, when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, was pushing Trump to sign off on a campaign to raise awareness of the opioid crisis. As Sims tells it, Conway wanted to film a video of Trump encouraging people to send stories of how the crisis had affected them personally.
[Read: The unsung architect of Trumpism]
Trump, though, had a different strategy in mind. “We need to scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life,” he told Conway, according to Sims. “Just give this to Cliff and let him make the most horrifying ads you’ve ever seen. Could you do that?”
Sims “just nodded.” “No, I mean it,” Trump continued. “We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies … Do it like they did cigarettes. They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.
“Next thing you know,” he concluded, “the kids don’t want to be cool and smoke anymore.”
At times, Sims witnessed fellow staffers—Conway chief among them—take swipes at each other behind their backs. He calls Conway a “cartoon villain brought to life” who bad-mouthed colleagues to multiple reporters by the hour. He credits Stephen Miller’s survival to the speechwriter’s ability to play both sides of the “globalist/nationalist” divide in the White House. While then–chief strategist Steve Bannon viewed Miller as his “right-wing protege,” his ideological ally against the so-called globalists, Miller was cultivating a close relationship with perhaps the globalist in chief, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Sims writes of listening in on Miller “plung[ing] the knife” into Bannon’s back and “twisting it with relish” during a conversation with the president. “Your polling numbers are actually very strong considering Steve won’t stop leaking to the press and trying to undermine Jared,” Miller said, according to Sims. “If Steve wasn’t doing that, I bet you’d be ten points higher.”
He also watched as senior officials privately laughed off many of the president’s stranger requests. In his first few days as director of the National Economic Council, Sims writes, Larry Kudlow emerged from a meeting with the president looking flustered. He told Gary Cohn, his predecessor, that Trump ordered him to “stop” a “special deal” that he believed Amazon was getting from the U.S. Postal Service. “Gary laughed loudly,” Sims writes. “‘Welcome to the White House,’ [Cohn] said, shaking Larry’s hand … ‘It’s total bulls—.’” Cohn explained that Amazon was not, in fact, getting “some special deal.” “He’s just mad at [Jeff] Bezos for owning The Washington Post.”
[Read: The brazenness of Trump’s White House staff using private email]
“‘So’ Larry replied hesitantly, ‘I shouldn’t do anything about this?’” Sims writes that Cohn told Kudlow not to bother, adding, “But now you know why I’m so happy to be leaving.”
Perhaps the liveliest pages of Sims’s book recount Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day tenure as communications director, when he maintained a singular focus on rooting out the leakers. Sims writes of a morning that Scaramucci gathered the full communications staff. His goal was to motivate them against leaking to the press. He tried to do so using a “horrifying” technique: role-playing. He pulled a young staffer on the regional media team to the front of the room, “probably the last person in the room who would ever leak anything,” Sims writes.
“Okay, Tyler, I’ll be Reince Priebus and you be you,” Scaramucci said. The “Mooch” then assumed the role of Priebus, who was chief of staff at the time: “Tyler, I need you to leak something for me.”
After a brief silence, a distressed-looking Tyler responded robotically, “I cannot do that.” Mooch twirled his finger in a circle, Sims writes, prompting him to continue. “I cannot do that,” Tyler reiterated. “I report to Anthony Scaramucci and he reports directly to the president of the United States.” “Perfect!” said the Mooch, who was beaming.
[Read: The spectacular self-destruction of Anthony Scaramucci]
As an observer and a writer, Sims has an eye for color and the kind of details reporters crave, those that will likely remain forever lodged in a reader’s conception of the Trump presidency. That’s not by accident: Before joining the campaign, Sims ran a news outlet in Alabama called Yellowhammer Media, where he broke high-profile state politics stories, including former Governor Robert Bentley’s affair with a staffer, which ultimately led to Bentley’s resignation.
But that instinctual attraction to the news, the color, led many of Sims’s former colleagues to believe that he’d joined Trump’s White House “just to write a book,” rather than serve the president. “He was taking notes every second from the minute he got there,” one former senior White House official told me. “It rubbed everyone the wrong way.”
Sims told me he was indeed a voracious notetaker during and after most meetings. (It’s the reason, he told me, he can attest that the quotes throughout the book are “very authentic.”) “The things I was looking for the most in meetings would be the things that would be potentially problematic if they leaked,” Sims said of his motivation to take notes. “I would write the entire meeting feverishly, like everything. Especially when Trump was talking, I would try to capture it verbatim as I could. Then I’d get to my desk and type it out.” From there, he said, he would compile the moments he thought were most interesting and put them in a “memories” file on his home computer. He said it wasn’t until after he left the White House, when he and his wife had long conversations about what the whole experience meant to him, that he considered stringing those memories together in book form.
[Read: How the White House gamed the security-clearance system ]
Sims told me his aim in writing the book was not to scorch or, alternatively, deify the president. In large part, Sims said, it was a way for him to gain clarity and closure on how the experience changed him personally—and how he became, at many points, a person he didn’t like. Throughout the book, he calls himself “nakedly ambitious,” “selfish,” and “a coward.” He writes about his struggle to reconcile his Christian faith with working for a president who, for example, “totally lacked nuance” in his attitude toward refugees—particularly “persecuted Christians,” whom Trump “promise[d]” to help but “[never] did.” Sims writes that he took this concern at one point to Stephen Miller, who, he writes, told him, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”
Meanwhile, he writes, he “never heard any of the faith leaders who actually had access to Trump” press him on the issue. He describes Trump’s evangelical advisory board as a collection largely of televangelist adherents to the prosperity gospel, people he “doubted” were “positive moral and spiritual influence[s] on the president.” “When the president occasionally struggled … to unify the country on divisive cultural issues, the silence of his ‘spiritual advisers’ was deafening,” Sims writes. “What is the point of having moral authority, as all these advisers claimed to, if you don’t stand up for morality?
“But as is so often the case, when I point my accusatory finger at someone, I have three more pointing back at me,” he continues, writing that his “greatest regret” from his time in the White House was “that I wasn’t a better picture of my faith.”
[Read: Why Trump can’t find anyone to be his Chief of Staff ]
Perhaps the harshest indictment of the White House in Sims’s book is not so much the things he saw but the fact that he was able to see them, even as the administration barreled into year two. Ultimately, as Sims’s book suggests, John Kelly might have helped streamline access to the president, but he failed to quash the free-for-all rhythms that had governed the West Wing from the beginning.
The experience came to an end for Sims in spring 2018. As he sought to leave the communications shop for a role elsewhere, a complicated web of events would leave him on the cusp of one job after another, from the assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs to a senior adviser post at the State Department. When the latter offer fell through, Sims writes, he accepted that factions within the White House were determined to keep him out of the administration. He writes that Kelly told senior staff that Sims was “fired” for getting caught recording the president during a meeting, a charge Sims denies.
For Sims, the worst part, he writes, was that despite their close relationship, Trump never fought to keep him on board. “Kelly had told him I was untrustworthy. But he didn’t know whether to believe him because I’d always been so loyal. All he had to do was say, ‘Hey, leave Cliff alone, okay? He’s going to State, he’s out of your hair. But he’s my guy, so let him go,’” Sims writes. “But he chose not to do that … we were all disposable.”
Sims told me that he and the president have spoken since he left the White House, but declined to share details of their conversation.
[Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump ]
Even though Sims’s book doesn’t hit stores until tomorrow, many outlets have published excerpts in the past week. I asked him how those named in the book have reacted to their portrayals. “The people inside aren’t really talking to me,” he said.
I asked Sims how publishing his book was any different from, say, Conway leaking details of private meetings to reporters. Those sorts of “selective leaks,” he argued, “are designed to sway things one way or the other … paint people in an unfair light.” His book, he maintained, presents scenes in their “proper context.” “I did use some discernment on like, ‘Is this fair?’ and I don’t—I can’t really say what the criteria for that was—it’s more like a gut thing.”
Sims said he’s aware that President Trump might tweet a blistering take on him personally. “That’s something I’ve thought a lot about … like how that would affect my life,” he said. “Number one, though, my identity is not wrapped up in being a Trump staffer … My identity is found in, you know, my faith, and I know who Jesus says I am. So if Trump wants to say I’m something else, then that’s—that’s okay.
“Like, I’m not saying—I don’t want the president to tweet, you know, something super negative about me. You know, it’ll suck,” he said. “But my identity is not wrapped up in this stuff anymore.”
As for the future, Sims told me that he’s considered everything from going to graduate school to becoming a missionary overseas. He said that he and his wife are in the process of adopting a baby from Colombia.
[Garrett Epps: Can Trump pardon himself?]
Though he’s “deeply conflicted” about it, he also said that he’s toying with the idea of running for office. He reminded me with a shrug that Senator Doug Jones, in Alabama, is up for reelection in 2020, and that he would be old enough to challenge him.
“I do think what Washington is lacking are people whose identity is not wrapped up in Washington. And so that makes me want to do it sometimes,” he said.
Because Trump’s imprint, he seemed to suggest, is still very much on him. In spite of it all, he does not think of his White House experience, like Kelly, as “the worst f—ing job” he’s ever had. In fact, Sims said, if he were to ever run for office, his former boss would probably serve as a guidepost. “I mean, it would be like a very Trumpian approach. Like, I’m going to go blow things up for four or eight years or whatever.” He laughed. “I feel like that sometimes.”
As a smelly little boarding-school boy, I could have done with some Edward Gorey. His lunar campness, his toys-in-the-attic surrealism, his easy way with cruelty, and his remote compassion, coldly and distantly flaming—all of this would have nourished and amplified my child-mind. His tiny, twisted books would have helped my development. But I grew up in England, where—despite his rarefied Anglophilia and profound relation to English literary tradition—no one knows about Edward Gorey. So I pickled myself in Edward Lear and then, later, a more modern master of English nonsense: Morrissey, from the indie-rock legends the Smiths. As Rose collects the money in a canister / Who comes sliding down the banister / The vicar in a tutu / He’s not strange / He just wants to live his life this way. (What’s that, if not a Gorey drawing set to music?)
Gorey comes sliding down the banister of Mark Dery’s Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, not in a tutu but bejeweled, multi-ringed, otter-fur-coated, Lear-ishly bearded, crazy for the New York City Ballet and definitely wanting to live his life this way. “I tend to think life is pastiche,” he said once, or possibly more than once. “I’m not sure what it’s a pastiche of—we haven’t found out yet.”
[Edward Gorey and the power of the ineffable]
What shall we call him? A children’s writer who didn’t particularly like children? Gorey produced small illustrated books, booklings, more than 100 of them: black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings of serrated quaintness, elaborately crosshatched, with accompanying text—some prose, mostly verse. Children suffer greatly in these works. They are sold on the street or carried off by eagles. As in Lear’s limericks, many of which function like little torture machines (Till at last, with a hammer, they silenced his clamour), absurdist violence is everywhere.
Little, BrownAnd nowhere. In 1957’s micro-masterpiece, The Doubtful Guest, a Victorian or Edwardian household (all of Gorey’s households are Victorian or Edwardian) is abruptly infiltrated by a tender-looking, proboscile creature in white sneakers and a long, stripy scarf. It says nothing. It has no expression, except for the ring of wild fatigue around its eye. It behaves oddly, unmanageably, its disruptions cataloged in sturdy and nursery-ready anapestic tetrameters: It joined them at breakfast and presently ate / All the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate. It lies down in a large tureen; it stands with its nose to the wall. What does it want? Nobody knows. What does it mean? You tell me. Like a trauma, like a gift, like an unaccommodated fact, it sticks around, with weirdly devoted constancy. Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat was published the same year, and Dery does some excellent work comparing the two texts, the two chaos-bringers, noting with Gorey-esque satisfaction that while The Cat in the Hat “changed children’s books as America knew them”—zapping the early-reader market with trickster-ish cartoon energy—The Doubtful Guest “sank with barely a trace.”
Gorey was an only child. He was a cat person. Otherwise, the rude facts of his biography seem a bit incongruous, a bit anti-Gorey. He was born in Chicago in 1925; his father was a newspaper reporter; his parents got divorced, and he moved briefly to Miami with his mother. Then, the summit of dissonance: The Second World War arrived, and Gorey joined the Army. He saw no combat. In June 1944, he was posted to a weapons-testing area in the Great Salt Lake Desert, a base called Dugway Proving Ground. “All around lay wastelands,” Dery writes. “The stillness was profound, a ringing in the mind. The sky was painfully clear.” In this futuristic void, this atomic birdbath, the young aesthete sipped tequila and listened to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
When the war was over, Gorey went to Harvard, where he set about the business of—as Dery puts it—“becoming Gorey.” His assistant dean found him to be a “queer looking egg.” But his best buddy was the poet Frank O’Hara, so who cares? There began the long coats, the many rings, the weary supremacy. He had crushes on other men. No sex, though, as far as Dery can ascertain, and no long-term companionship. Sedulous bachelorhood became the MO. Morrissey again: The hills are alive with celibate cries. Gorey moved to Manhattan in 1953 and churned out book covers for Doubleday’s mass-market imprint Anchor. This was also the year he published the first of his small books, The Unstrung Harp, about a novelist named Mr. Earbrass. Gorey would never again use so much prose in a book, but the prose was good and, more important, it was Gorey: “Mr. Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything.”
His poetry, meanwhile, was poetry. A fugitive and lurid gleam / Obliquely gilds the gliding stream. So run the lines beneath a panel in his 1969 book The Iron Tonic. Parodic? Iron-tonic ironic? Yes and no. These are lovely, Tennysonian lines, but with a slight chemical distortion, as if Tennyson had forgotten to take his lithium. In the illustration, a tiny-headed man in a huge fur coat stands (transfixed? lost? dreaming?) in a snowy landscape, on the bank of a dark stream. Rods of light come poking through the low clouds, and the gliding stream is indeed obliquely gilded. It’s Gorey all the way down: a heavy-hanging antique atmosphere retro-injected with modernity, with anomie, with freaky deadpan emptiness.
Gorey entered the American cultural mainstream quite suddenly on the evening of February 5, 1980, when WGBH, the Boston PBS affiliate, debuted its Mystery anthology of British crime dramas. Mystery featured title sequences tracked by tango music and worked up by the animator Derek Lamb and his team from motifs in Gorey’s books: a pen-and-ink montage of rain, tombstones, flitting aristocrats, a disconsolately struck croquet ball being crushed by falling masonry, a woman’s cry, wilting and droopily orgasmic. The series was a hit, and Gorey—in his creeping, ivylike way—went nationwide.
His influence today, the seep of his sensibility, is pervasive: Dery efficiently lays out the debt owed him by the graphic-novel author Neil Gaiman, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the filmmaker Tim Burton, and any other fantasist who loiters in the dark gardens of childhood. “When I was first writing A Series of Unfortunate Events,” remembers Daniel Handler, the author of the Lemony Snicket series, “I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ Now everyone says, ‘That’s right; you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey!’ ” You can hear Gorey’s feline phrasing in the voice-overs of Wes Anderson movies. Or you can just look at a dusty chandelier, or someone in jodhpurs, or a particularly knotty, obscurely communicative tree, and say: Yup … Gorey-esque.
Gorey ended his days in his house on Cape Cod, contented after his fashion—that is, gently and wittily moaning. He lived alone: silver-bearded, buried under cats, with his books in heaps and his mini-hoards—of tassels, rusty cheese graters, antique potato mashers—around him. Was there a clinical component to his unwavering furry presence at every single bloody performance (just about) of the New York City Ballet between the years 1956 and 1979? Something OCD about all that crosshatching, that endless scritchy-scratching? Probably. And Dery does bang on a bit about Gorey’s monastic sexuality, the “mystery” of his gay-in-everything-but-the-deed-ness. But enigmas invite speculation—that’s what they’re for.
Edward Gorey is the doubtful guest in this fine biography: a stubbornly evasive and irreducible essence, now sprawled in a tureen, now chewing on crockery, now standing with his nose to the wall. He lived 30 years too early and 100 years too late. His solitude was significant, that’s for sure—but not as significant as his genius, which put him in touch, eventually, with the audience that could not do without him. The words that end Auden’s tribute to Edward Lear apply equally to Lear’s truest successor, his transplanted and violently wistful inheritor, Edward Gorey: Children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “The Father of Children’s Goth.”
It has now been more than three weeks since President Donald Trump first began his public flirtation with declaring a national emergency as a way of getting funding to build a wall on the southern border. At first he seemed intent on declaring an emergency immediately. Within days, though, he began saying that he was in no hurry to pull that trigger. On Friday, even as he abruptly caved and allowed the government to reopen for three weeks without wall funding, he again threatened to declare an emergency—but only if Congress doesn’t give him what he wants.
Trump no doubt thinks he looks more reasonable if he gives Congress plenty of time to act before declaring an emergency. He might also think that Congress’s repeated failure to provide funds shows the need for emergency action. The truth is the exact opposite. By giving Congress time to definitively establish its unwillingness to fund the border wall, Trump is both taking away any legitimate justification for emergency action and proving his intent to subvert the constitutional balance of powers.
[Alex Wagner: Pelosi won, Trump lost]
Here’s how the legal process for emergency powers works: Under the National Emergencies Act, passed by Congress in 1976, the president has broad discretion to declare a national emergency. Upon issuing the declaration, he gains access to special authorities provided in 123 provisions of law that have been enacted over many decades. These laws authorize presidential action across all areas of government, from military deployment to agricultural exports to energy production. Like an advance medical directive, in which a patient specifies actions a doctor may take in a range of extreme situations when the patient cannot make her wishes known, they represent Congress’s best guess as to what powers a president might need in a crisis that is unfolding too quickly for Congress to respond.
As this legal framework makes clear, emergency powers are not a license for the president to sidestep Congress. To the contrary: The only powers the president can access during a national emergency are those Congress has granted. However potent some of these powers might be, the source of the president’s authority in all cases remains a legislative delegation—one that is granted in advance because true emergencies require immediate action. A president using emergency powers to thwart Congress’s will, in a situation where Congress has had ample time to express it, is like a doctor relying on an advance directive to deny life-saving treatment to a patient who is conscious and clearly asking to be saved.
Of course, Trump’s hesitation also belies his claim that there is an emergency at the border. Presidents don’t dawdle in the face of real emergencies. President George W. Bush did not spend weeks scratching his head about whether to issue an emergency declaration after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But even if a real crisis existed, emergency powers are designed for situations in which Congress has no time to act. If Congress does have time, then there is no justification for bypassing the ordinary legislative process.
[Read: What the president could do if he declares a state of emergency]
Indeed, the more time Congress has to act—and the more times it votes against providing the funding the president has asked for—the clearer it becomes that an emergency declaration in this case would be designed as an end run around the Constitution. Article I provides that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This provision is one of the Constitution’s most important checks against executive-branch overreach. Congress has now consistently declined to appropriate funding for the border wall. Whatever deference judges might owe to the president’s assessment of what constitutes an emergency, an interpretation of the National Emergencies Act that would allow the president to engage in an expenditure of funds for which Congress has expressly withheld consent cannot be squared with the Constitution.
Trump is right about one thing: He should give Congress time to debate, deliberate, and vote. But if Congress continues to vote against providing funding, that is a decision the Constitution commands the president to respect. The National Emergencies Act is not—and was never intended to be—a constitutional workaround for a president who cannot bend Congress to his will.
OAKLAND, Calif.—The funny little secret about the Democratic presidential primary right now is that no one knows what’s going to work. Everyone has theories. Arguments. Cases that consultants and aides have been making to one another, and to their respective candidates, for months. Some have maps through the states; some are pinning their hopes on dreams of being lifted up by media attention or surprisingly strong showings in the early states. Most have spent the past year sizing up one another, and sizing up all the permutations of the dynamics in the field, depending on who got in and who didn’t.
Too often to bear, aides cite the cliché that this is a marathon, not a sprint. But that’s the wrong metaphor. A race has one set of rules, all the runners run as fast as they can, and the winner is the first one over the finish line. What’s going on now is more like one person playing chess, another playing checkers, another playing Monopoly, Parcheesi, Candy Land—and no one will know for at least a year which is the right game to fit the moment.
For Kamala Harris, it’s get out early, get out big, get out hard—or, in the phrase that’s been circulating among her campaign team in the week since she announced she was running, demonstrate strength.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy: Don’t pick a lane]
Many of her opponents are thrilled that that’s how Harris is playing it. With a process this long and intense, they say, Harris can go ahead and be a front-runner. Especially after voters recoiled after Hillary Clinton was effectively anointed in 2016, there is no better way, they argue, for her to not be there at the end.
“The candidate who will win is the candidate who peaks at the right time, and traditionally being the first to peak is not the right time,” said an adviser to one of the other 2020 Democrats.
Harris and her team point to the estimated 22,000 people the California senator managed to pack between police barriers in the streets along Oakland City Hall on Sunday. Or they point to the $1.5 million she raised and the 3 million views of her announcement video in just the first 24 hours. Or that she was the first to accept a CNN invitation to do a televised town hall, Monday night from Des Moines, which is how she’s spending her first trip as a candidate to the first caucus state, rather than going on the barnstorming tours that Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, among others, opted for.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s political memoir is an uneasy fit for the digital era]
No matter who else gets into the race, her circle of advisers believe, she’ll be seen as one of the two or three candidates in the top tier. That’s the media narrative they’re stoking. This, they figure, will help her raise more money, which will create the buzz that will stoke the media narrative more. In a field this big, with the number of twists and turns ahead, the perception eventually will become reality. Or so goes their thinking.
They hope Beto O’Rourke was watching her echo Barack Obama and invoke Robert Kennedy on Sunday, and thinking that there’s not a spot for him. They hope Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker were watching, too, and realizing what it would be like to go up against her. And most of all, they hope there will continue to be paragraphs like this one that treat her as being in the top tier—no small feat for a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman from Oakland who has been in the Senate for only two years.
Is Harris the candidate to beat? I asked San Francisco Mayor London Breed, making her way out with the crowd while Harris was still shaking hands and taking selfies after leaving the podium.
“I think so right now,” Breed said. “Best speech so far.”
The primary race is still at the stage of candidates welcoming one another with hugs and encouraging statements, while privately their aides assess each move and look for weaknesses. Give them a little cover of not having their names or the names of their candidates attached to their comments, and they’re happy to write off anything that Harris has done so far as a show for reporters and donors that will just result in focusing the opposition research on her and making her seem tired in voters’ eyes.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s Trump-size tax plan]
“Expectations are being set sky high—a year is a long time to hit them,” said an adviser to another 2020 Democrat.
During her speech on Sunday, the people who turned out chanted her name and seemed filled with energy and real enthusiasm. She’s already a big enough deal that both her husband and her sister got cheers as they slipped into the crowd. She had to pause for only a moment as she said, about halfway through, “And so I stand before you today …” for her fans to fill in the next words about declaring her candidacy. She made a point of having a good time, pausing and holding an amused smile, after she dropped a line about “foreign powers infecting the White House like malware.”
Drawing heavily on parts of speeches she’s been working out on the stump for months, Harris talked repeatedly about “our America.” She went back again and again to ideas of common values and shared reality that she seems insistent on repeating precisely to emphasize that they can’t, and shouldn’t be, ignored.
“We are at an inflection point in the history of our world. We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” she said.
There was a long list of goals, from battling climate change and achieving pay equity for women to enhancing cybersecurity, instituting universal pre-K and Medicare for All as a health-insurance option, stopping school shootings, ensuring reproductive rights, creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and passing working- and middle-class tax cuts, though she left an explanation for how she’d get any of it done for another time.
And while her prospective opponents are eager to make her the establishment candidate in the race, Harris spoke of herself as the underdog, though no one really sees her that way.
“The doubters will say what they always say: It’s not your time. The odds are long. It can’t be done. But our story has never been written by the doubters or the naysayers,” she said. “Robert Kennedy said it best: ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.’”
Harris has so far lived up to their internal estimations, said an adviser to yet another 2020 Democrat. “I am not unimpressed. I am not overly impressed,” the adviser said. “The fundamentals are there, but the question is if it can be taken to the next level.”
Is it intimidating at all? I texted one of the people advising another 2020 Democrat about an hour before the rally started, with the helicopter counting the crowd already overhead and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir onstage, warming up the crowd.
“Lol,” the adviser immediately wrote back to me.
Keep thinking that, say the people working with Harris. That just gives her more time to build up the lead.
“This was a spectacular, electric, and unprecedented crowd,” said Sean Clegg, who helped her write the speech and sat backstage watching favorite moments unfold, “and it demonstrates the hunger for her candidacy, and for someone who can fight and lead from the high ground.”
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
I’ve been dating Adam for two and a half years. I’m 33 and childless, and he’s 48, divorced, and the father of three kids. We seem to keep having the same fights about his needy ex-wife and the negative impact she has on our relationship.
Despite my wish to appear mature and chill, I have a strong distaste for the ex-wife. She doesn’t work, and she collects disability from the government and spousal support and child support from Adam. She attaches herself to every ailment for which she can find a symptom, and is on all kinds of medication. The kids’ main residence is with her, and Adam has the kids a few days a week. The ex constantly sends Adam texts about the kids, from mundane details to complaints about their behavior. Quite often she calls Adam hoping that he can “set them straight.” I’m certain that she’s the cause of all that chaos, because the kids never go out of control with Adam, and I’ve only seen them be pleasant.
Every time Adam’s ringtone goes off, my stomach churns because I feel so violated and intruded on by her. Adam knows how I feel and tries to handle these situations without hurting my feelings, but it’s really difficult to care for the kids while keeping the ex out because she has completely tied herself to the kids. Adam and I love each other deeply and cherish being in each other’s lives, but a shadow of the ex-wife seems to loom over and create tension between us. I try hard not to feel like a victim in all of this because I understand that it’s my choice to be with him, but I can’t help feeling robbed of something that should be mine. I’m open to any suggestions and perspectives.
Ginger
Rochester, New York
Dear Ginger,
Although Adam’s ex-wife doesn’t seem to be handling things well—and I can imagine how disruptive her texts are—this is also an issue between you and Adam, and there are several ways to make this situation work better. Some of them are practical, which I’ll get to in a minute. But others will require you both to talk about your expectations in this relationship.
While you want to be with Adam, you must understand that the person you’re in love with is somebody who has a family. He comes with his children, and his children come with their mother. There’s no such thing as Adam without them—that version of Adam simply doesn’t exist. And when a person who doesn’t have firsthand experience as a parent becomes romantically involved with a divorced parent, he or she can struggle to understand the parent’s experience and the directions he or she is pulled in, both emotionally and logistically.
It sounds like Adam is trying to please everyone and ends up feeling trapped. If he doesn’t respond to his ex’s calls for help with the kids, he might worry that they aren’t okay and that he’s neglecting their needs. But if he does respond, he might worry that he’s making you feel angry or unimportant. Ultimately, he responds not because he doesn’t care about your relationship, but because, like it or not, his kids are his priority.
If you can begin to really accept and ultimately embrace the reality that his kids come first without taking it personally, then you and Adam can sit down and figure out what can be done to improve the situation with their mother. One option might be for Adam and his ex to see a therapist who can help them navigate their co-parenting arrangement, creating parameters and offering tools for handling the kids when his ex is alone with them. If it turns out that even with these parameters and tools, she’s unable to care for the kids without calling for help, he can try to change the custody arrangement until she works out her own issues and feels capable of caring for them solo. But this would take time, involve conflict, and also mean that the kids would be more of a presence in your life—which brings me back to the package deal I mentioned earlier.
I think you should consider how you feel about Adam’s kids two and a half years into this relationship, because they aren’t going anywhere. How well do you know them? How much time have you spent with them? On the days that Adam has the kids, are you there, too, or does Adam spend that time alone with them? If you and Adam get married, these three kids will be your stepchildren, and my guess is that you don’t know them very well, because kids—like people of all ages—aren’t always “pleasant” and sometimes—again, like adults—“go out of control.” I imagine that they’re going through their own struggles related to the divorce—adjusting to two homes, to their mother’s less-than-stable situation, and also, don’t forget, to a woman in their dad’s life. They may be “on” when they’re around you, the way kids tend to be around people they don’t know well, but if you knew them on a deeper level, you might see more of a range of their internal experience, which probably has its ups and downs. Of course they’ll be different around their mom; naturally, they’ll find it easier to self-regulate in Adam’s calmer, more stable household. But they aren’t completely different people. After two and a half years, you’d have seen some less-than-pleasant behavior if you were making a concerted effort to integrate them into your life.
At the same time, I understand that in an ideal world, the kids would have a more stable and self-sufficient mother who wouldn’t intrude on your time with Adam. You say that you feel “robbed of something that should be” yours, and while you absolutely should have some uninterrupted time with Adam and parameters set in place, it will be important for you and Adam to talk about his needs as well. For instance, he may miss his kids when they’re with their mom and enjoy some of the “mundane” details his ex sends, even if he’s bothered by her other calls and texts. He may welcome a goodnight call or text every single night from his kids, even if you’re cuddled up watching Netflix together or in the middle of a candlelit dinner. Parenting requires a lot of selflessness but also has many rewards. Similarly, stepparenting requires a lot of selflessness and has the potential to come with rewards, but it also comes with a stipulation—one you have to decide whether you can live with. And that’s this: If you and his kids were drowning in the ocean, I can assure you that Adam would rescue his kids before you. You’re going to have to embrace the fact that your boyfriend is a father and was before he met you, and if you want to be with him, you’ll have to make peace with what it is you’re signing up for.
Hopefully, Adam will be willing to get some professional help in navigating his co-parenting situation, even if his ex-wife declines to participate with him. Just remember that you two have some navigating to do, too, in figuring out what your life together will look like in this blended family. Now’s the time to be honest with each other about how he envisions you fitting into his life in its entirety—kids and ex-wife included—and how you envision that happening as well. If you aren’t interested in working through the complications and many inconveniences that will surely arise, even once this particular issue gets sorted out, you may want to think about dating someone without young kids.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
In a remarkable series of interviews, the president’s most public lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, put on a show of unconventional lawyering. He quoted Donald Trump on the extended history of his mid-campaign negotiations with Russia over a hotel project in Russia. He quickly backtracked and restated the startling disclosure as a “hypothetical.” He wouldn’t say what the president told him, he admonished a reporter; the communications were confidential, and “I’m his lawyer.”
But then Giuliani promptly related the president’s “recollections” on the subject. At another point, he seemed to suggest that whatever hope he had for a healthy legacy as a former prosecutor and mayor of New York City might be dashed by a late-life turn as a liar for Trump. And even his decisions about the interviews he would grant, and when, seem surpassingly haphazard. He recently took a call from The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, and gave an interview, on his way to the shower.
This is not the first time that the president’s lawyers’ unusual behaviors have turned heads. Giuliani was not yet a member of the legal team when two of its members chatted about the Russia case loudly over lunch, within steps of the offices of The New York Times, and then found their comments reported in the paper. If this was strange, so was the tweet that one of the lawyers claimed he sent out in the president’s name, on the reasons for his firing of FBI Director James Comey, which caused his client all sorts of trouble.
[Read: Trump and Cohen may have discussed the Moscow Project. “So what?”]
The bad press fed by these behaviors has mostly been taken up with the question of whether, by the prevailing standards of good criminal-defense work, the president’s legal team is doing the best job for its client. The supposition is that the best defense is the one celebrated in film and lore: “getting the client off,” winning the case. Giuliani and his lawyers are seen as falling short of that standard of sound legal representation. They are criticized for harming their client’s chances of winning.
Less pronounced in this commentary is the broader responsibility that lawyers might recognize in representing the president of the United States. Because Trump is not just any criminal defendant, the performance of his lawyers in this episode will not be judged solely by whether his lawyers can claim to have won or lost. The case, and so necessarily the representation itself, is laden with lasting consequences for the public interest. While the president has the final say on how his defense is shaped and managed, his lawyers have an independent role to play and decisions to make—and these are not defined by the narrowest possible constructions of what is best for Trump as their client. The choices confronting these lawyers invariably present the question, Is what may be appropriate and generally expected in the defense of any client involved in a criminal investigation acceptable in the representation of the president of the United States?
The rules of professional responsibility do not provide detailed guidance, but the Model Rules do authorize lawyers to advise clients with appropriate reference to “moral, economic, social, and political factors that may be relevant to the client’s situation.” The explanatory comment accompanying the rule concedes that “a lawyer is not a moral advisor as such,” but that “moral and ethical considerations impinge upon most legal questions and may decisively influence how the law will be applied.”
[Read: An obscure White House staffer’s jaw-dropping Trump tell-all]
A lawyer representing the president in a criminal case is not obligated to take any of these nonlegal factors into consideration. But the lawyer for the president would seem to be among those who, in making strategic judgments, would have the most compelling reason to look beyond their client’s narrowly construed personal legal interests.
Lies told by the president or by his lawyers in defending against prosecutors or impeachment erode public confidence in the government and further inflame America’s partisan divide. The best possible case for the client need not be a tapestry woven out of outright falsehoods. A constitutional defense can be more or less responsibly drawn, with short-term interests balanced against the longer development of the law governing presidential immunities and privileges. It matters how Trump’s lawyers are readying a robust challenge to protect against the disclosure of evidence on a claim of executive privilege. They have important judgments to make in sculpting their theory of presidential immunity from obstruction of justice.
When the prominent trial attorney James St. Clair came to represent Richard Nixon in the final stages of his Watergate agonies, he took the position that he was representing the office of the presidency and not the president. He told astonished lawyers in the White House, “I’m going to deal with this as a straight lawsuit, not as a political problem.” Whether he succeeded in these more high-minded aims is open to dispute. Certainly the prosecutors he tussled with took issue with what they thought was a lack of cooperation with their investigative efforts. But then again, he was their professional adversary, and it is unlikely they would have taken kindly to any aggressive, even if appropriate, measures he adopted in the president’s legitimate defense.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s inner circle keeps violating the Stringer Bell rule]
St. Clair was at least sensitive to what The New York Times described at the time as “the broader question [of] whether the lawyer for the president of the United States should proceed with the single-minded goal as a lawyer for a defendant charged with a common crime, the goal of ‘getting the client off’ however he can.” The Times pointed to the predecessor of current Rule 2.1, which counseled, “The advice of a lawyer to his client need not be confined to purely legal considerations.” It was not suggested that a president’s lawyers were relieved of the responsibility to mount an energetic defense, giving their all in providing the “zealous advocacy” that is also an ethical command. But a critical difference lies in how they choose, craft, and present their arguments. A representation can be conducted with the requisite zeal and commitment, but also within the boundaries set by considerations identified by Rule 2.1.
So when Giuliani states, as he did, “I’m a criminal lawyer. I am not an ethicist,” he is speaking accurately, but seemingly discounting the importance of this wider professional responsibility. His further suggestion that he might foresee a legacy rewritten to reflect repeated lies for Trump suggests that he is experiencing some disquiet on this score.
Of course, lawyers argue with all the materials in hand, and sometimes it is to the president’s advantage for his lawyers to argue a version of the “public interest.” When Jay Sekulow, another lawyer for the president, recently took to Fox to excoriate BuzzFeed and other media outlets for ignoring facts so that they could indulge their hatred for Trump, he argued that objectionable or unethical press practices are damaging not only to Trump, but also “to the office of the presidency and the entire country.” This sensitivity to the public interest is promising, but not only as a defense-team talking point. What is in the public interest is not, of course, necessarily or even consistently in the client’s. It may also clash with what the client mistakenly believes the defense of his interests requires.
Another member of the Nixon Watergate legal team, Leonard Garment, seemed to have appreciated this distinction between public and private interests, even though, unlike St. Clair, he had a long history with Nixon and considerable affection for the late president. As he recounted in his memoirs, he shared Nixon’s deep distrust of the motives of his implacable foes. He suspected that the Watergate prosecutors and congressional investigating teams were out to “bleed Nixon to death” and to “nail” him.
[David Frum: Roger Stone’s arrest is the signal for Congress to act]
But when Garment had legal judgments to offer, on the scope of executive privilege or on the question of whether the president would commit obstruction of justice by burning the incriminating White House tapes, he refused to blink at the legal realities. He would have no part of Nixon’s readiness to falsify evidence. And when Garment decided that Nixon’s position was beyond repair—that he had suffered a “fatal erosion of presidential authority”—he concluded that he should advise the president to begin considering resignation.
Garment was on the inside, while St. Clair was the “outside” lead lawyer, but the ethical issues were the same for them, even if they were heightened for the government lawyer. Rule 2.1 does not apply only to attorneys working out of the West Wing on the public dime. Both Garment and St. Clair had the same compelling, ethical reasons to provide advice and to structure a defense built on more than “purely legal considerations.”
It is especially problematic for the president’s legal team to operate on assumptions common to the representation of the average criminal defendant when its defense must address the president’s exposure in both the regular law-enforcement and constitutional impeachment processes. At issue are Trump’s legal problems on leaving office and, more immediately, his chances of holding on to it. His lawyers cannot be unconcerned with evidence that may develop of the “fatal erosion” of their client’s “presidential authority.”
An additional ethical challenge for these lawyers is the degree to which, by their silence or active connivance, they will stand by as this president fires off grossly irresponsible tweets in his own defense. Trump has consistently urged the Department of Justice to prosecute his critics and made baseless accusations about the motives and conflicts in the office of the special counsel. Most recently, the president has been making veiled threats against the family of a key witness in the Russia investigation, his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Trump’s lawyers have the professional independence and ethical responsibility to do what they can to divert him from this path, or any other, that leads to serious harm to the nation’s democratic processes and institutions. If, because Trump is a hard client to manage, they fail in the attempt, they are not obligated to support a dangerously self-interested defense that their client may prefer without regard to the relevant “moral,” “social,” and “political” factors that a president should consider. A fixation on doing whatever it takes to win is the luxury of criminal lawyers who do not represent a president.
On Friday, the United States ended a 35-day government shutdown, the longest in history, over President Donald Trump’s demand for funding for a wall on the southern border. Hundreds of thousands of workers were missing paychecks; food-bank lines in Washington, D.C., were full of federal employees; and air-traffic controllers were warning of potential catastrophe.
The president’s strategy was predicated on the belief that the more suffering the shutdown inflicted on the American people, the more likely the Democrats were to cave to his demands. But it was all worth it, Trump insists, because the wall is necessary to stem the ceaseless tide of violence from the border. “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,” Trump said during his prime-time address in early January.
The president regularly invokes violent crises perpetrated by scary foreigners. The announcement of his candidacy began with the declaration that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.” He called for a ban on Muslims coming to the United States after an ISIS-inspired attack in San Bernardino, California. In his border-wall address, he pointed to crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants, whose victims were bludgeoned to death, beheaded, or stabbed, to argue for the necessity of the wall. But there’s one spike in violence that the president rarely acknowledges or even mentions, and it’s the rise in far-right terror that has accompanied his ascension to the White House.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s caravan hysteria led to this]
On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report finding that attackers with ties to right-wing extremist movements killed at least 50 people in 2018. That was close to the total number of Americans killed by domestic extremists, meaning that the far right had an almost absolute monopoly on lethal terrorism in the United States last year. That monopoly would be total if, in one case, the perpetrator had not “switched from white supremacist to radical Islamist beliefs prior to committing the murder.”
The number of fatalities is 35 percent higher than the previous year, and it marks the fourth-deadliest year for such attacks since 1970. In fact, according to the ADL, white supremacists are responsible for the majority of such attacks “almost every year.” The 2018 attacks include the one at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue by a man who blamed Jews for the migrant caravan, the mass shooting at a yoga studio by an “incel” obsessed with interracial dating, and the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, carried out by a student who wished that “all the Jews were dead.”
From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists. In other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists. But they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms.
[Peter Beinart: Trump shut programs to counter violent extremism]
When white extremists kill, politicians do not demand that they be racially profiled. They do not call for bans on white people coming to the United States. They do not insist that white people’s freedom of movement be restricted, their houses of worship be surveilled, their leaders be banned from holding public office, or their neighborhoods be “secured” and occupied by armed agents of the state. And they do not demand that taxpayers foot the bill for a massive, symbolic monument that will register America’s official disdain for white people in perpetuity.
And that’s how it should be. It would be immoral to collectively punish white people for the actions of a few extremists—and it would only raise the stature of those extremists, partially legitimize their grievances in the eyes of potential followers, and strengthen their ability to recruit future operatives for further attacks. But that’s not the reason none of those things happen. They don’t happen because, as America’s largest demographic group, white people have the political power and influence to prevent such proposals from even being contemplated. This is a form of political correctness so powerful that it shapes behavior without being mentioned or publicly acknowledged; it is simply the way things work.
By contrast, when religious or ethnic minorities commit such acts, they are seen not as individual extremists, but as representative of the groups to which they belong. As such, collective punishment is believed to be justified. This is, in a basic sense, how American bigotry works: White Christians are simply individuals, while everyone else is vulnerable to demonization by demagogues prepared to exploit the fear of those who are different in exchange for political power.
[Read: President Trump’s numbers game]
The correct response to the rise in right-wing terrorism is not a nationwide panic that mirrors those that accompany terrorist attacks by religious or ethnic minorities. It is to extend the same benefit of the doubt, the same proportionate, measured response with which Americans meet attacks from right-wing extremists, to attacks of all sorts. It is to recognize that the constitutional rights of minorities are no less inviolable than the constitutional rights of white Americans, and that anyone who would run on a platform of disregarding those rights is not fit to hold public office.
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