Os últimos três meses já haviam sido de chuva torrencial. O solo estava completamente encharcado em quase todas as regiões de Santa Catarina. Famílias haviam deixado suas casas, estabelecimentos comerciais fechado as portas e milhares de equipes de resgate trabalhavam em meio à lama e aos alagamentos que, àquela altura, já se mostravam devastadores.
Mas o ápice da tragédia ainda estava por vir. Nos dias 22 e 23 de novembro de 2008, o estado registrou a maior precipitação de chuva de sua história. Os rios localizados na região do Vale do Itajaí transbordaram e arrastaram tudo o que havia pela frente. Morros inteiros desbarrancaram e levaram inúmeras casas abaixo.
Foram 135 mortes confirmadas por causa da enchente, um quarto delas em Ilhota, pequeno município de 12 mil habitantes que fica a pouco mais de 100 km de Florianópolis. Todos os acessos por estrada ao município ficaram bloqueados pela cheia do rio Itajaí-Açu ou por deslizamentos do Complexo do Morro do Baú. Equipes do Corpo de Bombeiros de diversos estados que ajudaram no resgate só conseguiram chegar em alguns bairros do município de helicóptero.
A maior enchente já registrada em Santa Catarina deixou quase 33 mil pessoas desalojadas – 5,6 mil perderam suas casas. Sessenta e três municípios decretaram situação de emergência e 14 de calamidade pública. Além das mortes confirmadas, 12 pessoas nunca foram encontradas, e a Defesa Civil chegou a orientar os moradores de áreas isoladas a enterrarem os mortos no quintal.
Imagens da devastação em Santa Catarina circularam na imprensa nacional e internacional. A ajuda veio dos mais diversos lugares: pessoas de outros estados enviaram roupas e alimentos, várias cidades receberam recursos de outros países. Um rei árabe chegou a doar dinheiro para construir mais de 400 casas para desabrigados.
Entre as várias promessas de ajuda, uma chamou a atenção. No dia 28 de novembro de 2008, o principal telejornal da Record lançou a campanha “Reconstruindo Santa Catarina”, pedindo doações para construir casas para desabrigados. Com direito a transmissão ao vivo direto de Itajaí, onde a Record possui uma afiliada, o apresentador Brito Junior chamou matérias mostrando o sofrimento de moradores e entrevistas com a cúpula da direção do segundo maior grupo de comunicação do país.
Nas semanas seguintes, a campanha, capitaneada pelo Instituto Ressoar, fundação de caridade criada pela TV Record em 2005, arrecadou R$ 10,5 milhões – o suficiente para construir, segundo a empresa, cerca de 700 casas. Dez anos depois, no entanto, quase metade dos moradores cadastrados pelas prefeituras das cidades atingidas pela enchente ainda aguarda as casas prometidas. Boa parte dos que foram alojados segue sem o título de propriedade, e mesmo o Ressoar não soube informar que fim levaram as residências – e o dinheiro das doações. A instituição informou, por meio da assessoria de imprensa, que “não possui qualquer registro sobre o projeto Reconstruindo Santa Catarina, uma vez que a equipe de trabalho não é mais a mesma da época”.
O último registro no site do Instituto Ressoar a mencionar a campanha é de 1 de abril de 2009, informando que R$ 10.452.966,15 foram arrecadados, dinheiro suficiente para construir 697 casas ao valor de R$ 14.830,00 cada. Não há detalhes sobre o que já teria sido construído com a verba.
Em um cartilha de divulgação da campanha de 2010, o valor de arrecadação informado é ligeiramente maior: R$ 10,5 milhões. Mas a promessa já considerava um número menor de casas, 650. Até então, segundo o material, ao menos 470 casas teriam sido entregues em 28 municípios.
Foto: Reprodução
Para descobrir onde estavam as casas populares doadas pelo Ressoar, o Intercept tomou como ponto de partida os registros de desabrigados da Defesa Civil e fez contato com as 29 prefeituras que cadastraram famílias atingidas pela enchente para receberem moradias do programa.
Da promessa inicial de 697 casas, identificamos 363 casas construídas – sendo que apenas 269 foram finalizadas. Nas outras 94 faltavam, segundo moradores, desde acabamentos simples, como tomadas e rodapés, até telhado, portas e janelas. Considerando que cada construção custou R$ 14.830, segundo dados do Ressoar, foram investidos só R$ 4,9 milhões do montante de R$ 10,5 milhões arrecadados.
‘O Instituto Ressoar não pagou nem o meu serviço e nem os dos outros pedreiros, ficamos sem material para terminar as casas.’O folder do material de campanha do Reconstruindo Santa Catarina informava ainda que as construções seriam realizadas em parceria com a Companhia de Habitação do Estado de Santa Catarina, a Cohab. Embora a estatal esteja em liquidação, ainda há alguns funcionários na ativa. Segundo o atual chefe de gabinete da empresa, Júlio César Pereira de Souza, a companhia assumiu o compromisso de oferecer assistência técnica ao Ressoar. Só que, para isso, o trâmite teria que seguir o ritual público, com processo de licitação. O instituto, segundo ele, chegou a repassar cerca de R$ 2 milhões à Cohab, mas tomou o dinheiro de volta com a justificativa de que seria mais rápido se fizesse o processo por conta própria.
“O recurso foi devolvido, inclusive com correção monetária. Pelo que a gente soube, realmente foram arrecadados R$ 10,5 milhões. Eles tiveram alguns problemas com as empresas contratadas para fazer a obra. Mas, como nós devolvemos o dinheiro, a responsabilidade passou a ser exclusivamente deles”, contou Pereira, tirando da Cohab a responsabilidade pela situação.
Onde estão as casas construídas pelo Ressoar?
| Municípios | Finalizadas | Incompletas | Total |
| Antônio Carlos | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Benedito Novo | 0 | 18 | 18 |
| Brusque | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| Camboriú | 48 | 0 | 48 |
| Indaial | 0 | 20 | 20 |
| Itajaí | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Piçarras | 35 | 0 | 35 |
| Tijucas | 23 | 0 | 23 |
| Nova Trento | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| Jaraguá | 0 | 30 | 30 |
| Blumenau | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Itapema | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Palhoça | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Rio dos Cedros | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Imbituba | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Luiz Alves | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Gaspar | 32 | 0 | 32 |
| Ilhota | 0 | 17 | 17 |
| Schroeder | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Pomerode | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| Rodeio | 21 | 0 | 21 |
| Timbó | 4 | 4 | 8 |
| Itapoá | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Botuverá | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| São João Batista | 31 | 4 | 35 |
| Ascurra | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Canelinha | 5 | 1 | 6 |
| Capivari de Baixo | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Guaraimirim | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 269 | 94 | 363 |
Nesse cenário de destruição, o pedreiro Antônio Hammes, de 62 anos, que estava trabalhando a cerca de 25 km de Ilhota, em uma obra na BR 101, só conseguiu chegar à cidade, onde morava o irmão e sua família, a pé. Foram nove horas de caminhada até passar por todos os bloqueios e enfim ter notícias e ajudar os familiares.
Hammes acabou sendo contratado para trabalhar na construção de 14 casas no bairro do irmão. Ele conta que os pagamentos ficaram pela metade e apenas 12 moradias foram construídas, ainda assim de forma incompleta. Sem acabamento, a maior parte se deteriorou com o tempo e teve que ser demolida. Muitas foram abandonadas pelos próprios moradores. Apenas três resistiram porque as famílias tiraram dinheiro do próprio bolso para concluir as obras. O pedreiro ficou com uma delas e calcula ter gasto ao menos R$ 8 mil para deixar o local habitável.
“O Instituto Ressoar não pagou nem o meu serviço e nem os dos outros pedreiros, ficamos sem material para terminar as casas. As 12 que conseguimos subir ficaram apenas o teto e as paredes. Essas estruturas são de madeira e se não fizer logo o acabamento se estragam rápido”, lembra Hammes.
Hammes caminhou por nove horas até encontrar a família, que perdeu tudo com a enchente.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
Descobrimos em Itajaí a primeira moradia entregue pela campanha. Carlos Quintino, de 74 anos – que teve a casa de madeira de três cômodos à beira de um rio afluente do Itajaí-Açu quase toda submersa em poucas horas durante a enchente –, recebeu as chaves duas semanas depois de Brito Júnior anunciar o “Reconstruindo Santa Catarina” em rede nacional.
Antes, Quintino e a família de nove pessoas foram para abrigos da prefeitura, onde permaneceram mesmo após o fim da enchente, porque a antiga casa foi interditada pela Defesa Civil do município. A entrega da primeira casa da campanha teve anúncio em reportagem no telejornal nacional da TV Record e os móveis foram doados por uma dupla sertaneja local. A rapidez se deve ao modelo de casas escolhido pelo Ressoar, construções pré-moldadas de madeira de 36 m².
Mas as chaves da nova moradia não vieram com o título de propriedade do terreno e até hoje Quintino não tem sequer um documento que prove que a casa é dele. “Não temos o registro de posse. Nunca mais vimos ninguém do instituto e infelizmente moramos aqui, mas sem o papel”, reclama.
Mas nem todos tiveram a sorte de Quintino. No município vizinho de Timbó, das 12 casas prometidas, só quatro foram entregues – três anos depois, também incompletas. Assim como os Quintino, as quatro famílias que ocupam as habitações estão até hoje sem escritura, o que as deixa sem a possibilidade tanto de ampliar quanto de vender o imóvel. Outras quatro casas ficaram inacabadas e se deterioraram com o tempo.
Carlos e Marilene Quintino foram os primeiros a receber as chaves de casa. Até hoje esperam pelo título de propriedade.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
Marinês dos Santos Teixeira, de 56 anos, mora em uma das unidades com o marido, de 49 anos, e dois filhos, de 17 e 19 anos. Outra filha, que é mãe de uma menina com deficiência e que, por isso, precisa de cuidados especiais, acabou mudando para outra cidade, uma vez que o espaço não comportava as necessidades da família.
Ela conta que a casa onde morava antes da tragédia era maior, de três quartos, adquirida a duras penas com seu salário de cozinheira e com o dinheiro que ganhava com um salão de beleza montado no porão. Desde que ficou cego por causa de uma doença, o marido não pode mais ajudar a pagar os boletos.
“A nossa antiga casa danificou bastante com a chuva e perdemos muitos móveis, mas não chegou a desabar. Ficamos 17 dias abrigados numa escola e retornamos para casa. Só depois de três anos é que nos tiraram de lá e nos trouxeram para essa casa do Ressoar”, conta. Hoje, o terreno foi ocupado por outra família, e o morro, que estaria condenado a desabar, continua sendo habitado.
A casa prometida pelo Ressoar, segundo Marinês, foi entregue sem piso. Por conta do pouco espaço – todas as casas têm dois quartos e um banheiro, além de sala e cozinha, distribuídos por 36 m² –, ela fez um puxadinho nos fundos, onde levantou a cozinha em cima de chão batido. Os móveis do salão de beleza foram abrigados debaixo de uma lona, mas se acabaram com a ação do tempo. Além dos problemas estruturais, a região para onde foram transferidos não dispõe de mercado ou farmácia e tem pouco acesso ao transporte coletivo. Pelo acordo com a Record, as prefeituras doavam o terrenos, com frequência em áreas afastadas do centro da cidade, e a empresa se responsabiliza apenas pelas construções.
Marinês Teixeira e a família contam que receberam a casa sem piso. Assim como Quintino, ela sonha com uma escritura para chamar de sua.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
“O meu sonho é ter escritura para que eu possa deitar a cabeça no travesseiro e dizer que isso aqui é meu, além de poder arrumar a casa do meu jeito. Até hoje me sinto injustiçada, pois foi tudo por água abaixo e nós nunca mais recuperamos”, lamenta Teixera. Ela reclama, em especial, da falta de informação sobre a situação do imóvel. “O pessoal do Ressoar só apareceu para entregar as chaves e fazer foto, depois nunca mais vimos.”
As outras quatro casas que localizamos em Timbó estão abandonadas e inacabadas. No final da rua Silésia, no bairro Araponguinhas, é possível ver em um terreno com mato alto e as estruturas de madeira pré-moldada das residências incompletas.
A transferência do registro de posse de imóvel, segundo o professor e advogado especialista em Direito Imobiliário, Deymes Cachoeira de Oliveira, é obrigação do proprietário do terreno. Como os terrenos foram doados pelas prefeituras para o Instituto Ressoar antes do início das obras, caberia ao instituto dar encaminhamento legal para que as famílias recebessem a escritura de cada casa.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
Cleonice Rezende de Salles, de 54 anos, moradora de Ilhota, também teve que abandonar a antiga casa após interdição da Defesa Civil. Quando recebeu a casa do Instituto Ressoar, em 2010, teve que tirar do próprio bolso acabamentos finais como piso e fiação elétrica. Como Quintino e Teixeira, ela também não possui documento de posse da residência. Nem mesmo a rua do loteamento onde a casa foi construída, no bairro Missões, foi regularizada.
‘Eu já fui nos Correios e me falaram que a minha casa não existe no mapa.’“Eu já fui nos Correios e me falaram que a minha casa não existe no mapa. Me explicaram que é porque não temos documentação, então nem a nossa rua, que é de casas doadas após a enchente, está registrada na prefeitura. Até hoje quando preciso receber alguma coisa por carta, tenho que ir na agência. Uma vez cheguei a ter a minha aposentadoria suspensa porque a carta de aviso de perícia não chegou aqui em casa”, lembra Salles.
Cleonice Rezende de Salles descobriu pelos Correios que sua casa está “fora do mapa”.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
Mesmo caso de Maria Marlene dos Santos, de 60 anos. Ela guarda até hoje toda a papelada da casa, de contas de luz até o laudo de interdição da antiga residência, que foi atingida por um deslizamento de terra, como forma de provar que a casa em que vive é de fato sua.
“O registro de luz na prefeitura e alguns documentos como a interdição da antiga casa, que foi o que permitiu a gente receber um imóvel depois, são as únicas coisas que tenho. Infelizmente, não deram até hoje o nosso registro da casa, então se alguém vier aqui e disser que eu invadi alguma coisa, eu tenho algum papel que me dá direito de exigir os meus direitos”, diz Santos.
Das residências visitadas pela reportagem do Intercept, apenas o condomínio de dez casas doadas pelo Instituto Ressoar em Blumenau, no bairro Itoupavazinha, teve entrega com as construções completas e com posterior registro de posse. Na entrada há uma placa com o nome do Instituto Ressoar e do Instituto Guga Kuerten, que organizou a mobília dos imóveis, todos entregues a familiares de crianças especiais atendidas pela Associação de Pais e Amigos dos Excepcionais, a APAE do município.
Em um relatório de setembro de 2013 do Grupo de Trabalho Direito Humano à Moradia Adequada, coordenado pela Secretaria de Direitos Humanos da Presidência da República, que analisa projetos habitacionais no país após desastres naturais, o Instituto Ressoar é citado pelo atraso na conclusão de casas para desabrigados da enchente de 2008 em pelo menos três municípios: Itajaí, Ilhota e Gaspar.
“Vinte e duas casas começaram a ser construídas pelo Instituto Ressoar, que ainda não as entregou prontas. Foi dado um prazo para recomeçar a construção até 20 de maio de 2013, porém o prazo venceu, e o Instituto não se manifestou”, expõe o relatório.
‘O Ministério Público vai fiscalizar’Ao falar sobre as doações no lançamento da campanha, o então diretor do Instituto Ressoar, Ivanildo Lourenço, afirmou que o Ministério Público iria “fiscalizar a conta”.
Não foi bem assim. Três dias após o lançamento da campanha, o Ministério Público de São Paulo – onde fica tanto a sede do Ressoar quanto a agência bancária para qual foram enviadas as doações – emitiu uma nota negando que fiscalizaria a arrecadação do instituto. Uma reportagem na edição de 3 de dezembro do jornal Folha de S.Paulo informa que a Record enviou um ofício ao MP-SP pedindo a fiscalização da conta bancária, mas que a assessoria do órgão respondeu que não cabia ao MP auditar esse tipo de campanha.
Questionados pelo Intercept, nem o Ministério Público de São Paulo nem o Ministério Público de Santa Catarina souberam responder se houve controle sobre a verba arrecadada pela instituição na campanha “Reconstruindo Santa Catarina”.
Encontramos ao menos um caso de investigação pública. A Promotoria de Justiça de Timbó abriu um procedimento administrativo para apurar as obras do Ressoar no município. De acordo com o promotor Alexandre Daura Serratine, a única resposta que o MP obteve do Instituto Ressoar foi a de que eles “não tinham conhecimento de parceria com municípios de Santa Catarina”.
“Infelizmente, não havia nenhum instrumento para cobrar a responsabilidade deles. Algumas casas ficaram inacabadas e foram invadidas. A prefeitura precisou demolir, pois não havia segurança naquelas estruturas”, lamentou Serratine. O caso, segundo ele, foi arquivado porque “não havia provas suficientes para cobrar providências do Instituto Ressoar ou da Cohab”.
O Intercept, porém, teve acesso a um ofício da Prefeitura de Timbó encaminhado ao Ministério Público de Santa Catarina, o Ressoar e a Cohab (aqui o primeiro e o segundo comunicado enviado ao MP) com uma cópia do contrato assinado pelo Ressoar, o município e a Cohab.
Depois que as construções pararam, em agosto de 2010, o município notificou três vezes a Cohab, sendo que a última notificação ocorreu em julho de 2017.
Na resposta, a Cohab, que tinha a responsabilidade de fiscalizar o andamento das obras, diz que forneceu projeto técnico, o que foi feito, e confirma que tinha o compromisso de fiscalizar. Mas lamenta o ocorrido e diz que não tem condições de “promover efetiva fiscalização, acompanhamento e entrega das casas”. “Considerando que a Cohab não tem legitimidade para acionar nem a construtora e nem o Instituto Ressoar, para que cumpram suas obrigações, lamenta o ocorrido, porém, não tem condições de promover o efetivo acompanhamento como sugerido na notificação (da prefeitura)”, diz documento assinado pelos diretores do órgão.
A prefeitura de Timbó também notificou, em julho de 2017, a construtora Casas Ecológicas, contratada pelo Instituto Ressoar, por conta do abandono das obras, mas a empresa nunca respondeu.
A prefeitura de Indaial, que também recebeu doações, afirma que existe um contrato assinado entre o Ressoar e a Cohab. Os terrenos foram comprados pelo município com recursos da Defesa Civil do Estado e, assim como ocorreu em Timbó e em outros municípios visitados pelo Intercept, os moradores ainda não possuem escritura. Segundo a prefeitura, os documentos estão sendo encaminhados.
Já em Benedito Novo, o contrato seria entre o governo do estado, por meio da Defesa Civil, e a Cohab. “Com o Instituto Ressoar nós não tínhamos nenhum contrato, até porque a intermediação das conversas sempre eram feitas pela Cohab”, informou o município.
Em Jaraguá do Sul, mais ao norte do estado, há inclusive uma lei municipal que autoriza o município a conceder isenções para as construções feitas pelo programa Ressoar e a realizar “obras de infra-estrutura e edificação das unidades habitacionais relativas ao Programa Ressoar, a título de contrapartida, sendo que este investimento será efetuado através de doação, mediante o caráter social do Projeto”.
Lá a administração municipal também não encontrou nenhum contrato assinado pelo instituto.
Foto: Eduardo Valente
Vinte e uma cidades confirmaram terem recebido doações do Ressoar. Segundo as prefeituras, os municípios doaram os terrenos e tiveram de arcar com algumas despesas, como rede de água e esgoto e energia elétrica.
De acordo com a prefeitura de Benedito Novo, a promessa inicial era de que as casas seriam de alvenaria, mas no decorrer dos trabalhos o Ressoar alterou o projeto para casas de madeira. Na época, a Defesa Civil Federal também colaborou com mais de R$ 600 mil para aquisição dos terrenos, e a prefeitura se responsabilizou pelas obras de infraestrutura.
“O Instituto Ressoar não finalizou o acordado. Das 29 moradias previstas, apenas 18 foram deixadas com a cobertura (telhado), faltando o acabamento interno e externo. Destas, 13 foram finalizadas e ocupadas pelos beneficiados. Os demais acabaram construindo por conta própria em outros terrenos devido a não conclusão das casas por parte do Ressoar”, informou, em nota, a prefeitura do município.
‘As casas foram entregues sem janelas e forro.’Uma assistente social de um município na Grande Florianópolis, que não quis se identificar por medo de represálias, diz que não foi possível criar vínculo com o instituto, uma vez que as tratativas ocorriam sempre com representantes distintos. “Sempre aparecia alguém engravatado e bem arrumado. Só que mudava muito, toda hora aparecia alguém diferente. Depois, começaram as desculpas de que as construtoras tinham dado golpe”, contou.
A prefeitura de Indaial informou que 20 famílias foram contempladas, mas todas tiveram que concluir os acabamentos por conta própria. Segundo o município, as casas foram entregues sem janelas e forro.
A prefeitura de Itajaí, uma das cidades mais atingidas pela enchente, afirma que enviou o cadastro de 31 famílias ao Instituto Ressoar, conforme acordo na época, mas apenas seis foram beneficiadas. “O Município de Itajaí doou ao Instituto Ressoar um terreno aterrado para construção de casas, onde seis famílias receberam imóveis mobiliados. Outras 25 famílias tiveram as informações cadastrais enviadas, porém não há registros sobre construção, conclusão ou entrega dessas casas”, informou, também em nota.
As prefeituras de Itapema, Palhoça, Rio dos Cedros, Imbituba, Luiz Alves, Itapoá, Botuverá e Guaramirim informaram que não foram contempladas com doações. As administrações municipais não souberam dizer se houve alguma promessa para essas cidades.
Apenas os municípios de Antônio Carlos, Camboriú, Piçarras, Tijucas, Nova Trento, Schroeder, Pomerode e Rodeio disseram ter recebido exatamente a quantidade de casas prometidas e que as construções foram entregues com os acabamentos.
E eu… o que faço com esses números?Em 2010, o Instituto Ressoar entrou com uma ação na Justiça de Santa Catarina para rescindir o contrato com a construtora Opus Prime – Indústria, Comércio e Serviços de Construção Civil Ltda, com sede no município catarinense de Nova Erechim. O Ressoar alega no pedido inicial que teria contratado em janeiro de 2009 a construção de 100 casas com a empresa, a um custo de R$ 1.483.000. No entanto, apenas 38 moradias teriam sido entregues até maio do ano seguinte. O calote de 62 casas, segundo o instituto, totalizou um prejuízo de R$ 682.112,50.
Protocolada em maio de 2010, a queixa judicial do instituto traz outro número sobre a promessa de casas. Na apresentação dos fatos para justificar a ação, os representantes jurídicos do Ressoar citam que “já foram entregues 316 casas e mais 157 unidades estão em fase de construção”.
A soma de casas a serem entregues, de acordo com o documento, seria de 473 unidades, número bem abaixo das 697 unidades prometidas no site do instituto um ano antes.
O caso tramita na 1ª Vara Cível de Itajaí, ainda sem sentença do juiz responsável. A empresa consta atualmente como inativa na Receita Federal. A reportagem tentou contato com o proprietário da Opus por e-mail, mas não obteve resposta até a publicação desta matéria.
The post Record captou R$ 10 mi para vítimas de enchente em SC, prometeu 700 casas, construiu metade e sumiu appeared first on The Intercept.
Years before he was a potential 2020 presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke was a city councilman in El Paso—and a leading voice in a high-profile battle with unions representing police and firefighters.
At the height of the conflict, O’Rourke publicly mused about disbanding the police union, calling it “out of control” and lamenting his colleagues’ unwillingness to stand up to the powerful political force. A year later, he was calling for “better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.”
The fight came at one of the bleakest moments of the Great Recession, and the city was stuck in contracts with the police and firefighter unions which provided for annual raises and benefits. The city manager was proposing a five percent property tax increase and other hikes in fees to pay for them, but the city council wanted the unions to defer some of the wage increases and forfeit some of the holidays. The Firemen and Policemen’s Pension Fund was in need of more money, which meant they were open to negotiations, but O’Rourke was frustrated at how dug in he said they were.
Police unions have increasingly found themselves in conflict with progressive Democrats in cities across the country, and are notorious for defending even the worst officers on the force against charges of assault or murder. Chris Evans, O’Rourke’s spokesperson, said that when he relayed The Intercept’s inquiry to O’Rourke, O’Rourke’s first memory of the fight was that police were demanding a provision that would give officers a 48-hour window after a police shooting before they would have to answer an investigator’s questions. That provision is indeed in the contract; O’Rourke’s remarks at the time, however, were focused on officer compensation and El Paso’s strapped budget.
O’Rourke in public took particular exception to some of the demands from the police union in the ongoing negotiations, including its continued insistence on maintaining the wage increases which he said amounted to 8 percent each year. In an August 3, 2010 meeting, a seemingly exasperated O’Rourke went so far as to ask the city’s attorney if there was a way to eliminate the union altogether.
“In my opinion, the basic problem with this whole set up is you’ve got a very powerful police union that’s been able to extract an unsustainable increase in salaries year-over-year and an unsustainable series of additional benefits,” he said, following an exchange over the city manager’s proposal to create a second police academy. “What are the provisions or opportunities for the voters of El Paso to go back to some other form of representation for the police officers?”
The attorney said there was not, and following the meeting, O’Rourke called the police union “out of control” and questioned “the need and wisdom” of having it in the city at all. The police union, angry at demands from the city council that the police be furloughed, responded by running an ad against O’Rourke and the city council.
The battle with the unions is another window into the former congressman’s enigmatic politics. O’Rourke was a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition while in Congress, and cast a number of votes with Republicans on financial regulatory reform and other issues. Yet he also bucked his party from the left, casting just one of eight votes against military aid for Israel at the height of the Gaza war. As a city councilman, he faced a recall threat over his support of LGBT rights. In 2018, he ran for Senate as an outspoken progressive, embracing Medicare-for-all, condemning police violence, and swearing off corporate PAC money. He took a pledge not to accept fossil fuel cash for his campaign. Dozens of oil and gas executives, however, gave him the legal maximum, and he’s since been removed from the pledge.
As O’Rourke fought over salaries and benefits, he was also rankling the police force by sponsoring a resolution that called for a national dialogue on drug legalization. (The resolution passed the city council, but the local congressman threatened the city’s federal funding if the mayor didn’t veto it. It was vetoed, which triggered O’Rourke to primary the incumbent.)
Evans told The Intercept that O’Rourke’s past remarks are not indicative of his views on unions generally but “were specific to the police union’s unacceptable behavior and the specific negotiation, not public sector employees as a whole.”
“He is a strong believer in the right for labor to organize and has been a reliable advocate for public sector unions and collective bargaining,” Evans wrote in an email, adding, “He campaigned everywhere in the state saying, ‘In this state that does not allow teachers to organize and strike, we will organize and fight for our teachers.’”
But in multiple interviews following the August 2010 meeting, when asked to clarify or expand on his remarks, O’Rourke expressed the belief that private and public sector collective bargaining were different and that the latter could be deleterious to the well-being of municipalities and taxpayers. In June 2011, for example, O’Rourke specifically included the firefighters’ union in his critique.
Q: You’ve made some controversial statements about the police and firefighters collective bargaining process and the position that has put the city in regarding continual salary increases and benefits. Your thoughts on that today and what the city might do?
A: I’m a big believer in labor’s right to collectively bargain in the private sector. The public sector is a completely different situation. From my experience these last six years on City Council, I do not think it is in the community’s best interests, certainly not in the taxpayers’ best interests, to have collective bargaining by the police and firefighters.
They are exceptional public servants; however, they are not so exceptional that they get to have these contracts and rights that no other city employee enjoy and which the taxpayer cannot continue to finance without the city going broke.
O’Rourke went on to praise then-Speaker Paul Ryan for having the “courage” to propose slashing Medicare funding and shifting costs onto beneficiaries and states—though he added he disagreed with the substance of Ryan’s proposal.
“[W]hile I don’t necessarily agree with his take on Medicare, I think it’s impressive that he was willing to take that on, because no one else has had the guts to take that on,” he said. “That’s what is missing in political leadership in America today, and that is guts. I think the public is starving for it.”
Evans clarified this statement on Medicare, citing O’Rourke’s efforts to “improve” the program by allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, as well as his vote against cuts. “In fact, he actually co-led efforts to introduce Medicare X and Medicaid public option legislation,” Evans wrote. “On top of that, he called for giving individuals the opportunity to buy into Medicare on the exchanges and advocated for Texas to expand Medicaid.”
A few months after that interview, in October, O’Rourke was again asked about the conflict and said he was a “huge believer in the right of labor to organize,” but added, “I’ll tell you though, that there is a difference when you have collective bargaining in the public sector.”
He described the tense negotiations and the lopsided deal he felt the city struck. “I was deeply disappointed in especially the police union’s intransigence when we were in tough budget straits because we were in the depth of a national recession that was affecting El Paso. We didn’t want to lay anybody off, and the police union had negotiated a contract for themselves, that the city council — minus my vote, and minus Steve Ortega’s vote — had agreed to, had given them guaranteed raises, merit raises and step increases and a very rich benefits program while every day El Pasoans…that pay taxes and pay their salaries, were going broke and were going without jobs. I thought that was unfair,” he said.
Unless someone had the “courage to stand up,” the city would “run out of money and…have to start laying people off.”
O’Rourke said that the police and firefighter unions had too much power as a result of their role in funding elections. “You have a problem when people who are paying and donating to your campaign, and control a lot of the flow of money and influence in those campaigns, are then sitting across from you at the negotiating table,” he said. “I’m proud of my vote against it, but we took holy hell from the police union.” O’Rourke’s relationship with police unions went further south during the Senate campaign, with his viral defense of NFL players who take a knee protesting police violence, and another viral clip of him condemning police violence inside a church, which Ted Cruz shared.
In his October interview, O’Rourke hinted at his inquiry into whether the police union could be broken. “Now…the city doesn’t have the power, nor do I as an individual, to do away with collective bargaining,” he explained, “but I seriously question the city’s backbone in standing up and negotiate a good deal.”
O’Rourke emphasized the role unions had played in the U.S., but concluded that “there need to be better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.”
“I don’t, by any stretch, want to do what Wisconsin’s done,” he added.
At the time, the Tea Party movement was reshaping the American political landscape by then, challenging the power of public-sector labor in states like Wisconsin, where then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker was trying to break the teachers union.
O’Rourke’s remarks did not hurt him with firefighters at the time, El Paso Association of Fire Fighters president Joe Tellez told The Intercept. From his recollection, O’Rourke’s beef was with the police union and “they do business a little differently.” The firefighters, he explained, had deferred some of their wages as a show of solidarity with the struggling people of El Paso.
“O’Rourke, from our point of view, is a supporter,” Tellez noted. “We endorsed him as a city rep, we endorsed him as a congressman, we endorsed him—not just at the local level but at the state level—in his run for Senate. And we had one-on-one conversations that, point blank, he supported our collective bargaining rights and he always voted on our issues in an affirmative way while he was in Congress.”
Tellez wasn’t sure whether the meeting had happened before or after O’Rourke’s June 2011 remarks that included the firefighters.
El Paso Municipal Police Officers’ Association president Ron Martin had a different view. “Back in that time, he was not an ally of the labor unions at all,” he told The Intercept, taking issue with how O’Rourke had characterized the union’s demands. “I guess throughout time, he has worked with us, worked with fire, and worked with the border patrol unions. I wouldn’t say he’s not an advocate of them, but he’s not—you know, he doesn’t come out and attack the unions anymore, even though it does cost money. But you know, our goal as the union wasn’t really money, it was more retention of personnel and trying to be able to hire somebody. And if you don’t offer some type of benefits, they’re going to go federal or somewhere else.”
O’Rourke ended up winning his primary against incumbent Democrat Silvestre Reyes, a former border patrol guard, galvanizing voters by drawing a contrast with his opponent on issues like use of campaign funds and cannabis legalization. His election effort received outside help from Republican oilman Tim Dunn who ran a Super PAC dedicated to ousting incumbents; O’Rourke’s father-in-law, a real estate magnate, contributed to the Super PAC. Dunn currently chairs the board of directors for the free-market nonprofit Empower Texans and its project, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. Empower Texans seeks to give localities control over public pensions and eliminate the use of public funds for the collection of union dues. Dunn spent heavily against O’Rourke in his race for Senate against Cruz.
Organized labor — public and private sector — provides the Democratic Party with some of its strongest support in terms of both funding and turning out voters. For better or worse, collecting union endorsements early on is a necessary part of any Democratic primary. O’Rourke has faced difficulty in that arena in the 2018 cycle. The Texas AFL-CIO delayed its endorsement of the rising star. The decision has been linked to the congressperson’s support for allowing President Barack Obama to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which the Texas AFL-CIO opposed, as well as his no-show at the group’s convention.
But the Texas State Teachers Association was among the first unions to endorse O’Rourke in his race against Cruz, in February 2018. On the questionnaire the group sent out, O’Rourke pledged his support for public education employees’ right to collectively bargain.
In defense of O’Rourke’s pro-union bonafides, Evans cited O’Rourke’s work on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, as well as the endorsements he secured during his Senate campaign from the Texas AFL-CIO, the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters, National Nurses United, and the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union in the country.
O’Rourke boasts a lifetime score of 94 percent from the AFL-CIO for his voting record in Congress, and a recent poll of New Hampshire voters by Change Research showed that his supporters, compared to those of the other potential 2020 Democrats, have the most favorable views of unions.
The post The Union Fight That Defined Beto O’Rourke’s City Council Days appeared first on The Intercept.
Gail Atwater and her two young children were driving home from soccer practice in March 1997 when they realized that a rubber bat that was usually affixed to the window of their pickup truck was missing. It was a favorite toy of Atwater’s 3-year-old, Mac, so the trio turned around, retracing their route to see if they could find it.
Atwater slowed to a speed of roughly 15 miles per hour as she cruised through Lago Vista, the lakeside bedroom community just northwest of Austin, Texas. And although state law required passengers in the front seat of a truck to wear a seatbelt, Atwater told her kids they could unbuckle themselves so they could look outside for the toy. There was no one else on the road, and she was driving very slowly.
Then, she saw the police car. She knew she was likely to be pulled over, which she found reasonable, she later told the New York Times. Under state law, driving without a seatbelt was punishable by ticket and carried a $50 fine.
But when Lago Vista police officer Barton Turek got to her driver side window, he jabbed his finger at her and began yelling. She asked him to lower his voice because he was scaring her children. He told her that she was going to jail.
He cuffed her and put her in the back of his squad car. (A neighbor who had heard about the disturbance out on the street came and took the children home before Atwater was carted off.) Atwater was booked into jail and then later released on $310 bond. She ultimately pleaded no contest to the seatbelt violation and was fined $50. And she paid an additional $110 to get back her truck, which had been towed.
Atwater was incensed by the arrest. Under state law, the seatbelt violation was a fine-only misdemeanor offense, meaning it was not punishable by jail time. Yet she’d been taken to jail for the violation. Atwater sued the city, claiming Turek had violated her constitutional protection against unlawful seizure. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2001, Atwater lost.
The ruling was astonishing to many, in part because it demonstrated a serious misunderstanding of the nation’s misdemeanor criminal justice system. Justice David Souter wrote that, during oral argument, Atwater’s attorney was asked whether he had any other examples of “comparably foolish, warrantless misdemeanor arrests,” and that he offered “only one.” Souter wrote that while there were certainly additional examples out there, “just as surely the country is not confronting anything like an epidemic of unnecessary minor-offense arrests.”
What Souter wrote was wrong then and remains so today. The misdemeanor criminal justice system makes up the vast majority of the nation’s criminal court dockets; it is wide-ranging, encompassing not only violent crimes like domestic violence, but also myriad offenses where there is little, if any, meaningful criminal activity — things like jaywalking and loitering. It has criminalized millions of people and jailed countless, even when the ultimate punishment for the crime carries no threat of jail time, a practice which the Supreme Court’s ruling endorsed.
The consequences of even the most minor encounter with the misdemeanor system are serious — they can lead to lost jobs and benefits, including food stamps, housing, or educational support — and yet in many respects, the system has avoided much scrutiny. At least until now. In her groundbreaking new book “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal,” Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, brings the misdemeanor system into clear focus. In an interview with The Intercept, she explained why the system has escaped widespread scrutiny and challenged us to rethink the ways in which we criminalize conduct.
Author Alexandra Natapoff.
Photo: Loyola Law School/Courtesy of Basic Books
Why hasn’t this book been written before?
Misdemeanors have always been the chump change of the American criminal system. We call them “petty.” We call them “minor.” They are the way that we punish people when we think that their offenses are not serious enough to warrant felony treatment. Not only felony punishment, but also the due process and attention that goes with prosecuting and adjudicating serious crimes. In writing this book, it was shocking to me how little attention we have paid to this vast swath of criminal justice work that the state engages in.
Can you talk about the difference between a major and minor misdemeanor, how they operate, and why that matters?
The misdemeanor system represents 80 percent of the state criminal dockets in this country, so of course it’s enormous and ranges from what we might think of as serious misdemeanors — like domestic assault, driving under the influence, crimes that we have come to a consensus that pose real harms, real threats, and that represent conduct that can fairly be called wrongful. At the other end of the spectrum, we see crimes or offenses that don’t seem culpable or blameworthy or harmful at all. We sometimes refer to them as “order-maintenance” crimes or “quality of life” crimes; sometimes they fall into the rubric of “broken windows.” Offenses like loitering or trespassing or disorderly conduct. They can include jaywalking, spitting, littering, all kinds of minor, so-called order offenses that are not about whether anybody did anything wrong or bad or harmful. These crimes are about something else.
We need a misdemeanor system that is capable of punishing low-level crime in a way that’s proportionate and fair, but our misdemeanor system has ballooned to encompass all kinds of other things: to create tools for police to engage in order-maintenance regulation of high crime and/or poor neighborhoods of color; to enforce gentrification boundaries; to collect information; to meet performance metrics in their own department. The misdemeanor system has always exceeded its core purpose of crime control and always reached into the outer corners of social control and social regulation.
How has this system played into the criminalization of race?
We sweep people of color into the criminal system with that first order-maintenance arrest. We give all those African-American men their first arrest, their first criminal conviction, their first experience in jail — all too often through order-maintenance offenses that are not harmful, that are not culpable or morally wrong — and we let the misdemeanor system do that work of criminalizing based on race.
Can you talk about the connection between low-level policing and future encounters with the criminal justice system?
We sometimes say things like, “The criminal system doesn’t just go after criminals, it makes and defines criminals.” Looking carefully at the misdemeanor system shows exactly how it works. Low-level policing concentrated in low-income communities of color will impose criminal marks on people of color, predominately African-American men. Once marked, those individuals have now been flagged by the criminal system in ways that will affect future encounters with the criminal system. So the system, in many ways, is responding to its own conclusions about where to police, who to stop and frisk, who to go after, who to arrest in ways that then determine the criminal system’s own decisions about what is a high-crime neighborhood, what is a high-crime population, who is suspicious, who looks like a criminal.
Image: Courtesy of Basic Books
One of the things that was stunning to me is how much a normal part of life being charged with, and convicted of, a misdemeanor has become. How many millions of people just encounter this experience as a matter of course and then have to cope with it for the rest of their lives. I think what it means for the country is that we need to grapple more profoundly with how much we rely on our criminal institutions to do the work of government.
We know that approximately a quarter of the American adult population has a criminal record. That’s a terrible public policy. It impedes people’s lives, their livelihood, their education, their work, their families. It’s a wasteful and costly and harsh way of engaging in government, and I think the commonness of misdemeanors and just how cavalierly we rely on the misdemeanor system to do so much work should give us pause.
And the whole system, writ large, really incentivizes the guilty plea. Could you explain that?
Every official player in the misdemeanor system has its own influential role. Misdemeanor policing is its own special phenomenon. Misdemeanor prosecution has its own key challenges and failings. Public defenders, with their enormous misdemeanor caseloads, pose a special challenge. Misdemeanor courts and judges themselves often do not play the judicial, supervisory role that we expect them to play.
The confluence of pressures incentivizes guilty pleas for every single player in the system. It puts pressure on prosecutors to manipulate the system in order to get guilty pleas quickly. It puts pressure on public defenders to cede to guilty pleas on behalf of their client. It puts pressure on judges to validate those hundreds of thousands of guilty pleas that pass before them without checking the factual bases, without checking whether the law has been followed.
Of course, defendants are under the most extraordinary pressure to plead guilty. I think it has become increasingly well-known that bail is often out of reach for low-income and poor individuals, which means they will languish in jail until their cases are resolved, which means they are under more pressure than their wealthy counterparts to plead guilty, and often do.
The high plea rates in the misdemeanor system are themselves an artifact, at least in part, of bail practices, which is an extraordinary thing to admit: to admit that in the American criminal system, convictions are a function not of evidence, not of culpability, not of true guilt, but of bail processes — of money. It’s an extraordinary admission of failure.
This seems like a nearly perfect system for convicting the innocent.
It is a setup for a wrongful conviction because it’s fast, it’s sloppy; because the evidence is not scrutinized, because there is such an enormous pressure on defendants to plead guilty, and such enormous pressure on all the official players to get them to plead guilty regardless of the evidence. Indeed, much of the time, the evidence will never be checked, and the pressure to plead will overwhelm what we think of as the true function of the criminal system, which is to actually figure out whether anybody has committed a crime or not.
In a section of the book about change, you invoke the “veil of ignorance” test. Do you think that we should use this in deciding how to rework the system?
Maybe the most important insight from thinking about misdemeanors is its invitation to empathy. It’s a reminder that nearly anyone can commit a misdemeanor. It shouldn’t take you very long to think of someone you know and care about who’s committed a misdemeanor. Between speeding, loitering, spitting, jaywalking, trespassing, these are not difficult crimes to commit. The past few decades of mass incarceration have also been an exercise in revision and dehumanization. We could not have grown our prison population to this enormous and terrifying scale if our society had not essentially dehumanized people we put into that system. It is saying that the people in the criminal system are not like us, and that’s very hard to say with misdemeanors, because the people in the misdemeanor system are so clearly like us — like our children, like our neighbors, like our friends.
I think that we should imagine and understand that the people in the misdemeanor system are not a “they”; they are an “us.” And that insight, to me, is the heart of the most important kind of criminal justice reform.
The post How Misdemeanors Turn Innocent People Into Criminals appeared first on The Intercept.
The prospect for governance at the national level is dark. If you were in doubt, here is some recent grist.
This makes it all the more important to notice, to connect, and to learn from the dispersed examples of local-level renewal, progress, and reinvention around the country. That is the intended theme of this ongoing thread.
With minimal elaboration, here are a few recent installments and bits of evidence toward this end:
1. Progressive federalism: My friends Lenny Mendonca and Laura Tyson have written extensively on this phenomenon, and how exactly cities, states, and regions and work most effectively in a time of national dysfunction. (Lenny Mendonca is the former head of CalForward and recently announced chief economic advisor to new California governor Gavin Newsom. Laura Tyson was head of Bill Clinton’s National Economic Council and a professor at UC Berkeley.)
In an article “America’s New Democracy Movement,” they detail a theme discussed here over the months, and evident in the 2018 mid-term results: moves toward structural improvements in the machinery of governance, at the local and state level. The state-level moves in the opposite direction, notably in North Carolina and Wisconsin, are well known. Mendonca and Tyson say there is an opposing and more positive trend:
But the story of the 2018 midterms is about more than Trump and the future of his presidency. It is about an American electorate yearning for democratic reforms. Like in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, when citizens and states spearheaded a wave of measures to improve democratic governance, voters from both parties used the election to signal their support for democracy….
With the federal government mired in dysfunction and now in its third shutdown since January 2018, voters are taking charge. Come 2020, there is every reason to expect that “progressive federalism” will usher in democratic reforms on a scale not seen since the heyday of the original Progressive movement.
2. Also in California, the governor-once-removed Arnold Schwarzenegger is continuing his drive for progressive democratic reform, notably through anti-gerrymandering measures. On January 10 his institute at USC had a big “Fair Maps Incubator” conference about a new approach to districting. I look forward to seeing the results.
3. Also in California, our friend Joe Mathews reports in the San Francisco Chronicle on the Salinas Valley town of Gonzales, many of whose residents are farm workers and where the median income is only $17,000 a year, that has found an ambitious way to give its young people a much better chance. As he writes:
Against the odds, Gonzales has assembled such a rich suite of services for children—27 programs—that it spends more on youth than on its Fire Department. Gonzales residents are poor, but they still voted for a half-cent sales tax that helps fund youth services. And while leaders in this Monterey County town don’t have much power, that didn’t stop them from sharing power with their own children, who help make decisions on spending and policy.
Gonzales, for all its challenges, has real strengths. It has developed an industrial park and agriculture-related businesses that produce steady tax revenue. And it has stable and thoughtful local leadership….
As much as possible, Gonzales employs the city’s own children as part-time workers or interns in its programs. Students as young as ninth-graders are asked to interview and fill out applications — giving them experience. The city also gives part-time work to college students from Gonzales to keep them connected to the town.
The whole story is worth reading.
4. Not in California, but from a state resident (and former San Jose Mercury reporter): Dan Gillmor writes about experiments in re-connecting local journalism with its civic audience, and with a potential economic base. This one is in Kansas City, to give local residents a view inside the news room.
Our work with newsrooms, including Kansas City, has been about collaboration in every respect. At The Star, for example, the collaboration with the public library has been astoundingly productive. The organizations teamed up on “Java with Journalists” meetings at branch libraries — a project soon to be expanded to other public library systems in the Kansas City metro area — and, of course, the “What’s Your KCQ” project. The latter has another partner: Hearken, a Chicago-based specialist in what it calls “public powered journalism” in which the public is integral to the reporting….
Speaking personally, some lessons are already clear. Among them: Each newsroom and community is different, so the engagement/transparency projects need to be tailored to fit the people and place; the principles don’t change but the specific tactics may.
Samantha Max, of the Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, has a related report, which like Gillmor’s is carried at Arizona State University’s NewsCo/Lab site.
5. From a very different perspective, drawing from the works of Friedrich Hayek and the doctrine of “subsidiarity” with a heavily Catholic emphasis, Andy Smarick of the libertarian R Street Institute talks about conservatives’ obligation to work out the practicalities of a local-centric approach. His essay in National Affairs is called “Toward a Real Decentralization,” and it says:
Conservative leaders who embrace [the localist] view should be comfortable even with formations that adopt initiatives they may not like. By recognizing our own limitations and the authority of others, we can see that the American unum requires a pluribus.
There are many instances in which leaders on the right seem to miss this point. For example, after the city of Charlotte passed an ordinance in 2016 permitting transgender people to use the bathrooms they prefer, state lawmakers in North Carolina hastily passed a bill overriding this policy….
Similarly, as political-science professor Jay Aiyer pointed out in a paper on localism in Texas, "Texas is a conservative state with growing liberal urban centers. However … the leadership in Texas has chosen to centralize authority through the legislative process, undermining local control on a myriad of issues." In other words, to prevent liberal policies from taking effect, or what Texas governor Greg Abbott often refers to as "the Californization of Texas," conservative leaders at times proudly subvert local authorities.
The essay is a useful complement to the progressive-minded examinations of the likes of Tyson and Mendonca.
6. Finally for now, former senator and presidential front-runner Gary Hart, subject of this recent story in The Atlantic, from his site Matters of Principle. In “The Darkness Before the Dawn” he writes:
Despite the chaos in and around the White House and the fog of stagnation it creates, emanating from a man who could care less for this country, and despite the cultural changes shrewdly observed by my friend, there must and will be a return to sanity and to a brighter day for the country we love. We are optimists because we are Americans.
As Reverend Jesse Jackson used to say about himself, God is not done with us yet.
Details on what God may have in mind for the people of the United States, and what Earthlings may do about it, ahead.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
The fact of what was happening dawned before the scope of it did: In the summer of 2017, immigration lawyers and judges began reporting that parents were arriving at immigrant detention centers without their children, who had been placed in custody elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. Not until April of last year, when a New York Times investigation found that some 700 children—many under the age of 4—had been separated from their parents after crossing the southern border illegally with them in the preceding six months, did the extent of the program become clear.
Though Donald Trump’s administration has intermittently denied that family separation was ever its policy, the litany of horrors associated with the policy lengthens. Toddlers screaming as they’re wrested from their parents’ arms. Children sleeping on the bare floor of cages. Parents getting deported to their home countries while their children remain in custody here. Children falling ill in custody. Border Patrol losing track of where certain children have gone. (When a federal judge ordered that children be reunited with their families immediately, it quickly became evident that border agencies had little idea how to do so.)
[Read: Trump’s immigration policy gets its moral reckoning]
Separating families was not a rare and unintended consequence of a policy but part of the point of it. Not long after Trump took office, senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security began saying that the administration was considering separating children from their parents as a deterrent to illegal immigration. Is that true? John Kelly, then serving as the head of DHS, was asked in early 2017. “Yes I'm considering” that, Kelly said. “I am considering exactly that.” (Kelly would later blame the policy on departed Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “zero tolerance” policy toward illegal immigration.)
It is an axiom of moral life among civilized humans that to separate young children from their parents is an offense against not just nature but society, one of the building blocks of which—as the Republican Party, in particular, has long been at pains to emphasize—is the family. Forcibly yanking children from their parents is of a piece with some of the darkest moments of American history: the internment of Japanese Americans; the forcible separation of American Indian children into special boarding schools; slavery.
Wanting to clamp down on illegal immigration is a reasonable policy position; the relative expansiveness with which this country grants asylum is a subject of legitimate debate. What is new is the callousness of the Trump administration’s approach, which is in keeping with what seems like an odd deficiency of human sympathy on the part of the president himself. In December, when two children who had not been separated from their parents—Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 7, and Felipe Gómez Alonzo, age 8—died in U.S. custody, the president’s first response was not an expression of condolence or concern but rather a statement blaming others and calling for a border wall: “Any deaths of children or others at the border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies,” he tweeted.
Even for those children who survive the border-crossing ordeal, the damage will be lasting: Research on the toxic and enduring effects of early-childhood separation from primary caregivers is abundant. What the effect of this progressive coarsening of our moral sensibilities will be is yet to determined.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Armed white terrorists, many of them Confederate veterans, stormed the July 1866 constitutional convention in New Orleans and slaughtered nearly 50 people, many of them black Union veterans. The attendees at the convention had committed a crime of dire proportions: They had sought to enfranchise the black population of Louisiana following the imposition of the Black Codes, laws that had reduced the black population of the state to a position of near-slavery. The white men of the South had no choice but to engage in mass murder.
Or at least that’s how the president of the United States saw it. “When they had established their government and extended universal or impartial franchise, as they called it, to this colored population, then this radical Congress was to determine that a government established on Negro votes was to be the government of Louisiana,” President Andrew Johnson told a supportive crowd in St. Louis in September 1866. “So much for the New Orleans riot—and there was the cause of the origin of the blood that was shed. And every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts, and they are responsible for it.”
[Adam Serwer: The white nationalists are winning]
Until the 20th century, most American presidents supported white supremacy, a ruling doctrine of the United States for most of its existence. Still, few endorsed mob violence or defended those who engaged in it. Until Donald Trump, who, in the aftermath of a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of the counterprotester Heather Heyer, defended the racist marchers, saying that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Although it was a logical extension of Trump’s governing philosophy, the core of which is the preservation of America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender, the statement nevertheless shocked a polity that has grown used to presidents who embrace pluralism, at least rhetorically.
In a now-typical Trump-era ritual, administration officials who recognized the president’s defense of white nationalists as immoral anonymously leaked their disgust to reporters without taking any concrete action against him. Republican legislators expressed concern and furrowed their brows, while continuing to aid Trump in pursuit of his agenda. And the white nationalists who had grown to see the president as their champion were reaffirmed in their suspicions. One of the organizers of the Charlottesville riot, Richard Spencer, said that he was “really proud” of Trump.
The most devastating consequences of the Trump presidency have been policy decisions: his attempts to expel undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety, and their American family members; his elevation of an ostentatious partisan to the Supreme Court; his implementation of a policy of child abuse as a deterrent to illegal immigration; his abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria; his Justice Department’s green-lighting of police abuses; his attempts to weaken the political power of minorities targeted by his policies; and other acts of state violence and disapproval against religious and ethnic minorities too numerous to name. But all of them follow the underlying logic of Trump’s response to Charlottesville, and Johnson’s response to New Orleans: that extremism in pursuit of white power is no vice, and defending the rights of those who threaten that power is no virtue.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
The president owns a business.
The president owns a business entity composed of roughly 500 other business entities.
The president owns a business entity that he no longer controls, but his sons do.
The president owns a business entity set up to allow him to withdraw funds “at his request.”
The president owns a business entity designed to reduce his tax burden, shift risk, and maximize profits. There is no independent public accounting of the machinations of this business entity, nor do his sons and other company managers answer to a White House ethics board. The company remains a company, meant to make money for the president.
The president is still heavily invested in any number of industries his government regulates, including real estate, tourism, and hospitality. The president passed tax cuts with specific carve-outs for real-estate developers.
[Read more: All of the president-elect’s conflicts of interest]
The president’s company operates a hotel just a few blocks from the White House. Foreign dignitaries have spent thousands of dollars there, as has his inaugural committee, as have Republican politicians and lobbyists, though there is no complete and transparent accounting available. This translates into additional profits for the president.
The president’s company manages, owns, or operates numerous other hotels. Government agencies have spent thousands of dollars staying at them during his presidency, enriching the president with revenue collected from taxpayers.
The president’s organization has said it donates the profits from “foreign government patronage” at those hotels. It has not identified its customers or provided a detailed accounting of how and how much money it has made from foreign patrons.
Throughout his time in the White House, the president has continued to own shares in a number of individual companies, including Halliburton and Apple. His government taxes and regulates those firms.
The president has business interests in countries around the globe, countries with which he sets trade, security, economic, and diplomatic relations. These include the United Arab Emirates, Canada, India, and Turkey.
The president owns a Florida resort and social club that has become his Camp David. The social club has raised membership prices and sold tickets to events with the promise of access to the president.
The president runs a personal charity. The New York attorney general said she found a “shocking pattern of illegality” there, “including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.” The charity is now dissolving.
[Read: How Trump's murky foreign business interests harm America]
The president runs a now-dissolving personal charity that for years donated to other charities, many of them seemingly linked to the president or his businesses. Its largest gift went to restore a fountain outside one of the president’s hotels, and its smallest appears to have paid for one of his sons’ Boy Scouts dues.
The president seeded his investments with inheritances from his father. The president committed tax fraud when inheriting his father’s fortune, an exhaustive New York Times investigation found.
The president’s real-estate projects are alleged or have been found to have misled investors and potential investors. That includes projects in the Dominican Republic, Canada, Panama, and the United States.
The president and his staff members have promoted the president’s personal brand dozens of times.
The president has not sold off controversial investments, foreign investments, investments in industries he now regulates, or investments in businesses that receive payments from the United States government or foreign governments. He is the first modern president to decline to do so.
The president has not put his investments in a blind trust. He is the first modern president with substantial financial interests to decline to do so.
The president has never released his tax returns. He is the first modern president to decline to do so.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Perhaps even President Donald Trump is susceptible to the emotionalism of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He listened to the piece surrounded by his fellow G20 summiteers, the leaders of the world who had gathered in Germany in the summer of 2017. Sitting in a balcony, he leaned forward and seemed to listen intently to jocular chitchat from the Macrons. A good rendition of the Ninth—and it’s hard to top the Hamburg Philharmonic—is the musical equivalent of a venti Red Eye, a thunderous jolt to the circulatory system. When Trump joined his colleagues for a post-concert dinner, he seemed unable to stay put in his chair.
More specifically, he roamed the banquet hall and gravitated to an empty chair next to Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was likely not a maneuver that Trump had discussed with his aides in advance. Protocol permitted him to bring one translator to dinner—and his interpreter of choice spoke Japanese. Part of the peril of the improvised conversation was Putin’s cunning, his skill at rewriting reality by cleverly insisting on his own pattern of facts. There was also Trump’s strange tendency to genuflect in the direction of the Russian leader.
Because there was no U.S. official eavesdropping on the conversation, we have no record of what was said during this hour of kibitzing. And for several days, there was not even an official acknowledgement of it. Despite the many witnesses who saw him saddle up to Putin, Trump dismissed various reports about it as “fake news.”
Even at this earlier moment in his presidential biography, the cloud parked over the Trump presidency was the Russia scandal. All political logic suggested that he should avoid furtive meetings with the Russian leader, since the official line in Democratic talking points, buttressed by the Steele dossier, described him as “Putin’s puppet.” Trump’s willingness to ignore this political logic can be read as willful defiance, incompetent optics, or confirmation of a nefarious alliance. But the consistent fact is that Trump places himself in situations where he manages to bolster both the prestige and the tactical advantages of a man who hopes to weaken the country Trump governs and the alliance of democracies that he theoretically leads.
The dinner scene in Hamburg was followed by Trump’s mad soliloquy in Helsinki the next summer. Trump stood next to Putin at a pair of podiums. The American president implied that he trusted the Russian president’s denials of interference in the U.S. election more than he believed the conclusive findings of his own intelligence community. It doesn’t take terribly sophisticated psychology to see how he could arrive at such a profoundly patriotic conclusion. To concede Russian meddling in American elections would call into question the legitimacy of his own victory.
To deny Russian meddling, however, is to grant Putin his wish. Putin has repeatedly used social media to try to sow discord in the United States and western Europe. He believes that he can tip elections and stoke resentments, weakening his rivals without paying any real geostrategic price. Indeed, Trump’s denial of the nefarious Russian role in the election furthers the suspicions that Putin hopes to encourage. It creates the impression of a biased, conspiratorial “deep state”; it makes the obsession with Russian influence seem like a partisan delusion.
One of the great discoveries of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is that the Russians and the Trump campaign allegedly began talking about “political synergy” back in November 2015, long before anybody expected the reality-television star to win the Republican nomination. Even before Mueller launched his probe, the FBI reportedly believed that the president was worthy of a counterintelligence investigation, because the evidence it possessed suggested there was a reasonable possibility that Trump was an agent working on behalf of Russia. Very little in his presidential record makes this incredible assumption any less plausible.
Whatever the ultimate truth about Trump’s relationship with Russia, it has been a supremely rewarding one for the Kremlin. Trump has downplayed the assassinations of Kremlin critics. He has seemed ready to accept the Russian occupations of Crimea and Western Ukraine as either established facts or nuisances not worth American bother. Syria is a theater of influence that he has conceded to the Russians by withdrawing troops. Even sanctions against Putin’s cronies are now being rolled back. We may never find evidence of covert collusion; but the collusion that is sitting in plain view is one of the worst scandals in American political history.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
The firing of FBI Director James Comey, widely thought to be the result of Comey’s handling of L’Affaire Russe, would have been scandalous on its own. What we now know is that it was more than an isolated abuse; it was a window into how President Donald Trump understands the role of federal law enforcement—and a template for how he would wage war on the apolitical application of the law.
The firing seems to have proceeded from a genuine befuddlement on Trump’s part at the expectation that anyone in power might not use his position—as Polemarchus says to Socrates about the nature of justice—to reward friends and punish enemies. Within the FBI, the action was considered so extreme that it triggered a counterintelligence investigation of whether the president himself was working on behalf of Russian interests. But Trump, for his part, appears to find it downright odd that he is not supposed to use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political foes and protect himself from scrutiny. When he’s not actively chafing at the restrictions, he’s made almost wistful by the powerful instrument he has but cannot use. In one 2017 interview, when asked “what’s stopping the Justice Department” from investigating Hillary Clinton, Trump told a radio talk show: “You know, the saddest thing is, because I am the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing, and I am very frustrated by it.” Trump asked of the department, “Why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier, and the kind of money? … It’s very discouraging to me. I’ll be honest, I’m very unhappy with it.”
[Read: Four things the Comey memos reveal]
It was a statement of remarkable candor: Trump declared it “the saddest thing” that he could not call up an investigation of his political opponent. He said he would “love to be doing” things with the Justice Department that defy political norms, and he declared himself “very frustrated” and “very unhappy” that he can’t manage to do them. He said with bold frankness that he would like to be able to interfere with ongoing investigations. He declared himself a corrupt actor who believes that the FBI and the Justice Department should be at his beck and call for political purposes.
Whether Trump’s conduct in firing Comey was legally an obstruction of justice or constituted a national-security threat, as the FBI worried, the attitude that found its initial vivid expression in the Comey firing is the true danger of the episode. It is the attitude that persisted in the threats against Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the bullying of Andrew McCabe and Jeff Sessions, the dangling of pardons before potential witnesses against the president, and the installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. It is this unapologetically authoritarian stance toward law enforcement, which merges the enforcement interests of the country with the personal interests of its leader, and not the firing itself, that represents the true, scandalous breach of conduct. The Comey firing was just Trump’s coming-out party.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
The exact date I knew that Colin Kaepernick would never play in the NFL again was March 20, 2017. That day, Donald Trump held a rally in Louisville, Kentucky, and publicly eviscerated Kaepernick—who had been taking a knee during the national anthem to protest the treatment of people of color by police and the criminal-justice system—for the first time as president. He had gone after the athlete many times on the campaign trail, but with the power of the Oval Office behind him, this became an even more potent takedown.
Trump referred to Kaepernick as “your San Francisco quarterback—I’m sure nobody’s ever heard of him.” He also bragged about the fact that he was responsible for NFL owners’ not signing Kaepernick, a free agent at the time, because they feared a public rebuke from Trump. Although the president has lashed out at Kaepernick since Louisville (including criticizing Nike for making Kaepernick the face of an ad campaign in September), it was Trump’s Louisville comments that were especially significant.
Trump’s remarks were essentially a smoking gun for Kaepernick’s collusion case against the NFL, which an arbitrator ruled in August could proceed to a full hearing. A few months before the ruling, The Wall Street Journal obtained depositions in the case showing that Trump successfully scared the bejesus out of NFL owners. That isn’t easy to do. The Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, stated in his deposition that Trump told him the NFL protests were “a very winning, strong issue for me. Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.” Jones reportedly relayed that message to his fellow owners, and suddenly the Miami Dolphins owner, Stephen Ross, who had created a grant program for social-justice organizations, was having an epiphany. Ross admitted under oath that he was initially supportive of the protests, but that Trump’s comments changed his mind.
The real irony is that as Trump has gleefully claimed victory for forcing Kaepernick’s unemployment, the president also may have gift-wrapped a winning case for the athlete at the NFL’s expense. Considering how much Trump loathes the NFL for blocking his ownership attempts in the past, that’s karma to an infinite power.
Trump possesses a unique ability to change narratives, and he has been able to use black athletes as a perfect foil. In September 2017, at a rally in Alabama, he said NFL owners should react to protesting players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired. He’s fired!” That same year, he disinvited the Golden State Warriors to the White House after they won the NBA championship, because Steph Curry had admitted that he didn’t want to be near Trump, which led to LeBron James calling the president a “bum” in the seventh-most-retweeted tweet of 2017. In those instances, Trump painted African American athletes as ungrateful, all to the thunderous applause of his base.
Trump isn’t the first president to show such overt interest in sports, but he’s the only president in recent memory to weaponize sports as a divisive political tool. It cost Colin Kaepernick his career, and NFL owners their self-respect.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Exactly one week after he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring nationals from seven Muslim-majority nations—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—from entering the United States for at least 90 days. Mass protests, wall-to-wall news coverage, and a series of legal challenges quickly followed.
Immigration lawyers and journalists camped out in the international terminals of airports around the country, seeking passengers from the affected countries as they arrived in a nation that appeared to have decided overnight that they were unwelcome. Judges in New York, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, among other states, temporarily blocked key provisions of the order; residents in these locales and elsewhere contested its constitutionality.
The president’s stated purpose was “to protect the Nation from terrorist activities,” and his focus was clearly on the Muslim world. Trump has a long-standing pattern of broadly equating Muslim people and Muslim terrorists—while at the same time seeming unable to see non-Muslim radical extremists for what they are. With the order that came to be known as the “Muslim ban,” Trump swore that he was focused on terrorism. But even by the president’s own logic, the ban was curious in its scope: He ignored the country that produced the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi Arabians, yet Saudi Arabia was not on Trump’s list.
The Islamic State has territory in Iraq, Libya, and Syria; al-Qaeda operates largely from Yemen; and al-Shabaab is based in Somalia. But as my colleague Uri Friedman has reported, nationals of the seven countries that Trump banned killed exactly zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015. The people around the world most likely to be affected by extremist violence are Muslims in the Middle East and Africa, among them the very nationals Trump banned with his order.
The president’s apparent yearning for a clash of civilizations—he would have made “a good general,” he recently mused—is inculcating a deep fear within his own people. The days following the introduction of the travel ban carried with them a kind of hysteria-inducing alarm. Especially for people whose countries and religious communities were targeted, the ban sowed dread: It kept families separated, halted reunions, and interrupted journeys spurred by the most essential human needs.
The travel ban was eventually green-lit, if watered down. The language is gentler, the provisions presumably more tightly restrained. But there is no remedy for the knowledge that a sitting president delights in the trembling of his fellow citizens. And there’s no escaping the knowledge that even when Trump modulates the volume of his cruelty, his targets remain the same.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Certain phrases, uttered in a moment, become part and parcel of a presidency, particularly when they reveal glimpses of the person occupying the office. “The better angels of our nature,” for instance, helped shape Abraham Lincoln’s legacy as much as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” did Bill Clinton’s.
Which phrases will history associate with Donald Trump? No president before him has offered such direct, unfiltered access to his psyche, or sparked such willful chaos in doing so. Faced with Trump’s enthusiasm for scorched-earth tweets and sound bites, few adversaries can measure up. Stormy Daniels is one of them, and the words Trump has used for her characterize aspects of his presidency better than any others.
The adult-film actor and dancer has plagued the president ever since The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2018 that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 campaign to not talk publicly about a sexual relationship she claimed to have had with Trump a decade earlier. Various lawsuits, talk-show appearances, and cable interviews featuring Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, ensued. In October 2018, as news broke that Daniels had had her defamation case against Trump thrown out by a judge in California, Trump responded to the news on Twitter, referring directly to Daniels for the first time. “Great,” he wrote, “now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas.”
Such a public pronouncement about a woman by a sitting president was unprecedented, beyond even all the other news-cycle-disrupting, norm-obliterating, protocol-decimating ways in which Trump had delineated his tenure as commander in chief. (Not to mention the historic nature of the scandal itself: It’s mind-boggling to imagine the scandal that would have erupted had Barack Obama, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton paid off a porn actress to cover up an affair that allegedly occurred while his wife was home with their newborn.)
To be clear: Insulting women wasn’t new for Trump. His nicknames for Hillary Clinton alone (“Crooked,” “Lying,” “Heartless”) could title a particularly bitter country song. Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren, “MS-13 Lover” Nancy Pelosi, and “Low IQ” Maxine Waters have each earned epithets at one point or another. Omarosa Manigault Newman, the reality-show villain whom Trump hired to work for the White House Office of Public Liaison, scored two nicknames after she published a tell-all book about her abbreviated tenure in the West Wing: “Wacky and Deranged Omarosa,” and “that dog.”
“Horseface,” attached to a woman who’d described having sex with the president shortly after his third wife had given birth to their son, came with its own baggage. Misogynistic in a casual, high-school-yearbook kind of way, it spoke volumes about Trump’s id. The nickname crystallized the president’s inability to perceive women as anything other than physical objects to be displayed or discarded. It revealed, again, Trump’s uncontrollable impulse to attack anyone who threatens him, however self-defeating such an attack might be. And it made plain how vulnerable the president is when it comes to his ego—as easily bruised as a petal, or a peach.
Even in the Charybdis-like vortex of the Trump news cycle, l’affaire Stormy Daniels was the scandal that couldn’t quit. That was partly because the president himself stoked it, although whether out of simple fury or the urge to have his sexual exploits be known is anyone’s guess. Hence an odd truth: “Horseface” is an epithet that says more about Trump than anyone he might attach it to.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
It is possible to view the history of presidential politics in McLuhanian terms, via the changing technologies that leaders have used to communicate. William Jennings Bryan stood at the edge of a train car and bellowed orations to his devoted followers as he traveled across the country. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio and his flair for the dramatic to transmit “real news,” as he once put it, directly to the people. And Donald Trump watches TV while thumbing out tweets to the “haters” and “losers.”
Trump has tweeted 6,152 times since he was inaugurated, each message a fragment of presidential id. His timeline, which swerves predictably from seething to gloating, is not just an end run around the press but a splintered stream of consciousness unmatched in presidential history, an unfiltered look at the forces that animate a president obsessed with how he is viewed by others.
His tweets are messy, reactive, often petty, and occasionally cruel. The world has grown accustomed to this aspect of the Trump presidency, and the regularity with which he self-publishes flapdoodle conspiracies, casual sexism, schoolyard insults, tin-can patriotism, and outright lies. When a steady stream of exclamation points is not enough, the president opts for all caps instead, as when he tweeted at Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last summer: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”
His tweets contain hundreds of references to “fake news” and more than 150 instances of “witch hunt.” The emoji he has used most as president is 🇺🇸. It remains an open question, as of this writing, whether a tweet can start a war.
But in the annals of Trumpian tweeting, nothing compares to what appeared on his feed at 12:06 a.m. on May 31, 2017: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”
Seconds passed, then minutes, then an hour, then six hours, with no word from the White House on whether Trump was okay, or even alive. Surely it was a typo, or a tweet published errantly—but what if it was the sign of something more sinister? The speculation was furious, and so was the snark. (No meme was left unsummoned, from “Stop trying to make covfefe happen” to “Hold my covfefe” to “Ask your doctor if covfefe is right for you” to “#covfefe: when you get tricked into emailing the nuclear password to that Nigerian prince.”) When the president tweeted again, at 6:09 a.m. on May 31, 2017, it was to say this: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!”
At a White House briefing that afternoon, Sean Spicer, the press secretary at the time, had this exchange with reporters:
Reporter: Do you think people should be concerned that the president posted somewhat of an incoherent tweet last night, and that it then stayed up for hours?
Spicer: Uh, no.
Reporter: Why did it stay up so long? Is no one watching this?
Spicer: No, I think the president and a small group of people knew exactly what he meant.
[Reporters speaking all at once]
Reporter: What does covfefe mean?
Reporter: What does it mean?
Reporter: What does the president mean?
Reporter: What is covfefe?
There have been more consequential presidential tweets, and someday there may even be a weirder one. But Covfefe remains the tweet that best illustrates Trump’s most preternatural gift: He knows how to captivate people, how to command and divert the attention of the masses. And long after the president’s tweets are stripped of meaning by the passage of time and the rotting of the internet, his severest critics will still have to grapple with the short distance between politics and entertainment in America, and the man who for years toyed so masterfully with a nation’s attention.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Andrew Johnson solemnly assured a campaign rally that he was not Judas Iscariot. Lyndon B. Johnson lifted his shirt to show reporters his gallbladder-surgery scar. Jimmy Carter told Playboy that he had lusted in his heart. Bill Clinton shared with federal prosecutors his unusual definition of sexual relations.
But until recently, the gold standard for inappropriate presidential self-revelation was Richard Nixon’s statement, on November 17, 1973, that “I’m not a crook.”
Then, on June 4, 2018, President Donald Trump tweeted, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”
A new record had been set.
[Read: Trump asserts “complete power to pardon” in Saturday tweetstorm]
Does the president really have the power of self-pardon? Is that power really “absolute”? The first question divides legal scholars; leaving aside the definition of numerous, the self-pardon position certainly has its partisans. The historical record shows that days before resigning, Nixon’s aide Alexander Haig quietly floated the idea of self-pardon; no other president apparently has discussed the idea. But even assuming that self-pardon is constitutional, absolute is a bridge too far.
The Constitution doesn’t lodge many absolute powers in anyone.
Trump’s lawyers have certainly argued that his authority is broad. In a January 29, 2018, letter to the special counsel, they claimed that Trump’s apparent attempts to stop an FBI investigation of his former national-security adviser Michael Flynn “could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself, and that he could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.”
The letter claims that the president has “power to pardon,” but it doesn’t say “to pardon himself”—much less claim “absolute” authority to do so.
[Read: Trump is weaponizing pardons]
In order to understand why it doesn’t, imagine the following scenario. During a session in the Oval Office, Trump shoots a visitor dead. Then, with his trusty Sharpie, he signs a predrafted self-pardon for the murder—while holding in the other hand what he might call the “smocking gun.”
No court would honor such a pardon, and no sane lawyer would argue that it should. In fact, beyond the murder, the attempted pardon itself would likely be a crime.
But if lawyers and judges don’t embrace “absolute” power, the president’s imagination evidently does. Trump’s statements are thus alarming not for their legal pretension but for their dark psychology. During the campaign, he publicly fantasized that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.”
Benevolent leaders seldom muse about murdering with impunity. Genuinely innocent people do not obsess about pardoning themselves. Trump’s scenarios evoke a chilling psychic Gehenna—a tenebrous plane of utter solipsism, where Trump himself is the only thing. He himself is “justice”; he himself is “law.” His will be done.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
It is impossible to blame a single individual for the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which brought thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in destruction to Puerto Rico. To attempt to do so would be not only faulty, but hubristic. Nature will do as it wishes. But in the history of Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump’s name will be tied closely to the story of Maria. In his cocoon of conspiracies, Trump has constructed a narrative in which the deaths and destruction are mere fabrications of a plot to tarnish his legacy. But the deaths and destruction happened on his watch, as his government flailed, and as his strongman bluster failed in the face of a tempest.
That failure was crystalized in an image that has haunted the Trump administration. During a visit to Puerto Rico, the president attended a relief event at a church in Guaynabo. The image is indelible: Trump, facing a throng of Puerto Ricans with outstretched arms, launching rolls of paper towels. The symbolism is thick enough to cut. A president whose job it is to serve Americans, to do the impossible to keep them safe and come to their aid in moments of crisis, reduced that role to cheerful charity for a crowd of brown faces, doing his “best Stephen Curry impersonation,” as a pool report would later describe it.
Perhaps that image is unfair to Trump without context. After all, the relief event was only a sliver of the administration’s involvement in the disaster response, and the people in the room cheered the president in the moment. But given the background of that response—and how it compares with the response to Hurricane Harvey, which struck the mainland Gulf Coast just a few weeks before Maria—the blunder is a useful distillation. The federal response was belated and haphazard; securing crucial supplies and reestablishing lines of communication on the island took weeks, amid a cloud of ambivalence and ineptitude emanating from the White House. “This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water,” Trump said during a speech that attempted to excuse the lack of federal action. Puerto Rico is indeed an island, but it’s only about 1,000 miles from the U.S. mainland. The president flies about the same distance on his frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago.
We now know that hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives were lost as a direct result of the federal government’s chaotic and ineffectual response. Trump’s own reaction to those deaths bespeaks an underlying ill will that goes beyond nonchalance: He has denied that the deaths of up to 3,000 Puerto Ricans even happened. For grieving families in a diaspora marked by colonialist malevolence, it must be reiterated that this is an official denial from the United States government that their pain even exists.
Presidents are judged, and their legacies forged, on the moments that their ambitions truly reflected the awesome power and responsibility of the office—or failed to meet the occasion. John F. Kennedy peered into the void of space and willed Americans to do the hard work of getting there. Abraham Lincoln defied the very founders of the country in proclaiming emancipation for the enslaved. Franklin D. Roosevelt wrestled with fear itself as he sought to transform the country and the government to fight the Great Depression. And, in 2017, Donald Trump stared into the eye of the most lethal hurricane in a century, and threw paper towels.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
On January 11, 2018, during an Oval Office talk with several U.S. senators about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries in a new immigration package, President Donald Trump unleashed a word that Americans aren't accustomed to hearing from their president.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump reportedly asked. (He later denied having said this.)
Months earlier, Trump had reportedly complained that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” and Haitians “all have AIDS.” He doubled down at the Oval Office meeting. “Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said. “Take them out.”
In their stead, Trump spoke of taking in immigrants from great European countries like Norway, and also from Asian countries, since they could help America economically.
The private conversation leaked. Shithole snatched the headlines. But what made this moment historic, what made this moment unprecedented, was not merely the misuse of a vile word. It was the racial hierarchy Trump constructed with that language. He placed whites over Asians, and both over Latinos and blacks from “shithole” countries.
[Read: Trump puts the purpose of his presidency into words]
White House staffers immediately predicted that the leaked conversation would resonate with his base. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it still does. Perhaps racist Americans see the browning of America as the shitholing of America. Perhaps, as former Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric L. Richmond responded, they hear “Make America Great Again” as “Make America White Again.”
On the other hand, Americans should take from that moment its bracing clarity. Trump’s administration is not pursuing a “hardline immigration policy.” That phrase obscures Trump’s soft immigration policy for white people from countries like Slovenia, the homeland of Trump’s recently naturalized in-laws. It obscures history.
Before the 1924 Immigration Act, before the Civil War, the exclusionary lines drawn by Know Nothings, Anglo-Saxons, and eugenicists were much more restrictive than Trump’s MAWA. In much the same way that Trump demeans and blocks Latino, black, and Muslim immigrants, the old immigration hard-liners demeaned and banned nearly everyone, including the very same eastern Europeans and Asians whom Trump now welcomes.
Trump’s predecessors were more anti-immigrant than pro-white. Trump’s “shithole countries” remark is evidence that he is more pro-white than anti-immigrant.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
President Donald Trump took the stage in Southaven, Mississippi, for a campaign rally on October 2, 2018, at a fraught moment in American politics. Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, had been accused of committing sexual assault as a teenager, and his nomination now appeared to be in peril. The confirmation battle had consumed the country, the national temperature was running hot—and everyone was waiting to hear what the president would say.
Republicans on Capitol Hill had been trying to tread lightly with Kavanaugh’s most prominent accuser, Christine Blasey Ford—inviting her to testify in the Senate and mostly refraining from personal attacks on her character. Trump had grudgingly gone along with this strategy of restraint. But gazing out at a roaring crowd of red-capped superfans that October evening, he just couldn’t help himself.
His voice dripping with contempt, Trump began ridiculing Ford’s memory of the alleged assault—even going so far as to imitate her testimony: “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”
The crowd erupted in delight.
“A man’s life is shattered,” Trump went on, lamenting the damage to Kavanaugh’s reputation. “His wife is shattered.” The people championing Ford, he declared, were “really evil people.”
From the very beginning of his presidential bid, Trump’s campaign events have had a certain carnival-like quality, with stump speeches that are part talk-radio tirade, part insult-comedy routine. The shtick was outlandish even for an upstart candidate. But whereas most presidents tend to mute their rhetoric once they reach the Oval Office, Trump has only turned up the volume as president. To watch his rallies throughout the 2018 midterm campaign was to feel as though anything might happen. Maybe he would tee off on supposedly unpatriotic football players. Maybe he would debut a new taunting nickname for a Democratic politician. Maybe he would pull Sean Hannity onto the stage.
Still, even by these standards, Trump’s Southaven performance was astonishing: During the efflorescence of the #MeToo movement, here was the president of the United States derisively mocking a reluctantly testifying private citizen who said that she’d been sexually assaulted, a woman whose testimony even many Kavanaugh defenders conceded seemed credible (even if, they said, she was misremembering who her assaulter had been). As the audience roared its support, Trump once again demonstrated his preternatural ability to read a room and rile a crowd—and his willingness to say things that most other people, to say nothing of most other presidents, would be chary to express in polite company.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
Unlike pornography, a constitutional crisis is not always obvious when you see it. The question of whether the nation is in the grip of such a crisis first surfaced within weeks of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it has never really gone away.
After the first travel ban was issued, in January 2017, stories emerged of Customs and Border Protection agents disobeying court orders to halt implementation of Trump’s executive order. Although the disobedience in question turned out to be more the product of confusion than systematic overthrow of the rule of law, the term constitutional crisis was thrown around quite a bit. Those two little words again took over headlines after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, and when he seemed poised to dismiss Special Counsel Robert Mueller or even pardon himself. Former Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that a crisis had arrived in response to the anonymous New York Times op-ed by an administration official supposedly working to stymie the president’s wilder impulses. A recent Supreme Court filing challenging Matthew Whitaker’s replacement of Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department referred to Whitaker’s appointment as a “constitutional crisis.”
There is no standard definition of what makes a constitutional crisis as a matter of law or history. Under the Trump administration, suggesting the arrival of such a crisis evokes a mood more than anything else—a sense of ineffable, fractured dread.
Keith Whittington writes that constitutional crises entail “circumstances in which the constitutional order itself is failing”; Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin similarly define such a crisis as “a potentially decisive turning point in the direction of the constitutional order, a moment at which the order threatens to break down.” Most people seem to agree that if Trump were to fire the special counsel in an effort to shut down the investigation into his conduct, the term constitutional crisis could fairly be applied. Despite the dire predictions, however, that may never come to pass. As Jack Goldsmith has argued, the Justice Department has proved resilient to the president’s most egregious assaults. The president has not succeeded in removing Mueller; the Russia investigation appears to have continued on course even under Whitaker’s uncertain supervision. Meanwhile, an independent investigation into campaign-finance violations committed by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen appears to be circling closer and closer to the president.
And yet, a sense of dread remains. To be overly sanguine about the health of the republic because the one obviously crisis-triggering event has not occurred risks following the circular logic of Republicans who have refused to act to protect the Mueller investigation because the president has not yet shut it down. “If there were an occasion, I would be rising to it,” the humor columnist Alexandra Petri wrote in a devastating description of this reasoning.
It may be wiser to focus less on crisis than on constitutional rot, what the constitutional scholar John Finn describes as the slow erosion of faith in the underlying ideals of the republic, even as legal structures seem to remain in place. Rot is not grand. It is the patient assault of base creatures like fungus and bacteria. But at some point, the floorboards fall apart.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
On President Donald Trump’s first full day in office, he crossed the Potomac to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he attempted to assure the intelligence professionals gathered there that nobody—nobody—cared about the agency more than he did. Of course, the people who work at the CIA are paid to see through such deception—which, in this case, may not have been terribly hard, given that Trump had just days earlier compared them to Nazis.
Trump compounded the awkwardness of this moment by choosing as his backdrop the hallowed Memorial Wall, which commemorates men and women of the CIA killed in the line of duty—and then compounded this compounding by saying casually, “Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did.”
This encounter aptly foretold the tenor of the relationship between the CIA and this White House—uncomfortable, mutually suspicious, at times hostile.
It is said that the CIA has only one customer—the president. For that reason, early on, the agency’s cadre of morning briefers readily dumbed down the President’s Daily Brief to bullet points and charts and graphs to suit Trump’s preferences. But whatever mistakes the CIA has made over the years—and there have been some big ones—the professionals who work there are avowedly apolitical, and pride themselves on a devotion to intellectual rigor and the truth. So when it became clear that Trump often didn’t care about the truth, especially when the CIA’s findings conflicted with his desired outcomes, their distrust of the president mounted.
The most shocking episode for the CIA came last July in Helsinki, when Trump publicly accepted President Vladimir Putin’s smug assurances that Russia had not meddled in the 2016 presidential election—even though the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that Russia had. For an agency that has spent the better part of its history squaring off against Moscow, this was galling. Former CIA Director John Brennan said that Trump’s Helsinki performance “was nothing short of treasonous.” Soon after, Trump said he was revoking Brennan’s security clearance, triggering acrimonious sniping between the president and the intelligence establishment.
The president has tended to find the CIA’s assessments inconvenient or worse, and he has described his intelligence agencies as part of a “deep state” rife with Democrats and other careerists out to destroy him.
The president and the agency have differed on issue after issue. Trump has said that, as a result of his own dealmaking prowess, North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat; the CIA believes the threat remains. Trump claims that Iran is in violation of the 2015 deal negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration, limiting the nation’s nuclear ambitions; the CIA says that Iran remains in compliance. After the CIA concluded, late in 2018, that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Trump said: “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.”
Ironically, the president’s fraught relationship with the intelligence community has produced at least one result that could benefit the CIA: Trump’s behavior has led Democrats, many of whom have for years viewed the CIA warily, to staunchly defend the agency.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
The operating thesis regarding democracy in the age of Trump is that America continues to operate because sane people still work in the government. General James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, was a prime example of this civic commitment: an institutionalist discipline amid executive malfeasance. Whether the Muslim travel ban, relations with North Korea, alliances with NATO countries, an announced ban on transgender troops, or simply putting a stop to costly public displays of presidential self-aggrandizement, the general (in addition to his duties as the head of the U.S. Armed Forces) was a reliable mediator.
His role as such came to an end on December 20, 2018, when President Donald Trump announced that the secretary had submitted his resignation. The day before, Trump had abruptly announced the withdrawal of American forces in Syria, abandoning Kurdish allies and effectively giving the strongmen Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin a particularly and inexplicably large Christmas gift. According to reports, Mattis went to the Oval Office on Thursday to urge Trump to reconsider his decision, prepared for ill-informed obstinance (this was Trump, after all): In Mattis’s pocket was a resignation letter informing the president of his planned departure on February 28, 2019.
That might have been the end of it. After all, the Departure Lounge of this administration has come to be a crowded and cacophonous place, animated by Apprentice-style employee shuttlecocking (Comey, Bannon, Spicer, Lewandowski, Sessions … Scaramucci), tail-between-legs exoduses (Price, Zinke, Porter, Pruitt), and the periodic flight of self-preservationists (Cohn, Hicks, Haley, McGahn, Ayers). Recently and worryingly, the departures area has also seen a steady stream of exiting agents of stability—notably, former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Mattis’s departure might have been an unfortunate inevitability in this vein (initially, the president tweet-thanked Mattis for his service), but the ensuing eruption turned the secretary’s departure into something specifically degrading, a noxious turning point in what has already been a spectacle of administrative humiliation.
Amid rising consternation over Mattis’s departure—Trump resents nothing as much as public doubt—the president two days after the announcement tweeted that he had been the one to offer the general “a second chance” after Mattis had been “ingloriously fired” by President Barack Obama. Of this decision, Trump mused beneficently, “Some thought I shouldn’t, I thought I should.”
The presidential psychology was familiar but still ugly: Shame the ones who bring you shame, no matter what they’ve done for you (or the country). And it was not over yet.
A day later, on Sunday, the president announced that the defense secretary would be leaving on January 1 of the new year, rather than Mattis’s announced (and preferred) date two months later. Kicking a four-star general off his job was apparently the 45th president’s way of saying “Thank you for your service.”
By start of the new year, the president was bristling to the cameras during a Cabinet meeting and saying of the now-departed Mattis, “What’s he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not too good ... I’m not happy with what he’s done in Afghanistan, and I shouldn’t be happy. As you know, President Obama fired him, and essentially so did I.”
The spite was stunning; the lies were obvious. But it was the outlandishness of the question—“What’s he done for me?”—that truly shocked. Mattis risked his life in three wars and spent his career in the military. His highest loyalties have been to his country. The decorated general known as the Warrior Monk was demeaned on live television by a president who never served a day in his life.
This president will attempt to destroy the reputation of literally anyone who crosses his path—including the many men and women who have sought to serve him, and especially the country, with honor. Good government rests on civil servants. And no president has yet disgraced those servants more explicitly than Donald Trump
Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.
When historians in the 22nd century search for the moment when reality television was at its most influential, they may well pinpoint June 12, 2018.
That was the day entertainment converged with existential danger, low-budget cinematography with high-stakes diplomacy. Less than a year after threatening to unleash “fire and fury” on the leader he called “Little Rocket Man” (and also “short and fat”)—and just a few months after trading threats with him about the size and potency of their respective “Nuclear Buttons”— Donald Trump became the first American leader to meet his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, as 3,000 journalists from around the world gathered in Singapore to transmit the spectacle. But perhaps the height of unreality was this: The former Apprentice star revealed that he had sought to persuade North Korea’s dictator to abandon his nuclear weapons by showing him a faux movie trailer produced by “Destiny Pictures,” more commonly known as the National Security Council.
Since the Singapore summit—where he insisted on meeting alone with Kim and summarily suspended U.S.–South Korean military exercises—Trump has kept the show going, preparing for another summit with the North Korean leader and professing his “love” for the tyrant in Pyongyang.
[Read: Here’s what Trump actually achieved with North Korea]
The decision to pitch denuclearization as if it were a buddy action film is more significant than it first appears; it’s a distillation of what distinguishes the president from his predecessors on international affairs. And there’s a chance, however slight, that the gambit will actually succeed where decades of more conventional methods to prevent North Korea from going nuclear have failed.
Approaching foreign policy with a real-estate mogul’s yen for dealmaking and a reality-TV maven’s hankering for high drama, Trump has shown himself willing to put everything—the United States’ alliances, American values such as democracy and human rights—up for negotiation.
The movie trailer, and the summit’s other theatrics, accordingly presented Kim with a vivid choice between continuing to live under threat of U.S. attack or relinquishing his nuclear arsenal in exchange for a prosperous future of beachfront condos and glittering cityscapes. Ignoring the North Korean government’s human-rights abuses, the trailer placed the leader of the free world and the leader of one of the world’s most repressive countries on equal footing, with the narrator declaring that the two men are among the “very few” people on Earth in a position to “renew their homeland” and “change the course of history.”
[Read: The man behind the North Korea negotiations]
Thus far, Kim is not acting like a man prepared to renounce nuclear weapons; in a New Year’s address, he hinted at limiting his arsenal but threatened to go “a new way” if the United States keeps sanctioning and pressuring his country. He’s probably more alarmed than attracted by the capitalist economy conjured in the trailer, because opening North Korea to outside influences risks obliterating his totalitarian rule. If anything, Pyongyang seems to be seizing on the characterization of nuclear talks as a leader-to-leader affair in order to bypass harder-line U.S. officials and strike a deal solely with the more malleable American president.
Nor, however, is the 35-year-old Kim particularly thrilled about ruling over a sclerotic economy at the barrel of an American gun for decades to come. The seemingly impossible mission of U.S. negotiators is to convince North Korea’s leader that in the long term he will be more secure if he reaps the benefits of denuclearization than if he clings to nuclear weapons at all costs.
In transforming this task into reality TV, Trump has brought the Korean peninsula to the brink of war, cast doubt on the future of the U.S.–South Korea alliance, and, for the moment anyway, merely papered over the problem of North Korean nukes rather than solving it. But even non-fans of the Trump Show must reckon with the fact that nothing else has succeeded in weaning North Korea’s leaders off nuclear weapons either.
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