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Catching up on Donald Trump

January 8, 2024 – 9:31 am

As always, a lot of news during the last three weeks centered on Donald Trump. The main themes were

  • whether the 14th Amendment bans him from holding office again,
  • the partial report on the millions he received from foreign governments while he was president
  • mainstream media still hasn’t figured out how to cover Trump
  • campaign odds and ends

Let’s take those in order.

The disqualification argument. So far, Trump has been ruled off the primary ballot in two states: Colorado and Maine. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled him ineligible, as did the Maine Secretary of State. Trump is appealing those rulings and the Supreme Court will ultimately have to decide whether he is qualified to be president again. They plan to hear arguments in February.

The basis of his disqualification is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The key legal questions to answer are:

  • Does the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 qualify as an “insurrection”?
  • Did then-President Trump “engage” in this insurrection or “give aid and comfort” to the people who did?
  • Since the presidential oath does not include the word “support”, but does give the president the (arguably stronger) obligation to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”, is an insurrectionist president disqualified?
  • Since the 14th Amendment does not specifically name the president, is the presidency covered by “any office … under the United States”?
  • What kind of legal process is needed to enforce disqualification? Both Colorado and Maine held evidentiary hearings where Trump was allowed to produce evidence that he is qualified. Is that good enough?

When I first heard the disqualification theory raised by retired Judge Michael Luttig and Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe in an Atlantic article in August, I was ambivalent about it, largely because I wasn’t sure what the people who wrote, passed, and ratified the 14th Amendment intended insurrection to mean. All I would say then was:

disqualification is a serious question, and our legal system owes the country a serious answer.

Since then, both the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision and the Maine Secretary of State’s statement have addressed the legal questions with some fairly convincing arguments. The historical context of the term insurrection — remember, conservatives on the Supreme Court claim to be originalists — has been well covered by Ilya Somin, and covered in eye-glazing detail by Mark Graber. So my current opinion is that January 6 was an insurrection, so Trump is not legally qualified to be president again.

I am still open to hearing convincing arguments in the other direction. But what I don’t want to hear are political arguments about whether disqualifying Trump or attempting to disqualify him is a wise course for the nation or for Democrats to take.

Trump frames all the legal proceedings against him — the indictments, the defamation suits, the challenges to his qualifications for office — as political. When we calculate the political advantages and disadvantages of those actions, we validate that frame.

But whether or not the Constitution bans him from holding office again is a question of law, not politics. The whole point of including things in the Constitution is to take them out of politics. If constitutional provisions are subject to politics, then all the rights the Constitution supposedly gives us are up for grabs. Your right to do any particular thing will depend not on the Constitution, but on whether your action is politically popular.

Those who argue that “the people should decide” whether Trump should return to power are advocating that we ignore the Constitution. We didn’t let the people decide whether Barack Obama should be elected to a third term in 2016, when he would probably have beaten Trump. But instead, Obama and the Democratic Party accepted that the 22nd Amendment disqualified him, independent of how much support he had.

Another bad argument is that disqualifying Trump will lead to Republicans trying to disqualify Democratic candidates. This is something we hear constantly: Democrats shouldn’t use a process in good faith because it will inspire Republicans to use the same process in bad faith. (That’s what we’re seeing now with the attempt to impeach Biden as a tit-for-tat response to the Trump impeachments. They can’t even formulate a charge, much less support one with evidence comparable to the evidence against Trump.) If Republicans have legitimate constitutional grounds to disqualify current or future Democratic candidates, they should go for it and let the courts sort it out. But courts are not going to be impressed by “they did it to us” as grounds for disqualification.

The worst argument of all is that disqualifying Trump will anger his supporters, who might respond with an even larger insurrection than January 6. Timothy Snyder, who has written books about how fascist movements take power, calls this a “pitchfork ruling“

How does the rule of law become something else? First comes the acceptance that one person is not subject to the rule of law, for whatever bad reason — that he was in office; that he has violent supporters; that he is charismatic; that we are cowards. Once that move is made, once that hole is opened, the person so sanctified as a Leader has been empowered to change the regime itself, and will predictably try to do so.

In short, I think disqualification is a legal question that deserves a legal answer. Personally, I don’t believe the Supreme Court will disqualify Trump. But I’m eager to find out how they will come to that conclusion: Will they find a plausible argument qualifying him, or will they simply make up an excuse to avoid doing something they don’t want to do? I have often accused the conservative justices of invoking originalism in bad faith, as sophistry that justifies whatever their prior opinions were. They have a chance to prove me wrong here.

Jay Kuo covers the current state of other Trump legal cases, including the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case, which starts a week from tomorrow. Final arguments in the New York civil fraud case, where the state has upped its ask to $370 million, start on Thursday.

Foreign emoluments. From the beginning of his administration — and maybe throughout his entire life — Donald Trump’s attitude towards his legal obligations has been: “Make me.” If a law has no effective enforcement mechanism, he sees no reason to follow it.

During his administration, that attitude showed up in many areas, such as the Hatch Act, which “prohibit[s] federal employees from using their official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting elections”. A report issued in November, 2021 by the Office of the Special Counsel found repeated violations of the Hatch Act by 13 Trump administration officials.

[W]ith respect to an administration’s senior-most officials—whom only the president can discipline for violating the Hatch Act—the Hatch Act is only as effective in ensuring a depoliticized federal workforce as the president decides it will be. Where, as happened in the Trump administration, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, there is currently no mechanism for holding senior administration officials accountable for violating the law.

Thursday, we found out about another example of Trump administration lawlessness: violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits US public officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” … “without the Consent of Congress”.

With respect to the President, the Foreign Emoluments Clause is enforced only the impeachment. So a lawless president who can count on the unflinching support of 34 senators can violate it to his heart’s content, which apparently Trump did.

A partial account of the money Trump took from foreign governments while president — at least $7.8 million from China, Saudi Arabia, and others — is the subject of a new report “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers paid off President Trump“, written by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The story of how this report came to exist, and why it isn’t the complete accounting we might hope for, is as interesting as the report itself.

At the very beginning of his administration, ethics experts recommended that Trump divest his business interests, particularly the ones that had foreign customers and clients. He refused to do so, and instead made an arrangement for his two adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, to manage the Trump Organization in his absence, while he retained ownership and ultimate control. So foreign governments could do business that benefited the President (like owning a floor of Trump Tower or running up a big bill at a Trump hotel), the President could know about that business, and the President might subsequently take actions that furthered the interests of those foreign governments (like shielding MBS from the consequences of murdering Jamal Khashoggi).

When the House Oversight Committee (controlled by the House’s Democratic majority from 2019-2023) began investigating his foreign emoluments, Trump fought them at every turn, refusing to turn over documents and fighting subpoenas served to his accounting firm (Mazars) all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in the Committee’s favor in 2020, and Trump continued to try to limit the scope of the subpoenas in lower courts until an agreement was reached in September, 2022.

This agreement remained in effect only until March 2023, by which time Republicans had regained control of the House. New Oversight Chair James Comer then released Mazars from the agreement and ended the full committee’s investigation. So ultimately, only a fraction of the subpoenaed documents were turned over, only a fraction of Trump’s foreign emoluments were revealed, and the report was issued by the committee’s Democrats alone.

All this raises a question Comer and the Republicans have never answered: Why shouldn’t the public know about the profits Trump made from foreign governments?

This question is particularly appropriate given Comer’s focus on Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, which he hopes someday to tie to President Biden, but so far has not. Why is it important to determine whether Biden has profited from foreign governments like China, when we already know for a fact that Trump did, and Comer does not care?

Media coverage. Thursday, AP wrote a headline outrageous in its false equivalence: “One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry“. James Fallows commented with this parody:

Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis: Two leaders, two traditions; both making the South’s “peculiar institution” a rallying cry.

Josh Marshall added:

Some headlines, you should look at yourself as a journalist and think I should stop being a journalist.

CNN’s Phil Mattingly responds as a journalist should:

There aren’t in fact two interpretations here. There is what happened, and then there are lies.

AP isn’t alone here. A big chunk of the mainstream media is still covering Trump the way it did in 2016: He says something false, Biden says something true, and the headline is “Two interpretations”. Journalists hate to “take a side”, but a higher priority should be to follow the truth. If the truth has taken a side, you have to follow it.

Promoting this kind of false equivalence is going to be a main thrust of the Trump campaign, and I was disappointed to see George Will — not normally a Trump puppet — echo it. “A Constitution-flouting ‘authoritarian’ is already in the White House” he wrote on Wednesday, citing Biden’s naming as acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration a woman whom he had been unable to get confirmed by the Senate, as if this were somehow comparable to Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election or his plan to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day 1.

Other odds and ends. On the campaign trail, Trump has adjusted the famous “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” line that Ronald Reagan used against Jimmy Carter in 1980. Instead, he’s asking if you’re better off than you were five years ago. Apparently, his disastrous 2020 doesn’t count. (If you include 2020, Trump’s four-year job-creation total is negative. The economy lost 2.9 million jobs while he was in office.)

Now, I see the logic in giving Trump a mulligan for Covid-related job losses. (Up to a point. One reason the pandemic hit us as hard as it did was that Trump tried to happy-talk the virus away in the early months, and pushed disinformation about “cures” the whole time. Estimates vary wildly, but it’s easy to justify the claim that the cost of his mismanagement in lives-lost runs into the hundreds of thousands.) But if you give Trump a pandemic jobs mulligan, you also have to give Biden a post-pandemic inflation mulligan. Both the unemployment and the inflation were worldwide phenomena that were driven by external forces. As a Biden supporter, I don’t claim Biden would have created jobs during 2020. But Trump supporters almost universally assert — based on nothing — that Trump would have controlled inflation in 2022-23.

In general, dropping Trump’s fourth year down the memory hole allows him to ignore what crappy shape the country was in when the failure of his coup forced him to hand it over to Biden. And once you’ve ignored that fact, Biden’s performance in office doesn’t look nearly as impressive as it has actually been.

Who could have guessed that the Civil War would turn out to be an issue in the Republican primary campaign? It started a few weeks ago with Nikki Haley’s strange inability to say the word “slavery” when some New Hampshire voter at a post-Christmas town hall meeting asked her about the cause of the war. After suffering a day of ridicule, she backtracked and said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.” But the damage was done.

Republicans used to ridicule Democrats about “political correctness” when they’d use some strange circumlocution to avoid saying something that would offend part of their base, or appeared not to know what the currently acceptable terminology was. But now the shoe is on the other foot. White supremacists and Confederate apologists are a key part of the Republican base, and candidates have to speak carefully to avoid offending them by hinting, say, that the Confederates were the bad guys in the Civil War. It’s a weird turn of events for the Party of Lincoln, but here we are.

Anyway, Trump got into the act Saturday, saying that he could have avoided the Civil War through “negotiation”. Now this is laughable in one way and downright hilarious in another. The suggestion of negotiation is itself laughable, because Americans as skilled as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster tried to negotiate the slavery issue, continuing efforts that had been going on since the Continental Congress assembled the Declaration of Independence. But slavery was at the center of Southern identity and was “a positive good” according to John Calhoun. All along, the South was clear that it would go to war rather than give up its slaves. Lincoln came into office offering to let Southern states keep their slaves, but to ban slavery only in the western territories. But that wasn’t good enough for the South. So what offer does Trump imagine they would have accepted?

CNN’s Dean Obeidallah looks at Trump’s record of praising Confederates and pandering to White supremacists, and asks a more interesting question:

The question for me is not whether Lincoln could have made a deal that would have made the slave-owning states happy enough to remain in the Union. What I wonder about is which side would’ve Trump sided with in the Civil War: The Confederacy or the United States of America? The track record of a president facing accusations of attempting his own insurrection, which he of course denies, would seem to readily answer that question.

What’s hilarious is the idea that Trump could have negotiated this. If we learned anything during his four years in office, it’s that Trump can’t negotiate anything. North Korea still has nukes, China is still running a huge trade surplus, ObamaCare hasn’t been replaced, he never got out of Afghanistan, he never got the “better deal” he claimed his rejection of the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accords would lead to, and the Dreamers still have no legal status, just to name a few issues that his mythical deal-making skill was supposed to take care of.

Trump played a great deal-maker on TV. But he’s a terrible deal-maker in reality.

Thursday, a shooter killed one student and wounded several other people, including the principal, at Perry HIgh School in Perry, Iowa. Friday night at a campaign rally in Sioux City Donald Trump said, “It’s just horrible – so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it. We have to move forward.”

In the immediate aftermath of a shooting, pro-gun people usually claim that it’s “too soon” to discuss doing something about America’s gun problem, or that using public sorrow and anger to promote solutions is “politicizing tragedy”. But in Trump’s new rhetoric, the very idea that something could be done is taken away. Somebody’s kid died needlessly? Get over it.

I did some googling to see how Fox News covered this quote, but I came up empty. Imagine the channel’s 24/7 focus if Biden had said something half this clueless.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (15)

Those University Presidents

December 18, 2023 – 10:25 am

William Faulkner’s classic story about a lynching, “Dry September“, starts with this paragraph:

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

The beauty of that description is that by the time you get to “knew exactly what had happened”, you’ve forgotten that the subject is “none of them”. That’s how viral public outrage works sometimes: The more the story goes around, the simpler it becomes, until you start to forget how little you actually know.

We’ve had an example of viral public outrage these last two weeks: Something about Jews and genocide, and university presidents being OK with it, or not willing to condemn it, or something. It was horrible, whatever it was. And heads have rolled. Penn’s Liz Magill has already been forced out, while Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth have managed to hang on. The House has passed a resolution citing statistics about antisemitic incidents on college campuses, “strongly condemning” the three presidents’ testimony as “evasive and dismissive”, and demanding that they all resign. The MIT Israel Alliance went a step further, calling for the resignations not just of the university’s president, but of board members “who support tacitly, or otherwise, the calls for genocide of Jews.”

The heart of the issue is a widely circulated video of a three-and-a-half-minute chunk of a five-and-a-half-hour hearing. [The video and transcript of the full hearing is available online. I’ve scanned the transcript, but I confess I have neither watched nor read the whole session. Unless otherwise sourced, the quotes below are from the transcript.] In that clip, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) badgers all three presidents to answer yes or no about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates their institutions’ harassment policy. All three give similar answers to President Gay:

The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific. And if the context in which that language is used, amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take — we take action against it.

Again and again, Stefanik rejects the suggestion that the context matters:

Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?

None of the presidents is willing to give that clear yes-or-no, resulting in national outrage at their “lack of moral clarity” (to use Stefanik’s words), and costing at least one of them her job.

So why couldn’t they give that yes-or-no answer? If we’re going to understand what this exchange was really about, we’re going to have to examine — dare I use the word? — context.

Framing the hearing: not antisemitism, wokeness. The hearing was held before the House Committee on Education and the Work Force (which I honestly had never heard of before), chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).

The first thing to understand about this hearing is that it was only superficially intended to discuss antisemitism. Antisemitism was just a convenient tool to use in the House Republican majority’s larger battle against “wokeness”, particularly as it appears in elite universities, which Republicans see as enemy outposts.

That purpose was announced in the opening statement given by Chair Foxx:

[A]fter the events of the past two months, it is clear that rabid anti-Semitism and the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another. We must be clear on the ideological dimension of this problem. For years, universities have stoked the flames of an ideology which goes by many names—anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality, the list goes on.

This value system taught in universities is absolutely foreign to 99 percent of Americans. It centers the identity on immutable racial and sexual characteristics. It presents a delusion that the color of one’s skin and expression of one’s chromosomes sort society into classes of oppressed and oppressors. And now it is clear that Jews are at the bottom of the totem pole and without protection under this critical theory framework. … Institutional anti-Semitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.

The buck for what has happened must stop on the President’s desk, along with the responsibility for making never again true on campus. Do you have the courage to truly confront and condemn the ideology driving anti-Semitism, or will you offer weak, blame shifting excuses and yet another responsibility dodging task force?

So the topic here isn’t really antisemitism, it’s “the ideology driving anti-Semitism”, which is “anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality.” As an example of this ideology, Foxx names courses like Harvard’s “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power”, whose title alone is so sinister that its wrongness needs no explanation.

Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to “Social and Racial Justice.” [1]

This larger focus is why much of the questioning by Republican members is about Blacks, not Jews. Rep Bob Good (R-VA), for example, uses Harvard’s history of affirmative action against it:

We know, of course, that Harvard has a history of dividing people based on race, based on the Supreme Court’s decision and students for Fair Admission versus Harvard.

Ranking Democrat Donald Norcross (NJ) pointed out in his opening statement that Republican interest in antisemitism or any other form of discrimination on campus has been quite selective:

Today we’ll hear from representatives of universities on their efforts to protect students and address discrimination on campus. Of note, this is an opportunity that my Republican colleagues denied us in 2017, when committee Democrats called for a hearing six years ago on campus discrimination, when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia grounds shouting “Jews will not replace us.” We didn’t — couldn’t get a hearing back then.

And while my colleagues claim to be committed to combating discrimination on campus, they’re also contradictorily and simultaneously stoking culture wars that can be divisive and discriminatory. Moreover, House Republicans are proposing significant cuts to the Department of Education’s offices — Office of Civil Rights, the very office responsible for upholding student civil rights and investigating discrimination claims.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t call for action then hamstring the agency charged with taking that action to protect students’ civil rights. In stark contrast, the Biden administration has taken an active role in helping institutions protect students as part of the White House’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. [2]

So no. They’re not talking about antisemitism because they see antisemitism as a problem. They’re using it as a bludgeon against Academia in general.

Why were the presidents called to testify? So that the committee could beat up on them. The title the committee gave the hearing was “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism“. Antisemitism got second billing; humiliating university presidents was the main goal. Foxx’ opening statement was also clear about that:

Today, each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied students the safe learning environment they are due. [italics added]

You might imagine calling three distinguished university presidents together in a spirit of real perplexity: How is this happening? What needs to change? But no: They’re not there to give insight; they’re there to atone.

What does it mean to “call for the genocide of Jews”? It’s important to recognize the mismatch between the questioners and the witnesses. The questioners — particularly Stefanik — were there to make particular political points to the nation. The administrators were there to protect their institutions, and so they mostly did not engage when the politicians framed larger political issues. This turned out to be a mistake on their part, and it cost them.

So what exactly counts as “genocide” or a “call for genocide”? In her questioning of President Gay, Stefanik identifies “intifada” with killing Jews in Israel, and “global intifada” with killing Jews everywhere in the world.

And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. … And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” and quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct? … So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?

Gay isn’t there to fight the Palestinian/Israeli political battle, and doesn’t want to get pushed into that corner, so she doesn’t dispute Stefanik’s framing (and may not have the background to do so). No one in the room is there to argue the Palestinian case, so the intifada=genocide framing goes unquestioned. But it shouldn’t have. On the liberal Jewish website Forward, Mira Fox does the analysis that no one at the committee hearing felt called to do:

Arabic contains many words for revolts or uprisings, each with a different valence — and often understood differently in the West, and when used in English in ways that don’t capture the words’ full meaning. … Intifada connotes an uprising against an oppressor. But that’s a relatively new meaning for the word, which comes from a verb root meaning “to shake off” or “dust off.” It only acquired its revolutionary implications during the Iraqi Intifada in 1952, a series of strikes and riots protesting the monarchy at the time. In Arabic, [University of Virginia Professor Mohammed] Sawaie said, it is also used to talk about the Arab Spring, and other revolts against oppressive regimes.

… Daniel Lefkowitz, a professor of language and culture in the Middle East at the University of Virginia who lived in Israel for several years in the early 2000s, hypothesized that, for most Palestinians, the word brings up memories of the First Intifada, a largely non-violent Palestinian protest largely involving work stoppages, boycotts and demonstrations.

… But for Israelis, and many Jews, the word brings up memories, instead, of the Second Intifada, a far bloodier Palestinian uprising characterized by suicide bombings on buses and at cafés that killed about 1,000 Israeli civilians.

So it’s important to understand that when American college students call for “intifada”, they might be calling for the indiscriminate killing of Jews, but they might also be calling for resistance (which they might intend to be either violent or non-violent) to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Similarly “global intifada” might mean attacks on Jews or Israelis wherever, but it might also mean showing non-violent international support for Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation.

It depends on the context.

Similarly, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” clearly refers to the whole region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, which includes both Israel proper as well as the areas commonly envisioned as a Palestinian state. Wanting that whole region to be “Palestine” might mean ethnically cleansing it of Jews. Or it might refer to what is known as the one-state solution: a multi-ethnic democracy where Palestinians and Jews have equal rights. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) sees it as

“an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” Tlaib supports the establishment of a single, binational Palestinian-Jewish state in place of what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Naturally, bigots can adopt ambiguous rhetoric in order to give themselves cover, so you can’t always take seriously people’s own explanations of what their slogans mean. (“All lives matter” is a good example. Taken literally, it is uncontroversial, but it is also commonly used by white supremacists to dispute the idea that Black lives matter.) But conversely, contending that you know what other people’s words mean — and they don’t — is a claim of supremacy: your interpretation is the only one that matters.

So what was Stefanik asking? The presidents also made opening statements, and all were clear about several points:

  • The Hamas attacks on October 7 were wrong and horrible. President Magill: “Let me begin by saying that I, and the University of Pennsylvania, are horrified by and condemn Hamas’s abhorrent terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th. There is no justification—none—for those heinous attacks.”
  • Antisemitism exists on campus and is unacceptable. President Kornbluth: “Let me repeat what I said in my very first message to campus. In that video, I said, ‘The brutality perpetrated on innocent civilians in Israel by terrorists from Hamas is horrifying. In my opinion, such a deliberate attack on civilians can never be justified.’ I also made clear that students were feeling unsafe ‘because of their Jewish faith, or their ties to Israel’ and said, ‘That should trouble every one of us deeply.’ I have reinforced this message, including in a November 14th campus video. As I said then, ‘Antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world. We cannot let it poison our community’.”
  • No student (whether Jew, Muslim, or anything else), should feel unsafe, unwelcome, or intimidated on their own campus. President Gay: “I am deeply troubled by instances of inflammatory rhetoric and division on campus. Individuals are reporting feeling threatened by others in our community. The chilling effect created by these tactics threatens to turn our community of learning and trust into an environment of alienation and fear. Reckless and thoughtless rhetoric—in person and online, on campus and off—is undermining feelings of belonging among members of the Harvard community. Efforts to threaten or intimidate members of our community betray Harvard’s core values.”

The question Stefanik badgered the presidents with, though, was far more specific than whether the Hamas attacks were evil or antisemitism is wrong. She asked specifically about the harassment policies at the universities.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?

That’s a legal question, and it should surprise no one that the presidents gave legalistic answers, all of which amounted to: It depends.

Their caution was undoubtedly raised by the framing Stefanik had already done: In her view, anyone who chanted or otherwise promoted common pro-Palestinian slogans was calling for genocide against Jews. Once that’s understood, and calling for genocide is defined as harassment, then any student who demonstrated in favor of Palestinian rights is subject to official punishment from their university.

It’s no wonder that the presidents didn’t want to go there.

How should context matter? You might think that a hearing lasting more than five hours would have ample time for everyone to explain themselves. But when a hearing is directed by people who don’t want to hear explanations, time can get away from you.

So if you want to know what “context” has to do with anything, I suggest looking at another Forward article “The university presidents were right and American Jews’ moral panic is wrong” by Jay Michaelson.

If someone says “Gaza should be turned into a parking lot” in the Knesset, or at some right-wing political rally, that is indeed a call for genocide. But is it harassment? No. And yet, if the same phrase is shouted in the faces of Palestinians who are marching in their own rally, or if it’s spray-painted on a mosque, then it is.

Now switch out “Gaza” for “Israel.” The same logic holds. If someone says “Israel must be pushed into the sea” in a college political science seminar, that may be a genocidal statement, even an antisemitic one, but it isn’t harassment. But if someone spray-paints it on a synagogue, or shouts it at a group of Jews, that’s harassment.

Michaelson concludes that the pain Jews feel in the aftermath of October 7 is being “exploited by people who do not have our best interests at heart.”

Just look around you. Is it not odd that, if you’re a relatively moderate or liberal American Jew, your current villain is a distinguished university president and your hero is a hard-right rabble-rouser who campaigned for a guy who praised Adolf Hitler? (Carl Paladino, if you want to look it up.) Don’t you see that you’re being played? Our pain is being weaponized as part of a longstanding hard-right attack on institutions of higher education. Do you really think that will be good for the Jews?

Blacks, not Jews. Much of Stefanik’s questioning was not about how Jews are protected by universities, but how Blacks are protected. She began one segment with

Dr. Gay, a Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not protected free speech at Harvard, correct?

When Gay didn’t immediately say yes or no, Stefanik cut her off.

That’s a yes-or-no question. Is that correct? Is that OK for students to call for the mass murder of African Americans at Harvard? Is that protected free speech? … And isn’t it true that Harvard previously rescinded multiple offers of admissions for applicants and accepted freshmen for sharing offensive memes, racist statements, sometimes as young as 16 years old? Did Harvard not rescind those offers of admission?

This leads up to questions about what actions Harvard has taken against students who support intifada. (Stefanik knows Gay can’t answer about recent demonstrations because all those cases would be ongoing.) At times it seems like antisemitism is actually a stalking horse for another topic entirely: Not “Why are Palestinians treated so leniently when they intimidate Jews?” but “Why are white supremacists treated so harshly when they intimidate Blacks?”

Divide and conquer. Throughout history, one of the ways ruling minorities have stayed in power has been to turn disadvantaged groups against one another. Today, we can see that most clearly in the way that rural working-class Whites have been turned against Hispanic immigrants and urban Blacks. In this hearing, we see an attempt to drive a wedge between Blacks and Jews, and in particular to turn Jews against Black-led anti-racism programs.

Perhaps the primary distinction that critical theory makes is between privileged groups and underprivileged groups, but American Jews have a foot in both camps. In terms of median income, American Jews are a comparatively wealthy group. On average they have high educational achievement. Blacks and Hispanics can only envy the number of Jews (like President Kornbluth) who have risen to positions of institutional power and influence.

But on the other hand, Jews historically have always been one pogrom away from disaster. [3] Their very success makes them easy to scapegoat and subject to conspiracy theories. The recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes — not just on campus, but throughout America and the world — is very real. [4]

Like Blacks and other underprivileged groups, Jews are vulnerable to collective blame. For example, if you are against Israel’s policy towards Palestinians, it makes perfect sense to demonstrate in front of the Israeli embassy, or some other outpost of the Israeli government. But it makes no sense to demonstrate in front of a Jewish-owned restaurant. Jewishness is an ethnic and religious identity, not membership in a faction.

Victims of antisemitism and other victims of bigotry — like, say, the three young Palestinian men shot in Vermont — could look at each other and gloat: “Now maybe they’ll know what it feels like.” But for the sake of the world, we have to hope that they’ll decide instead to grasp what they have in common.

What can be done? Rep. Foxx has a clear remedy in mind: Jews, and anyone who opposes antisemitism whether they are Jewish or not, need to reject wokeness in all its forms. In particular, universities should have to worry about their government funding until they abandon any attempt to teach about structural racism, white male privilege, LGBTQ rights, or any other woke concept. In short, the US needs to follow the example of Ron DeSantis’ Florida.

In my opinion, though, the resurgence of antisemitism both on campus and in the larger world, together with the simultaneous increase in Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, and many other forms of bigotry, deserve a better discussion than they got in this manipulative and exploitive hearing.

As so often happens when the Right stokes a controversy, we find ourselves talking about something other than the real problem. [5] As we debate about the attitudes of university presidents, the lived experience of students — Jews and Palestinians alike — who feel unsafe on campus or intimidated out of expressing their political views has faded into the background.

Of course you would expect that university presidents would see education as a key component of a solution here. President Gay in particular promises

a robust program of education and training for students, faculty, and staff on antisemitism and Islamophobia broadly and at Harvard specifically. These educational programs will provide history and
context about the roots of certain rhetoric that has been heard on our campus in recent weeks, and its impact on Jewish and Muslim members of our community. The goal is to identify antisemitism and Islamophobia in daily life and interrupt its harmful influence.

But I also think that in this hearing the Right has exploited a hole in much anti-racist literature, which (at least in what I have read, which is a non-trivial but far from comprehensive sample) says little about antisemitism. This isn’t just a failure of inclusion, it overlooks a valuable resource. Antisemitism is perhaps the longest-standing and best-documented manifestation of bigotry. Its history should be a storehouse of examples of key anti-racist concepts, such as structural bigotry and how privilege can be embedded in rules that seem to apply equally to everyone. (Requiring employees of all religions to work on Saturdays but not Sundays, for example. Jews who want to observe their religion’s day of rest can seem to be asking for “special rights”.)

The relationship between Judaism and anti-racism goes way back. Many Jews were important activists in the Civil Rights movement, and Black leaders have often used the symbolism of the Exodus (as when Martin Luther King identified himself with Moses and said he had “been to the mountaintop”). Much of our modern thinking about social justice traces its roots back to the Hebrew prophets.

That history and that commonality is too important to let the Right drive a wedge between the two communities today.

[1] I once sat in on an HDS class and thought about applying, so this hits home: Good heavens! Ministers-in-training are learning about social and racial justice? Maybe liberal professors will assign them to read radical pro-justice texts like the Book of Amos or the Sermon on the Mount. Wake up, America!

[2] Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) isn’t on that committee and so wasn’t at the hearing, but fleshed out similar points in a subsequent tweetstorm, asking Stefanik five yes-or-no questions. He noted Great Replacement Theory’s role in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and asked if Stefanik rejected that theory. He also called attention to the antisemitic tropes employed by the Trump campaign and asked if she endorsed his candidacy.

Unsurprisingly, Stefanik dodged Raskin’s questions, and instead answered with a recitation of Trump pro-Israel policies, as if supporting the Netanyahu government were incompatible with antisemitism. In fact, the two positions can go hand-in-hand for ethno-nationalists, who support Jewish supremacy in Israel and White-Christian supremacy in the US. Many in the KKK would argue that Jews should have a homeland in Israel and they should all go there.

[3] For example, many Jews were doing quite well in Weimar Germany, but that didn’t save them when the Nazis came to power.

[4] Similar observations apply Chinese Americans, the so-called “model minority”. Many Chinese are quite successful in America, but during the recent pandemic we saw how easy it was to blame them for spreading “the Kung Flu“.

[5] For example, rather than discuss changing gender roles and how to treat people who don’t identify with either traditional gender, too often we end up discussing largely imaginary problems, like predatory men claiming to be trans so that they can enter women’s bathrooms, or the possibility that the comparatively small number of trans athletes might somehow come to dominate women’s sports.

By weeklysift | Also posted in Expand Your Vocabulary | Tagged , | Comments (13)

More Questions Than Answers

December 11, 2023 – 10:50 am

A lot of the posts on this blog are motivated, in one way or another, by questions people ask me, or by worries I hear my friends express. They have concerns that they don’t have the time to research in detail, so I do that and report back.

My typical post is an expression of confidence: You may be wondering about this topic, but I think I’ve got it figured out, at least up to a point.

Lately, though, I’ve been hearing questions either from friends or via social media and thinking, “Those are good questions.” I usually have a few worthwhile thoughts on the topic, but nothing I can tie up with a bright red bow.

So this week I’m trying out a Q&A format as a way of lowering the bar a little. I don’t necessarily have the answers, but this is what I think.

Will Donald Trump ever be held accountable for the things he’s done?

I believe he will, but I can understand the frustration of all the people who ask this question. The justice system takes far too long under ordinary circumstances, and when a powerful man’s entire strategy is based on delay, the time lapse between crime and punishment can become enormous. Plus, I think the government lost about a year because Merrick Garland really didn’t want to start his term by pursuing charges against the former president. Trump keeps saying the charges are politically motivated, but I think what’s really political is that one-year delay. (This, I will add, is a theme in my thinking about the Trump trials: He believes — or says, it’s always hard to know if Trump believes what he’s saying — that he’s being persecuted for political reasons. But in fact he’s benefiting from favoritism.)

However, the mills of justice continue to grind. Trump is facing four separate indictments: federal indictments in D. C. and Florida, plus state indictments in New York and Georgia.

I can imagine the New York case failing for technical reasons. This is the case the comes out of the Stormy Daniels payoff, which Michael Cohen has already done jail time for. The charge against him is falsifying business records, and the 34 counts are 34 false documents. No one is even claiming the documents aren’t false, so he’s clearly guilty of the thing he’s been charged with. But it’s possible to argue that he should have been charged under the misdemeanor version of the law rather than the felony version, and if that’s true then the statute of limitations has run out.

The other three prosecutions look very solid to me, though, and if they get to a jury he’ll be found guilty. In his public comments, Trump doesn’t even address the evidence against him, because he can’t: He’s guilty and the government has the goods on him. (He talks about the prosecutions all the time, but mainly makes false ad hominem arguments: Jack Smith is a deranged thug, Fani Willis had an affair with a gang member, and so on.)

The big question is whether he can be tried before the election. His only hope of escape is to delay past the election, retake the presidency, and use the powers of his office to obstruct justice.

Unfortunately, the most open-and-shut case is the one that drew a judge biased in Trump’s favor: the classified documents case. After leaving office, he had no right to keep those documents, he said he had given them all back, he had them moved to avoid detection, and then a search found them in his possession. There’s really no defending that set of facts. (His only attempt to do so is a flight of fantasy: Trump’s claim that the Presidential Records Act gives him a right to keep classified documents at all, much less store them in cardboard boxes in his bathroom or show them to people he wants to impress, is legally absurd.)

The judge can’t change the facts, and probably would be reversed on appeal if she threw the case out for some bogus reason, but she can collaborate with Trump to delay past the election. The other judges won’t do that, so I’m pretty sure we’ll see a guilty verdict before the election in at least the federal election-interference trial. That’s the most important case anyway.

Undoubtedly Trump will find some excuse to appeal, so he won’t actually be in jail on election day. But to see him squirming out of accountability requires that the public witness a trial proving his guilt, that his guilt on a very serious charge be validated by a jury, and that he win the election anyway. That scenario seems unlikely to me.

Meanwhile, there are the civil cases. He’s already lost a multi-million-dollar settlement to E. Jean Carroll, and has been judged guilty of fraud in a New York case that could take down the whole Trump Organization. He hasn’t had to pay the money yet, though.

The New York civil case should end in a week or so, and the judge’s decision about damages should follow (in the NYT’s estimate) within a few weeks.

One final consideration: Can Trump count on higher courts (like maybe the Supremes) to save him? Probably not. We saw an example this week when an appeals court upheld nearly all of Judge Chutkan’s gag order on what Trump can say about the D. C. case. The Supreme Court had no appetite for getting involved in Trump’s lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and I doubt they feel much different now.

What’s going on with Ukraine aid?

In theory, nearly all Democrats and about half of the Republicans in Congress support continuing aid to Ukraine as it resists the Russian invasion. But somehow the aid doesn’t pass.

Currently, the aid package Biden proposed is tied to a border-security bill, which Republicans want to use to restore Trump border policies.

This is a tactic that I can’t remember Democrats using: claiming to support X, but refusing to vote for it unless they can also get Y. (Suggest an example in the comments if you have one.) But it’s a standard tactic for Republicans, and gets trotted out whenever there’s a budget impasse: We don’t want to shut down the government, but you have to give us something to keep us from doing it. Trump used to claim to want to give the Dreamers legal status, but no bargain the Democrats offered ever contained a big enough payoff to get him to agree to it.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy suggests (but doesn’t get behind) a stronger spin: “If I were a cynic, I would say that Republicans have decided to tie support for Ukraine to immigration reform, because they want Ukraine aid to fail. But I’m not a cynic.”

Maybe I am that cynical: It’s credible to me that MAGA Republicans are doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, who helped put Donald Trump in the White House and is a hero of the global white-Christian-supremacist authoritarian movement. According to The Guardian, unnamed Republicans in Congress are meeting with representatives of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán “to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine”. The Hungarians are in town for a two-day conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.

Are liberal media outlets giving Liz Cheney too much good publicity? Didn’t she used to be evil?

Politically and philosophically, Liz is a clone of her father, who was the dark heart of the Bush II administration. So it’s not hard to imagine a Princess-of-Darkness role somewhere in her future.

However …

During Bush II, just before the public began turning against the Cheney-inspired Iraq War, I heard Michael Moore speak to a crowd in Manchester. He predicted that people would soon start turning against the war, but told us that we needed to make it easy for them to do that. When people joined us, he said, we needed to welcome them.

Well, Liz Cheney has joined the effort to stop Donald Trump from bringing an end to the American experiment in democracy. And she hasn’t joined in an I’ll-give-one-interview way, like John Kelly, or in a now-that-I’m-out-the-door-I’ll-reveal-what-I-think way or in a making-excuses-not-to-help way like Mitt Romney. Liz is out there touring the country, talking to anybody who will listen to her, and telling them “our focus has got to be on defeating Donald Trump“.

At the moment I’m about half-way through her recent book. While making serious claims about Trump and his Republican allies, it’s impressively down-to-Earth: I saw this. I did that. I talked to this person. She’s managed to sound the alarm without sounding alarmist.

Is she convincing anybody who wasn’t already convinced? I have no idea. But I don’t see how we save the Republic without more people like her.

If everything works out, maybe I’ll have the luxury of demonizing Liz Cheney again someday. That would be nice.

What should we make of the whole Hunter Biden thing?

Hunter received a new batch of indictments this week, all having to do with tax charges. For Hunter himself, this is a big deal. If found guilty, he could serve years in prison.

This is also a big deal for Joe Biden the person, a father who loves his only surviving son despite all the ways Hunter has screwed up his own life and made trouble for his family.

Republicans love to claim that Hunter’s troubles implicate Joe Biden, the president. But so far they’ve shown no connection. We know that Hunter took advantage of his name to do business with foreign companies, a practice which is unethical but not necessarily illegal, and which implicates the Trumps far more than the Bidens. Hunter may have told people that he had pull with his Dad and could get them special favors, or maybe he just didn’t correct them when they assumed he could. That, again, is unsavory.

But here’s what I would need to see to say that President Joe has been implicated: evidence that he knew Hunter was making promises in his name, together with instances where Hunter’s associates arguably got some kind of special treatment from the Biden or Obama-Biden administrations. I’d also be impressed by evidence that some of the money Hunter was making found it’s way back to his Dad. (If you read the tax indictment, it looks like Hunter blew all the money on himself.)

If that kind of evidence exists, then by all means impeach President Biden. (Feel free to bookmark this page and quote that line back to me sometime in the future.) But while Republicans keep making wild claims that they will produce such evidence any day now, they still haven’t.

Should President Biden be running for reelection?

I hate to even raise this question, because in some sense the controversy is self-sustaining: People are talking about it because people are talking about it.

Here’s what I think: President Biden has done an amazing job and deserves to be reelected, but so far the public is not hearing that story.

He has dealt with the post-pandemic economic upheaval extremely well: We have full employment again, and inflation is returning to pre-pandemic levels. (I’m currently in South Carolina, where gas is back under $3 a gallon.) He pulled NATO back together after Trump tore it apart, and engineered a Ukraine aid pipeline that has kept Putin from conquering the country. He got us out of Afghanistan. He kept the promise Trump repeatedly broke, and got a bipartisan infrastructure bill passed to rebuild America. Working with tiny majorities in both houses of Congress, he got the first serious anti-climate-change bill passed.

It’s a fine body of work, making him one of the best presidents of my lifetime. He absolutely deserves another term, and ought to be leading Trump in the polls by a wide margin.

But he isn’t. Why is something of a mystery. “Generic Democrat” is leading Trump in the polls, though no specific Democrat is doing much better than Biden.

You can read that two ways: Nate Silver claims that other Democrats suffer from lack of name recognition, and that if they were nominated, they’d run closer to Generic Democrat. The alternate view is that the full force of right-wing propaganda is aimed at Biden, and would train itself on any alternative candidate as soon as Biden stepped aside.

I tend to lean the second way, but I’m not sure about it. Again and again, we’ve seen people claim that they’d like to vote for a Democrat, but there’s something wrong with this Democrat: Biden’s age, Hillary’s emails, Obama’s birth certificate, and so on.

When you have the kind of resources conservatives command, and the willingness to use those resources without any scruples or standards, you can create an issue about anybody. So if you can find me a Democrat mud won’t stick to, I’ll support that candidate in a heartbeat. Otherwise, I think I’ll stay with the old guy.

By weeklysift | Comments (18)

The Remarkable Biden Economy

November 27, 2023 – 10:58 am

Under Biden, the US has faced the post-Covid challenges better than just about any other country in the world.

The polls. Most readers of this blog, I imagine, are worried about the polls. A string of polls have shown Trump with a lead over President Biden, and the current RCP poll average has Trump up by 2.3%.

Now, 2.3% isn’t much, and polls a year ahead of the election are not that meaningful, particularly when the media focus is on the opposing party’s primary campaign. A number of Republican candidates are touring the country and putting their commercials on television, and those ads start from the premise that the Democratic president is doing a terrible job and deserves to lose. President Obama had a small lead (less than 1%) over Mitt Romney at this point 12 years ago, and the RCP had Romney ahead at several points in October of 2012. Obama wound up winning by 3.9%.

The betting markets — whose predictive record is probably even worse than the early polls — are mixed. One has Trump-to-win at 40 cents on the dollar and Biden-to-win at 37 cents. But Democrat-to-win-the-presidency is at 55 cents.

I have explained in a past post why I think Biden will still win. But what the polls do tell us is that three important parts of the Biden message have not gotten through yet to most voters:

  • A second Trump term will mean the end of American constitutional democracy. In his response to losing the 2020 election, Trump showed us just how little he respects the will of the voters and how much he is willing to do to hang onto power. His recent rhetoric and his announced plans for a second term are openly authoritarian, and can be fairly described as fascist.
  • Biden has been an excellent president, particularly in his stewardship of the economy. The issue on which the polls give Trump his biggest advantage over Biden is the economy. But this is a complete misperception. The Covid pandemic disrupted the economy of every nation on the globe, and recovery has been difficult everywhere. But under Biden, the US economy is doing as well or better than just about any country in the world: GDP is rising, jobs are plentiful, and wages-after-inflation are rising. Post-pandemic inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, but the US has handled it better than most.
  • Biden will continue fighting climate change. Trump will reverse the progress Biden has made. Getting from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a sustainable-energy economy will require a lot of government investment, because the advantages of a more temperate planet are hard for private-sector corporations to capture. Biden began making those investments in the American Rescue Plan, and more emphatically in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Republican Party is still in the pocket of the oil companies, though, so any Republican victory will not just stop that progress, but actively undo it.

I covered the first point last week. In this post I want to look at the second. I hope to get to the third before long.

The state of the country on Inauguration Day. One similarity between the Biden and Obama administrations is that both presidents were handed an economy in terrible shape, a fact that the opposing party was very good at getting the public to forget. The month Obama took office, the economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, and many worried that we were headed into a second Great Depression. The bad trends continued for several months, but by January, 2017, Obama was able to hand off to Trump an economy in very good shape: 4.8% unemployment, consistent job growth that would lower it further, and low inflation.

Four years later, the economy Trump handed off to Biden was doing very badly indeed: unemployment at 6.3%, GDP at virtually the same level it had been at the start of the pandemic, and a federal budget deficit of around $150 billion per month.

Trump tends to get a mulligan for that poor overall performance, because we usually think of the pandemic like a hurricane or other natural disaster: It’s an unfortunate thing that (mostly) wasn’t his fault, and that screwed up his plans as much as it did ours.

For some reason, though, Biden doesn’t get the same mulligan: Not only didn’t Covid magically end on Inauguration Day, but the disruptive policies that world leaders (including Trump) implemented to fight Covid have had longer-term effects. So Biden has had to sail through choppy economic waters since Day One, and has done so remarkably well.

The inevitability of post-pandemic inflation. Compounding the economic problems of the Covid shutdown was an overhang of savings: Like most other countries, the US (under Trump, remember) had shut down much of its economy intentionally, in order to save lives. To a large extent, this had meant paying people not to work: The government subsidized shut-down businesses that kept people on their payrolls, and even sent money to people directly.

For many people, these payments were life-savers. Otherwise, they would have been homeless during a deadly pandemic. (Recall, even with these mitigation efforts, Covid deaths peaked in January, 2021, with over 100K deaths in the US that month.) Those personal bankruptcies could easily have cascaded into business bankruptcies, Great-Depression style.

For others, though, the government checks went straight into the bank, because most of what they had been spending money on was shut down. No one was driving, for example, both because travel seemed unsafe and because there was nowhere to go. (The collapse of demand sent average gas prices down to $1.82 per gallon. This number is sometimes used today as a things-were-better-under-Trump argument, but in fact it is a measure of just how bad things got. If we have another pandemic that kills thousands of people every day, gas prices will sink again.) No one bought new cars, because their current car was rusting in the garage. Cruise ships and airliners looked like death traps.

At a macro level, the effect of this policy was to preserve purchasing power even as production dropped. Basic supply-and-demand thinking makes the outcome obvious: As soon as people started buying again, inflation was going to cut loose.

That’s what happened around the world.

Biden’s dilemma. By January, 2021, the US economy had begun to reopen, but it was still 9.9 million jobs short of where it had been when the nation first felt the effects of the pandemic in February, 2020. So the twin threats of inflation and recession were both looming. Too much government stimulus would exacerbate inflation, but too little might repeat the mistake both the US and Europe made in response to the Great Recession of 2008, when a focus on austerity slowed growth so much that it took years for the economy to fully recover.

Biden opted for a full recovery and got it.

Economic performance. Under Biden, the unemployment rate fell from 6.3% to under 4% by February, 2022, and has stayed below 4% ever since. During the period Trump describes as “the greatest economy ever”, unemployment got as low as 3.5%. But it was 3.4% in both January and March of this year.

The price of that impressive jobs performance has been inflation, which peaked in the summer and has declined considerably since: 3.2% year-over-year rather than 9% in the summer.

But US inflation is not purely Biden’s responsibility. Our inflation performance parallels (and in fact is somewhat better than) inflation rates around the world, which (according to Statista) peaked at 8.7% in 2022 and fell to 6.9% this year.

That inflation is unfortunate, but American wages have largely kept up. Average real hourly earnings (i.e., adjusted for inflation) were at $11.03 (in constant dollars from 1982) in February, 2020, rose considerably early in the pandemic (to $11.72 in April, 2020, probably because workers able to keep working from home made more money to begin with), fell to a low of $10.92 in June, and have risen back to $11.05 by October.

So average real wages are back at pre-pandemic, best-economy-ever levels, and are rising.

What’s more, Biden actually got some important things done with that money the government needed to spend to stimulate the economy back to full employment: He financed a vaccine program that has saved countless American lives, began making good on Trump’s failed promises to rebuild our infrastructure, and started the US transition to a sustainable-energy economy.

What’s the Trump anti-inflation plan? It is an article of faith on the right that inflation would not have happened under Trump — the post-pandemic overhang of savings would have dissipated with no effect, and jobs would have bounced back without additional stimulus. Going forward, we’d be back to the full-employment low-inflation days of February, 2020.

What policies would bring this about? That’s where things get murky. Republicans in Congress talk about cutting spending, but that didn’t work so well, either here or in Europe, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. What’s more, Trump has never cut spending. Federal spending increased every year under Trump (even before the pandemic). And who’s going to pay for the ten futuristic cities he has promised to build?

Other policies Trump is famous for — tariffs, for example, which he promises to increase sharply, or expelling immigrants who work for low wages — would make inflation worse, not better.

In short, if you’re counting on Trump to beat inflation, you’re betting on the magic of the Trump name, because he hasn’t offered us anything else.

Why doesn’t Biden get credit for his good economic record? Trump has one talent that Biden lacks: He is very good at claiming credit when things go right and at blaming others when things go wrong. So, for example, his administration’s pre-Covid economic record mainly consisted of keeping going the trends that Obama had established. (Look at that job-creation graph above. The slope in Trump pre-pandemic performance is exactly the same as the trend in Obama’s second term.) But in retrospect it’s the Trump economy, not the Obama economy.

Ditto for the Covid mulligans: Trump gets one, but Biden doesn’t. Matt Yglesias summarizes:

It’s like how we don’t hold the disastrous state of the economy in 2020 against Trump because the pandemic interceded, but somehow Joe Biden is personally culpable for the fact that restoring full employment and real output couldn’t be achieved at zero cost.

But a discussion between NYT business writers Binyamin Applebaum and Peter Coy pinpoints a second reason: People aren’t reacting to the current state of the economy at all, but to their long-term pessimism about the future.

In an NBC News poll released last weekend, only 19 percent of respondents said that they were confident the next generation would have better lives than their own generation. NBC said it was the smallest share of optimists dating back to the question’s introduction in 1990. …

I think what we’re experiencing is a crisis of faith in the narrative of capitalism — at least as practiced in the United States in 2023 — as an engine of shared prosperity. Americans are dying sooner. They can’t afford to own a home. The cost of college is crushing. Global warming looms. And the world seems a lot less safe and stable than it did a few years ago.

As for what we do about that …

In 2024, Biden and Trump will represent two options for dealing with that pessimism: With Biden, we can continue taking small steps in the right direction that may or may not be adequate to the scale of the problems. With Trump, we can distract ourselves chasing “enemies within”, punishing scapegoats, and imagining that our leader has some messianic power to make us all great again.

I hope America chooses wisely.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Revisiting the fascism question

November 20, 2023 – 10:16 am

People who used to deny that Trump is a fascist have been changing their minds.

From the beginning of his first presidential campaign, it was clear Donald Trump was not like other candidates. The difference was not in political philosophy, because he barely seemed to have one. On any given day, he might be for or against a national healthcare program. He might want to raise or cut taxes on the rich. If “conservative” had been defined by Ronald Reagan and carried into the present by Republicans like Paul Ryan, then Trump was not a conservative.

Meanwhile, he celebrated his supporters’ violent tendencies, called Mexican immigrants rapists, and promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. Maybe we needed a different word for this. Maybe the word was fascist.

For years, the word fascist had mainly just served as an insult in American politics. Yes, there were people on the right-wing fringe who waved swastikas and celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but they had no power and nobody took them seriously. If you heard some congressman or cabinet secretary described as a fascist, it was hyperbole. No significant player in American government was literally a fascist. [1]

But maybe it was time to dust that word off as a serious descriptor. If you were going to do that in a responsible way, though, you had to be clear about what you were using the word to mean. It couldn’t just be “somebody more conservative than me” or “somebody I don’t like”. It needed a real definition that could be applied objectively.

And that was actually kind of tricky, because historical fascism has not displayed a defining set of policy positions, like communism’s public ownership of the means of production. Once in power, fascists become chameleons, championing whatever ideas their leaders find useful. Fascism often resembles a charismatic religion more than a political philosophy; the important thing is the spirit, not adherence to some 10-point plan.

But by November of 2015, I was ready to start using the word again, so I wrote “The Political F-Word” to say what I would mean by it. I said fascism was more about social psychology than politics, and described it as:

“a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

  • styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past, [2]
  • identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
  • helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
  • under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
  • reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
  • all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.”

I could easily see Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascism in that description, and believed that it fit Trumpism as well, with its vague allusions to making America great “again” (without specifying when exactly that greatness was present or how it was lost), its persistent claims of persecution and victimhood, its emphasis on “owning the libs”, its hatred of immigrants, the violence of its rhetoric (which is frequently echoed in the manifestos of mass murderers), its focus on “real Americans”, and (most of all) the cult of personality around Donald Trump himself. [3]

The subsequent eight years, I believe, have borne out what I saw in 2015. The January 6 insurrection, for example, was a direct manifestation of “helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence”, and so are the current threats of violence against the prosecutors and judges who attempt to make Trump submit to the rule of law.

Still, not everyone agreed, and calling Trump a fascist was controversial. To many, fascist meant Hitler, and (whatever you might think of him) Trump was not Hitler. This week, Tom Nichols summarized his thinking like this: He was against using fascist through the 2016 campaign because

Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill.

At the time, I thought this view was unhistorical, because Hitler also had seemed ridiculous to many Germans, even after he had become chancellor. But Nichols continued:

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

Well, Nichols is now shocked and alarmed. What changed his mind? The same things that have swayed a lot of pundits lately: the escalating rhetoric that now routinely dehumanizes his opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country“, coupled with a series of ominous proposals for his second administration:

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Nichols is not alone. [4] Though The Economist does not use the F-word, it says that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024”. WaPo’s Dan Balz also avoids fascist, but says his rhetoric is “associated with authoritarian leaders of the past”, whoever they might be. His colleague Aaron Blake puts recent Trump quotes side-by-side with Hitler’s use of the same language. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy warns that the 2024 election is

a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth.

In short, it’s not just the crazy things Trump says or how he says them. It’s what he’s done and plans to do.

The 2020 election plot. It’s important to realize that we’ve gone well beyond the point of Trump-says-a-lot-of-crazy-things. Openly fascist ideas and proposals are percolating in TrumpWorld right now, and are still not being taken seriously by many American voters. But before we go into those, we need to lay out what Trump has already done: launched a plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

People who think we can put January 6 behind us tell the story like this: After it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, he latched on to every rumor of fraud because he didn’t want to admit defeat. His stolen-election rhetoric resonated with his most radical supporters, and the result was a January 6 rally that got out of hand. Eventually, though, Trump told the rioters to go home and left office peacefully. He still may be claiming he won in 2020, but so what?

Both the evidence gathered by the House January 6 Committee [5] and the Georgia and D.C. indictments against Trump, though, tell a different story:

  • As soon as it became clear that Trump was likely to lose the 2020 election, he began preparing to claim fraud and stay in office.
  • Within a few days of the November 3 election, his campaign officials and other top advisors told him that he had lost.
  • Within a few weeks, all his administration’s top investigators — Bill Barr in Justice, Chris Krebs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and others — told him that his claims of election fraud had no basis in fact. No one in a position to know supported those claims.
  • Republican officials in key states — Georgia, Michigan, Arizona — told him that the votes had been counted accurately. Again, no one in a position to know said otherwise.
  • In order to find support for the view that he had won the election, Trump had to turn to amateur conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.
  • Barr’s successors at Justice refused to send state legislators a letter falsely claiming that evidence of significant election fraud had been found and recommending that they reconsider their states’ electoral votes.
  • Republican-controlled state legislatures all refused Trump’s urging to ignore the election results and appoint Trump electors instead of Biden electors.
  • Officials close to Trump coordinated attempts in multiple states for Trump supporters to falsely claim to be electors, and to fraudulently cast Electoral College votes for Trump.
  • His own vice president, Mike Pence, resisted his urging to count the votes of the fake electors, or to refuse to count electoral votes from states Biden had won.
  • The January 6 assault on the Capitol was planned in advance by groups like the Proud Boys, and their leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. A direct connection from the White House to the Proud Boys has not been nailed down in evidence publicly available, but may have gone through Roger Stone.

The more details come out, the clearer it becomes that this plot could have worked if only Trump had more yes-men in key positions. If the Justice Department had backed rumors of election fraud, Republican legislatures would have had cover to submit alternate slates of electors, and Mike Pence might have been convinced to count those votes, creating a constitutional crisis that the Supreme Court (with three Trump appointees) might have been unwilling to resolve in Biden’s favor. A military leader unlike Mark Milley might have provided troops to put down any subsequent disorder, and Trump would be President for Life. [6]

From the preparations for his second administration, we can conclude that Trump has learned a lesson from his first failed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, and will not make the same mistakes again. He’ll appoint a compliant attorney general, a compliant vice president, and military leaders willing to do what they’re told. Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly put it like this:

The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.

Plans for Trump’s second term. According to many reports, Trump did not expect to win in 2016, so he paid little attention to the transition plan drafted by Chris Christie. Top jobs were filled in a haphazard way, often with conservatives who had little previous connection to Trump, like General John Kelly, or with people like Senator Jeff Sessions, who backed Trump but retained independent views of how government was supposed to function. The Trump legislative agenda was largely left to Speaker Paul Ryan, who engineered a Reagan-style tax cut for corporations and the rich, but failed to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare.

As a result, Trump was frequently told that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do; it was illegal or unethical or against the norms of the federal government. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, but there were still enough establishment conservatives around to thwart his attempt to steal a second term.

He doesn’t want that to happen again, so plans are already in place to hit the ground running with sweeping proposals and a list of Trump loyalists ready to implement them.

Weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Trump claims that the indictments against him are purely political. [7] But rather than promise to restore the Justice Department to its proper function, Trump promises to do to his enemies what he (falsely) claims has been done to him. In an interview with Univision, he said:

What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. … They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization, and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party. I mean, if somebody if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them. Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They’d be out they’d be out of the election.

At a New Hampshire rally in October, Trump said:

This is third-world-country stuff, “arrest your opponent”. And that means I can do that, too.

In general, I’m trying to source Trump’s second-term plans to his own words and quotes from allied organizations and named advisors, rather than anonymous sources (though the Mueller Report often attached names and testimony under oath to anonymously-sourced reports Trump had labeled “fake news” at the time). But I’ll make an exception for this quote from the WaPo:

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

One person who believes this account is John Kelly:

There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.

Use the military against Americans. During his administration, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows deploying the active-duty military to enforce law and order within the United States itself. (During riots and natural disasters, governors may call out their state’s chapter of the National Guard, which consists of ordinary citizens and is the successor to the “militia” mentioned in the Constitution.) According to the NYT, he was talked out of doing so by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley — exactly the kind of appointees he will avoid in a second administration.

Instead, Trump reportedly plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day One of a second term. This would put the military on call to respond wherever he found it necessary.

Turn the federal government into a patronage machine. In the early days of the United States, the government worked according to the “spoils system”, in which federal jobs were plums a new president could award to his political allies. This led to a lot of corruption and inefficiency, so a series of reforms were passed that made most federal jobs nonpartisan civil service jobs.

Trump began trying to undo the civil service in his first term. A month before the 2020 election, he ordered the creation of “Schedule F” jobs — tens of thousands of positions formerly protected by civil service rules that would become fireable by the president.

Rather than take advantage of this power grab, President Biden reversed Trump’s executive order. But Trump has pledged to restore it if he regains office. Presidents already need to make about 4000 appointments when they take office, but Trump’s plan could cover ten times as many jobs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is assembling a database of Trump loyalists who could fill those jobs. According to Axios:

intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected.

Create massive detention camps for immigrants and the homeless. Trump has pledged to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, a statement fleshed out by Trump advisor and speech-writer Stephen Miller, who told the NYT:

Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.

Miller is talking about rounding up not just “illegal” immigrants, deporting “millions per year”, but also revoking the legal status of many others: foreign students who participate in demonstrations Trump disagrees with, immigrants granted temporary protected status because they escaped from countries the US deems unsafe, Afghans evacuated after the Taliban takeover, and others.

To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

Trump has also proposed tent cities for the homeless, who would be arrested and relocated. [8]

The threat of non-action. In addition to the things Trump is planning to do in a second administration, we have to consider the things he might choose not to do: enforce the law against groups who do violence against his opponents. From the beginning, Trump has defended his supporters when they get violent, from describing two Trumpists who beat a homeless man in 2015 as “passionate” to saying “We love you. You’re very special.” to the January 6 rioters, whom he says he will pardon.

In the early Hitler years, the more serious threat was not that the official Gestapo would whisk you away to a concentration camp, but that the unofficial Brownshirts would beat or murder you with no interference from the police. Kristallnact was not police enforcing draconian laws, but hooligans running free. If you think the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers wouldn’t like to play a similar role today, you haven’t been paying attention.

[1] On the Right, the word communist is still used this way, as when Trump promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. I doubt he could define communist, Marxist, or fascist. The words are simply barbs that he throws at people.

[2] Four years after my F-word post, Trump made this point clearly in his January 6 speech:

Just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.

[3] The 2020 Republican Convention, for example, refused to write a platform that would endorse any specific policies, but declared instead that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump” and would “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” — whatever turns that might take.

any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order

Going forward, the Republican Party would be Donald Trump, and its policies would be whatever Trump said they were.

[4] You might think Nichols’ article would have an apologetic tone, something like: “You guys were right, he is a fascist.” But no. Those of us who saw further ahead than Nichols are to blame for “the overuse of fascist” that “wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words”.

I see it the other way: Maybe if people like Nichols had taken Trump’s fascism more seriously in 2015, more of the public could have processed the threat then, and we could have avoided this whole mess.

[5] Trump supporters discount the January 6 Committee’s findings because (after Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his appointees and Nancy Pelosi named Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to replace them) no members of the committee defended Trump.

What this point ignores is that nearly all the testimony heard by the committee came from Trump appointees, Republicans at the state level who supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and even members of the Trump family. There would have been more even testimony from Trump supporters if so many (including Trump himself) had not refused to testify. Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Peter Navarro went so far as to defy subpoenas.

I can’t help believing that if any of those people could have testified to Trump’s innocence without committing perjury, they would have.

The possible bias of the Committee’s report was an issue in the recent hearing in a Colorado court about whether Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in 2024 by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The judge’s ruling noted:

while Trump spent much time contesting potential biases of the Committee members and their staff, he spent almost no time attacking the credibility of the Committee’s findings themselves. The Hearing [in Colorado] provided Trump with an opportunity to subject these findings to the adversarial process, and he chose not to do so, despite frequent complaints that the Committee investigation was not subject to such a process. Because Trump was unable to provide the Court with any credible evidence which would discredit the factual findings of the January 6th Report, the Court has difficulty understanding the argument that it should not consider its findings

[6] You might think, “A second Trump administration would just be four years, because of the 22nd Amendment.” But already during the 2020 campaign, Trump floated plans to serve more than two terms.

We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.

Doubting his intent would be repeating another mistake Germans made with Hitler: believing that he didn’t really mean what he said. Hitler’s 1925 book Mein Kampf laid out much of what he wanted to do and later did, but many Germans refused to take his writings seriously.

[7] That position is hard to square with the evidence those indictments lay out. Trump has been indicted because he committed crimes.

In practice, Trump simply does not address the evidence against him. See the quote from the judge’s ruling in note [5].

[8] In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the Nazi death camps did not start out as death camps, and did not specifically target Jews. In the beginning, the camps housed “undesirables” like Communists. Over time, the definition of “undesirable” expanded, and the limits of what could be done to them loosened.

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Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?

November 6, 2023 – 9:15 am

The endless spiral of tragedy seems too depressing to contemplate. But beyond the repetitive segments of the 24-hour news cycle, a few articles are worth paying attention to.

Nobody I know, including me, wants to talk about the war in Gaza and Israel. Sometimes we feel compelled to: It is the news, after all. It is consequential, and informed citizens in the world’s most powerful democracy should form opinions about it.

And yet …

I’ve been witnessing, experiencing, and occasionally complaining about this phenomenon for nearly a month now (since the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel). But it really came home to me Friday evening. I was at a church potluck dinner. My church is full of opinionated people, many of whom have a fairly high assessment of their grasp of world affairs. Then someone brought up the war, and there was an awkward silence. Eventually we segued onto some other topic.

I did not break the silence, because anything it occurred to me to say sounded either pompous or stupid. I have no simple paradigm that lays everything out clearly, and no five-point plan for peace. The people who can fit everything into a simple frame — whether that frame is the Global Zionist Conspiracy or God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15 — are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution. The situation seems to illustrate a famous Bertrand Russell quote:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

And yet, a simple Google search for a source shows that this quote is out of context: Russell’s next line was “I do not believe this is necessary”, and from there he laid out a hopeful message of how he believed human happiness might be achieved.

I have no comparable vision. But if I have no grand explanation to present, Russell at least inspires me to start collecting articles and ideas that seem useful if we want to think seriously about the situation.

Colonialism plays a role, but maybe not the one you think. In the critique of Israel that is popular in some left-wing circles, Zionism is just one more example of White colonists stealing land from indigenous peoples. Previous examples include the United States, where Native Americans were steadily pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations, and the apartheid regime of 20th-century South Africa. In this narrative, the foundation of Israel is an unjust act of Jewish aggression from the beginning, and all the subsequent unhappiness — from the Nakba of 1948 to last month’s Hamas attacks and the Israeli reprisals — can be laid at the door of the early Zionists and their contemporary successors.

Simon Sebag Montefiore does a good debunking of this view in “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False” in The Atlantic: Most of the Jews who moved to Israel in the last century or two were not “settlers” so much as refugees — from Czarist pogroms, Nazi death camps, Soviet oppression, Ethiopia, or long-vanished Jewish quarters of Muslim cities like Baghdad. Many of these refugees (especially the Ethiopians) do not fit any reasonable definition of White. Josh Marshall echoes this point:

You cannot look at the range of inhabitants of Israel and all the Palestinian territories together and think the conflict is fundamentally or consistently about skin color. Many Ashkenazi Jews [i.e. from European backgrounds], in American terms, look white. But more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from the Arab and Islamic worlds. There are many Palestinians and Israeli Jews who could not be readily identified as one or the other by physical appearance or skin color alone.

There is a role for colonialism in this narrative, but it is more subtle. (I’m leaving Montefiore’s article at this point and going off on my own interpretation of history.) In the aftermath of the Holocaust (and the Western world’s relative indifference to it as it was happening), the Zionist vision of a sanctuary for Jews — a place that would always accept them and never throw them out — became compelling for many non-Jews. Once, Western liberals might have imagined that civilization and education would eventually overcome the ancient prejudices, but what society had been more civilized or better educated than Germany? And among those ancient prejudices, antisemitism seemed virtually unique. Jews, of course, are not the only group that has ever been persecuted, and the Holocaust was not history’s only genocide. But antisemitism’s ability to subside for decades and then spring up with renewed virulence made virtually any nation’s guarantees suspect.

In addition to that theoretical justification, there was a practical problem that needed a solution: Postwar Europe was full of displaced persons, including many survivors of the death camps. They couldn’t be sent back to their families, who were either dead or similarly displaced. Often their entire villages no longer existed, or were now occupied by the people who had collaborated with the Nazis to send them away. But they had to go somewhere.

Palestine was of course where the Zionists envisioned their homeland, but the great powers were not bound by their preferences. (Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union takes place in an alternate history where part of Alaska became a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust.) There was even a certain logic to making the nations that caused the problem pay the price: What if, say, Bavaria, where Hitler’s movement got its start, had been set aside as a Jewish homeland?

But even suggesting such a thing sounds laughable, because Bavaria already had citizens (some of whom share my last name, though I’ve never met them) and cities like Munich. But so did everyplace else, including Palestine. The world had no desirable empty spaces. The challenge was to find a place whose current inhabitants volunteered, or could be induced to cooperate.

Or whose desires could be ignored.

What separated Palestine from everyplace else wasn’t just the Zionist vision, it was that the Arab world had no power. World War I had brought down the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent treaty of 1922 divided the region into a British mandate and a French mandate. These colonial powers then drew the outlines of the subsequent states: Syria and Lebanon by the French, and Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz (a forerunner of Saudi Arabia) by the British. The strife-torn histories of several of these states comes in part from their unnatural founding. (As we saw during the Iraq War, there is little reason for Iraqi Kurdistan — largely the Ottoman province of Mosul — to belong to the same country as the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra.)

When Britain and the United Nations (with American support) split the Palestine mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the great powers were doing what great powers often do: paying their moral debts with someone else’s assets.

Today, Americans often shake our heads at the two sides: Why can’t they get along? We are dismayed when every dispute seems to have no beginning: The Israelis have no choice but to do Z, because the Palestinians did Y. And the Palestinians had no choice but to do Y, because the Israelis had already done X … back and back and back to A and beyond. “Why not leave them to fight it out?” we sometimes think, because it has nothing to do with us.

But it has everything to do with us. We played a large role in the great-power coalition that redrew the world after World War II. That arrangement set the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians up to fight with each other. What has happened since was not fate; both sides have made mistakes and have blown opportunities to seek peace. But it’s not all their fault either.

Jews deserve a state. The Western powers should not have made Palestine provide one. That is history now and there’s no undoing it. Generations have been born and died in Israel; moving either the Israelis or the Palestinians somewhere else would be no more just than moving you or me from our homes. But we also can’t wash our hands of the current situation. If there is some way to resolve it that demands sacrifice, the US, Britain, the EU, and perhaps other countries should be ready to make some of those sacrifices.

The situations in Gaza and the West Bank may be linked, but we can’t lose sight of the differences. Here I would point you to Matt Yglesias’ “Israel’s Two Wars“. He believes that Israel has little choice but to root Hamas out of Gaza (with all the costs that entails), but opposes what has been happening slowly for decades on the West Bank.

while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught.

Yglesias believes that the closest the two sides came to peace was at the 2008 summit in Annapolis. The framework of that near-agreement was that Israel got to keep its most populous West Bank settlements, in exchange for giving the new Palestinian state land elsewhere. Obviously that compromise gets harder for Palestinians to accept the more settlements there are. Yglesias believes that sabotaging such a two-state solution has been a deliberate Netanyahu policy.

Josh Marshall interprets Netanyahu slightly differently:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise [than an Annapolis-style agreement]: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions. …

For those of us who never believed this could be true, it did slowly become a matter of reason over experience. That couldn’t go on forever. And yet, year after year somehow it did. Israel’s economy grew stronger. It normalized relations with more Arab countries. It even managed a de facto normalization and something close to a de facto, though sub rosa, alliance with Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t work and yet it kept working. Until it didn’t.

What exploded Netanyahu’s legitimacy and reputation on October 7th wasn’t just an abject national security failure. It exploded the whole idea that the occupation could be effectively managed and that Benjamin Netanyahu could manage it.

He sees a return to the Netanyahu status quo as a failure of imagination: a simultaneous inability to imagine peace and an inability to imagine the nightmares that will continue to happen until both sides are willing to take risks for peace.

What might happen in Gaza. One of the most dismal aspects of thinking about this war is that all roads seem to lead nowhere. Simply punishing Hamas, but leaving it in control of Gaza, just starts the clock ticking down to the next attack. But occupying Gaza would be an endless quagmire.

In Iraq, the US demonstrated the limits of military power: A superior military can go wherever it wants and destroy whatever it chooses. Any goal that can be achieved by going places and destroying things can be achieved by military might alone. However, neither winning over a population that hates you nor establishing a government they will cooperate with fits that description.

Israel wants to wind up living next to a Gaza that is stable rather than a launching pad for future attacks like the ones we just saw. But what kind of government could achieve such a goal?

Francis Foer takes on this challenge in “Tell Me How This Ends“.

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

Foer asked “a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington” to imagine “a plausible endgame for Gaza”.

What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

That plan has a number of moving parts, and requires a number of countries, including the Gazans themselves, to make sensible decisions. The basic steps are

  • Israel goes into Gaza and destroys Hamas as a viable government. But it does not stay as an occupying power.
  • During a transition period that is framed from the beginning as temporary, a collection of Arab countries not aligned with Iran — the article suggests Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, and Morocco — manage a reconstruction. Presumably, this reconstruction is funded by some combination of the oil-rich Arab states, the US, and the EU.
  • What makes the transition temporary is turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority that currently oversees the West Bank.

Each participant buy-in might be difficult to achieve, but Foer tries to answer those objections: Egypt will want its companies to get reconstruction contracts. The PA will want to “substantially [bolster] its position in the West Bank.”

It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor.

Now we’re back to the “sacrifices for peace” from the last section. So why would the Israeli government (whatever it looks like when the war ends) make such concessions?

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.

A million things can go wrong with the plan Foer describes, and with the resolution of Gaza as a stepping stone to a broader peace. Certainly, plans that seemed more promising have failed in the past. Peace is definitely a long shot. But we have to hope that at some point all involved will realize that there is no alternative. At that point, an admonition of the original Zionist, Theodore Herzl, can be repurposed: “If you will it, it is no dream.“

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Mike Johnson is worse than you think

October 30, 2023 – 10:26 am

Most Americans don’t know much about Christian Nationalism.
They’re about to find out.

If you hadn’t heard of Mike Johnson until this week, don’t be embarrassed. Neither had I and neither had anybody but his Louisiana constituents and the most obsessive observers of politics. And so since Wednesday, when the House Republican caucus suddenly pulled unity out of a hat and elected Johnson speaker on a party-line vote, we’ve seen a lot of scrambling to characterize him.

Matt Gaetz, who had started this three-week circus by introducing a motion to get rid of Kevin McCarthy, declared victory by christening Johnson as “MAGA Mike”. Critics pointed to his role in Trump’s election denial: He organized the 100+ House Republicans who signed an amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit challenging the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and offered legal cover to the 147 Republicans who voted not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

After initially repeating Trump’s baseless lie that voting software developed for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had flipped votes from Trump to Biden (the same lie that Fox News refused to defend in court, and so had to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to compensate for), by January 6 Johnson was making a claim less obviously insane:

On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional. [1]

Other people noted his extreme views on social issues: Johnson has sponsored a six-week abortion ban. As a lawyer for Americans Defending Freedom, he defended laws criminalizing gay sex (which doesn’t sound very freedom-loving to me). He sponsored a federal version of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law. He’s a climate-change denier who fights all efforts to discourage fossil fuel use. His discussion of the border dog-whistles the racist Great Replacement Theory. All of which caused the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie to characterize him as “an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public”.

And that analysis is true as far as it goes, but it misses the underlying theme that justifies these views and portends worse ones we haven’t heard yet: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist.

Christian Nationalism. In a nutshell, Christian Nationalism is the belief that the United States was founded not as a secular republic, but as a specifically Christian nation. In an interview with Politico, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who specializes in evangelical Christianity and politics, elaborates:

Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want.

On most contentious issues, this puts Christian Nationalists on the same side as ordinary conservatives, and makes it easy to confuse one with the other. But there’s a difference: Ordinary conservatives at least give lip service to the idea of fairness, while Christian Nationalists don’t. Their side represents God’s Truth, so of course they should win. The appropriate standards are God’s standards, so it would be ridiculous to apply abstract rules equally to both sides.

For example, one point I often make in my articles on the Supreme Court’s “religious freedom” cases is that they aren’t about freedom at all; they’re about giving special rights to Christians. (The “praying football coach” won his case because he’s Christian. No Muslim or other non-Christian coach should imagine that the Court will defend his right to lead players in prayer on the 50-yard line.) But I make that point expecting the other side to deny it. If I could argue with Sam Alito or Amy Coney Barrett, I would expect them to spin their position in a way that makes it sound scrupulously principled and fair.

Similarly, when I accuse MAGA Republicans of being against democracy, I expect them to dodge, not to confront the point. Somehow, they’ll paint gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, and the filibuster as pro-democracy, not anti-democracy.

But in either case, a true Christian Nationalist might accept my characterization and openly defend it: Of course Christians should get special rights, because the United States is a Christian nation. And ultimate sovereignty belongs to God, not to the People. If democracy leads to the People voting down God’s laws, then democracy has to go. [2]

For example, in this broadcast radio host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association claimed that the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause only applies to Christians.

But the point is, by “religion” the Founders were thinking of Christianity. So the purpose was to protect the free exercise of the Christian faith. It wasn’t about protecting anything else. They weren’t providing any cover or shelter for the free exercise of Islam or even Judaism or even atheism. They weren’t saying you can’t do it, I want to be clear on that. They weren’t prohibiting that. They were just saying “That’s not what we’re talking about here.” …

If we don’t understand the word “religion” to mean “Christianity” as the Founders intended it, then we have no way to stop Islam. We have no way to stop Satanism. We have no way to stop any other sort of sinister religious practice that might creep onto these fruited plains.

Mike Johnson. While Du Mez admitted she had never heard Johnson characterize himself as a Christian Nationalist, she believes the shoe fits.

I feel comfortable applying that [label]; it’s not in a pejorative way. It’s simply descriptive. As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. …

But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.

Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.

And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.

You can hear his belief in God’s sovereignty in his first speech to the House as Speaker:

I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time. [3]

In an interview he gave during his first campaign for Congress, Johnson said:

We don’t live in a democracy, because a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. … The Founders set [our system] up because they followed the Biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.

And:

The Founders believed that we’re endowed by our Creator with these rights, and that we owe our allegiance ultimately to our Creator, because He’s going to be the judge of all of us. One day, every knee is going to bow before the Lord.

God ordained civil government with certain authority. But He gave it limited authority. … The overarching problem we have right now is that the government has gone beyond the scope of the authority that was ordained by God. … And when the government grows and it expands its scope of authority, it usurps it from somewhere else. It takes the power and authority that God had ordained for the Church and the Family.

The Christian-establishing Constitution is what Christian Nationalists have in mind when they talk about defending or restoring “the Constitution” — not the document that you or I might read, the one that never once mentions God, and whose meanings and intentions Americans have been arguing about since the Founding, but that document overlaid with a very specific set of interpretations rooted in an Evangelical Christian moral vision.

In this way, they are treating the Constitution much the way they treat the Bible itself — as if their own very elaborate interpretations were sitting right there in the text. As Speaker Johnson told Sean Hannity:

I am a Bible-believing Christian – someone asked me today… people are curious, “What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the Sun?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it, that’s my worldview – that’s what I believe.”

But if you ever do what Johnson suggests — pick up a Bible and try to read it de novo, as if no one had ever told you what it is supposed to mean — you almost certainly will fail to find anything resembling a “worldview”, and certainly not a view that transparently applies to the 21st-century world. [4]

Instead, you’ll find a number of evocative stories open to a wide range of interpretations. To take an extreme example from the very beginning: In the Garden of Eden story, it’s not entirely clear that the serpent is the villain. What the serpent tells Eve turns out to be true, and God’s threat that she will die if she eats the forbidden fruit only becomes true because God makes it true: He banishes her and Adam from the Garden specifically so that they won’t eat from the Tree of Life. So which of the two supernatural antagonists has Eve’s best interests at heart?

In short, the people who want to bring America “back to the Bible”, or to “restore the Constitution”, aren’t talking about the actual Bible or the actual Constitution. They are talking about these revered documents with their particular sect’s interpretations pasted on top of them.

And now one of them is running the House of Representatives.

[1] Note what is not being claimed here: that Biden’s voters weren’t real or weren’t entitled to vote. Instead, the claim is that these legitimate voters cast their votes in ways that shouldn’t have counted — like by mail in districts that in previous elections had different rules about voting by mail.

Even if this claim had some legal legitimacy, which I doubt, trying to fix it two months after the election violated the way we have always done things here in America: We argue about the election rules before the election. We don’t wait to see who wins, and then, if we lose, try to invalidate the votes of fellow citizens who voted in good faith under the rules their local officials had laid out for them.

[2] Arguing with a Christian Nationalist can be jarring for precisely this reason: They happily take the position you had hoped to trap them in. It’s as if a child accused their parents of liking another child better, and the parents replied, “Of course we like Jenny better. Now shut up and clean your room.”

[3] Someone needs to ask Johnson whether God has raised up Joe Biden to his current place of authority. I can’t guess what his answer would be.

[4] Try this experiment: Find some article (like this one) listing all the Bible verses that supposedly condemn abortion. Now go to each one and read the whole chapter the verse comes from. You will discover that, in context, these verses have nothing to do with abortion.

Anti-abortion views, like many other conservative Christian views, do not come from the Bible. They come from somewhere else — largely whatever the Christian community wants to believe — and are imposed on the Bible through interpretation.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (15)

The House, Still Divided

October 23, 2023 – 10:04 am

With several looming crises demanding Congress’ immediate attention,
the House of Representatives has been frozen for three weeks,
with no end in sight.

Quick review. Matt Gaetz moved to kick Kevin McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair three weeks ago. Eight Republicans and all the Democrats voted yes, so McCarthy was out. Then Steve Scalise tried to unify the Republican conference around his bid to be speaker, but he saw that wasn’t working and dropped his candidacy before a vote was held.

Next up was Jim Jordan, who had Trump’s endorsement and kept saying he could get the votes, but didn’t. Twenty Republicans voted against him on the first ballot, 22 on the second, and 25 on the third. Then the Republican conference held a secret ballot on whether he should continue, and the majority said no. So Jordan has also withdrawn. [1]

In between Jordan’s second and third attempts, the idea of empowering Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry came up. His exact powers under the current rules are vague, but are being interpreted narrowly, so that he can only preside over votes to elect a new speaker. The House could allow him to act more like a speaker himself, so that bills could come to the floor and the House could function again. [2] But that idea went nowhere within the Republican conference and never came to a vote on the floor.

Jordan’s third failed vote happened Friday, after which the Republican conference asked him not to continue. He withdrew, an ever-increasing number of obscure Republicans have thrown their names out as speaker candidates, and the Republicans took the weekend off, as if they had all the time in the world. They’ll reconvene tonight to try to find a new candidate, and maybe the whole House will vote sometime.

Meanwhile, the world is not waiting for House Republicans to either get their act together or ask Democrats for help. The Ukrainians and Israelis are undoubtedly running out of certain key munitions, and a government shutdown is looming in less than four weeks.

The Democrats. Meanwhile, House Democrats have stayed united behind Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Republicans have not sought their cooperation.

On their own, without getting any concessions whatever, Democrats could have helped Republicans save McCarthy or elect Jordan — the only options that made it to the floor where they were allowed to vote. But other than maybe Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan is the last person Democrats want to see as speaker, so that was never going to happen. And McCarthy had crossed and double-crossed everybody during his nine months as speaker, so in the absence of a public deal, Democrats had no motive to bail him out of his well-earned troubles. (As one member put it: “It’s not our circus and he’s not our clown.”)

Democrats have been pretty clear about what they want in exchange for getting the Republicans out of this mess. [3] They want a power-sharing deal similar to what the Senate did last term when it was split 50/50: equal numbers from each party on committees (with Republicans as chairs, because the GOP still holds a majority), and some mechanism that would allow either party’s leadership to bring a bill to the floor.

They would probably settle for this much: A speaker who admits Joe Biden won the 2020 election, together with guarantees that the new speaker will

So far, though, Democrats have been offered exactly nothing. Republicans have insisted that they will elect a speaker on their own, which they have been unable to do.

Why are House Republicans doing this? It’s a great question. If you’re pressed for time, you can settle on “because they’re incompetent jerks” and not be wrong.

But I found two essays that offer a deeper understanding: Josh Marshall’s “The Inside Story of How Jim Jordan Broke the Model, Didn’t Become Speaker and Decided That was Fine“, which is behind TPM’s member paywall, and “The game theory of the Republican speakership crisis“, which is on Nate Silver’s Substack blog. [4]

Marshall describes the “stable and functional system” that House Republicans have operated under since the 2010 Tea Party wave election. This system is designed to deal with a particular problem: The mythology of the far Right says that they represent “the American people” [5], but their actual policies — ban abortion, promote fossil fuel use, cut Social Security, abandon Ukraine, expel the Dreamers, ban books about gender or race from schools and libraries, make voting as hard as possible, cut rich people’s taxes — are unpopular outside a few dozen deep-red districts. So the Party needs to have one message for its true believers and another for the general public.

The congressional party is controlled and run by the hard right minority variously called the Tea Party or Freedom Caucus. But they are a bit too hot for national public consumption. They also rely on the idea that their far right policy agenda has broad public support but is held back by a corrupt/bureaucratic establishment. For both of these reasons a system was developed in which this far right group runs the caucus, but from the background, while it is nominally run by a mainstreamish Republican leader. Under John Boehner, Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy this basic dynamic remained more or less the same. It works for everybody because the Freedom Party calls the shots while the party maintains broad electoral viability via figureheadish leadership.

Meanwhile the stresses created by the gap between party goals and electoral viability is played out in psychodrama between a cluster of self-styled rebels and the beleaguered leader of the moment. This feature is more important than it looks. The big Freedom Caucus beef with McCarthy was that he couldn’t take the far right legislation they jammed through the House and magically force the Senate to pass it and Biden to sign it. The true believers are thus in a perpetual state of being betrayed by a menagerie of RINOs and other softies who make up the ever-shifting definition of ‘the establishment,’ a fact that keeps the conservative media fundraising water wheel chugging forward.

Making Jim Jordan speaker would have broken this model, which is probably why it didn’t happen. Going into the 2024 congressional elections with Speaker Jordan would be suicide for Republicans in swing districts, and they know it. Meanwhile, members from pro-fascist districts can’t go back to their voters and say they elected a speaker who won’t impose his will on Biden by shutting down the government. So there are really only two possible outcomes:

  • A speaker so obscure that both the “Freedom” Caucus and swing-district Republicans can claim they got what they wanted (and express shock if the new speaker does something unpopular in their district).
  • A deal with Democrats that “Freedom” Caucus members can cite as a new betrayal by “the establishment”.

Glassman’s take. On Silver’s blog, Nate lets Matt Glassman explain how the House really works: A speaker’s power isn’t primarily located in his or her office, but comes from leading a procedural coalition.

In the modern House, the Speaker almost always has a partisan majority that gives him this deferential backing to create a procedural coalition. That is, backbench members vote in lockstep on procedural matters such as what bills to consider and what rules to consider them under, even if they are opposed to the actual legislation. They do this because the benefits they receive from the party, such as committee assignments, electoral support, and the help of other party members on bills they do like, outweigh the small costs of occasionally having bills on the floor they oppose. Bucking the party on procedural votes is a serious transgression.

In turn, the empowered leadership supports the backbenchers, by raising massive sums of money and spreading it around to campaigns, by protecting the Members from tough votes from coming up on the floor, and by developing a party program and negotiating deals between party factions, as well as with the Senate and president.

McCarthy’s problem during the 118th Congress was that he never had a stable procedural coalition.

So McCarthy was a Speaker In Name Only.

To Glassman, then, the question is bigger than just the one-day problem of electing a speaker: Going forward, does the majority that elects the new speaker represent a new coalition that the speaker can call on day after day to govern the House? If not, the chamber will soon be back in the same soup.

This is why it never made any sense for McCarthy to seek Democratic votes to bail him out when his partisan procedural coalition was failing. If Democrats had helped McCarthy win the Speakership in January—perhaps by voting present, as many observers suggested they could do in exchange for some goodies—it might have won him the office, but it would have left him in the exact same bind on the very next vote (the vote on the rules package). Unless he was willing to create a permanent procedural majority coalition with the Democrats, there was no point in getting their help that one time. His only choice was to try to make peace with the GOP rebels. Ditto on the resolution to vacate the Speakership.

Likewise, unless Democrats were ready to form a lasting coalition with McCarthy, it made no sense to save him.

McCarthy didn’t need one vote, one time. He needed an ongoing procedural coalition. Unless the Democrats were going to form a permanent alliance with him, saving him on the vacate vote wouldn’t have done any good.

Glassman notes the same far-right dynamic Marshall pointed out: Unlike the GOP moderates, the “Freedom” Caucus has a narrative that works either way:

In fact, the core brand of the Freedom Caucus is their opposition to the GOP House leadership. It’s almost impossible for the party leadership to discipline HFC members and induce party loyalty, because they prefer to be at odds with the leadership; defeating their policy proposals, cutting them out of negotiations, or calling them out publicly as disloyal to the party only serves to reinforce their brand among their constituents and allies in conservative media. …

And so the story of the 118th Congress has largely been one of the Freedom Caucus holding the GOP leadership hostage, forcing leadership to either sign on to their extreme conservative populist agenda—one that has no chance of policy success in the Senate or with President Biden—or see their procedural majority fall apart. There’s no compromise. You either do what they want, or you go work with the Democrats after they abandon you. It’s a win/win for them, in any case. They either get their policies, or they get their betrayal narrative.

Hardball competition. Most of the time, the competing wings of the GOP resemble the two women who came to Solomon claiming the same baby: When Solomon announced his decision to cut the baby in two, one woman was satisfied and the other withdrew her claim so that the baby might live. [6]

In my analogy (which Glassman doesn’t make), the baby is the country, the “Freedom” Caucus is the first woman, and the GOP establishment is the second. Again and again — the debt ceiling crisis is the most recent example — the far Right has shown itself willing to let the country come to harm if that’s what’s necessary to get their way.

They thought their tactics would work here: In the medium-to-long term, the country faces disaster with no speaker and a frozen Congress, and the Republican Party faces electoral disaster if its dysfunction keeps bringing this level of chaos while the whole world watches. So obviously the establishment Republicans would have to give in and let Jim Jordan take the gavel. With no Solomon in the picture to reward those who actually care about America, how could Jordan lose? Scalise played his assigned role as Solomon’s second woman and withdrew his claim, leaving Jordan as the only choice.

And that’s where the narrative changed. Such a blatant display of independence-for-me, party-loyalty-for-you was too much for a small group of moderates and Republicans interested in governing (like Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, who is the point person on the issue of keeping the government open).

And this is the upshot to the first roll call vote on Jordan’s Speakership candidacy: a group in the GOP besides the Freedom Caucus decided to play hardball. The longstanding asymmetry and Freedom Caucus monopoly on hardball behavior may be coming to end.

Glassman has no idea how this resolves. He lays out four possibilities, one of which (Jordan grinding out an eventual victory the way McCarthy did in January) has already failed. The other three are:

  • Republicans come up with a candidate so obscure that all factions can spin his/her speakership as a victory. There’s a certain beer-goggles effect needed to bring this about: It’s getting late and they’ve got to go home with somebody. [7]
  • Moderates make a deal with Democrats.
  • There’s a bipartisan deal to empower McHenry, so the House can do business without a permanent speaker.

Glassman leans towards the third option, while recognizing that (like the other two) it’s just a band-aid: There’s still no governing coalition that can keep the House functioning.

[1] Tim Miller comments:

Is there a better encapsulation of the GOP elected officials during the Trump years than Jim Jordan winning 194-25 GOP votes in the public ballot and then losing the majority by secret ballot?

Miller is referring to the level of intimidation the GOP’s far right wields against the rest of the Republican caucus. At times this goes as far as physical threats, like those Don Bacon, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Carlos Gimenez, and others complained about after opposing Jordan.

I want to sympathize with Bacon et al, but did they really not know until now that their party’s base is full of violent fascists? Wasn’t the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband a clue? Clearly, they just never thought the leopards would eat their faces.

For the record, Jordan has denounced threats against his opponents. But I’m not impressed. Back in the heyday of lynchings and the KKK, Southern states would send distinguished gentlemen to Congress, who of course would express horror about what the ruffians back home were doing. It meant nothing then and it means nothing now. Jordan plays to and postures for the violent Right, just as the Southern gentlemen did then.

[2] Article I Section 5 of the Constitution says, “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” So the House can do whatever a majority of its members want, assuming a majority can be found to want something.

[3] Of course they’d be thrilled if a handful of Republicans would join them to make Jeffries speaker, but I don’t think even the Democrats who make that suggestion consider it a serious possibility.

[4] Substack will ask you to pay to subscribe to Silver’s blog, but it will let you click through without subscribing. BTW, I’m developing a policy on Substack subscriptions: I’m shameless about clicking through once or twice, but the fourth or fifth time I consult the same blog I usually subscribe.

[5] As Rep. Russell Fry said of Jim Jordan: “The American people trust him.” Clearly, Rep. Fry does not consider me an American.

[6] For those who don’t recall the rest of the story, Solomon’s first judgment was just a test. After he saw the women’s responses, he concluded that the woman who was willing to lose her case to save the baby’s life was the real mother.

[7] Matt Ygelsias jokes about the current list of nine candidates:

At least four of these people aren’t real, they’re just making up names.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (9)

My 9-11 Flashbacks

October 16, 2023 – 9:45 am

The worst damage we suffered from the attack came from the things we did in response.

I spent a lot of this week meditating about why I’ve been finding the reports out of Israel and Gaza so hard to watch. I suspect most of you haven’t had to think too hard about this question: You’re compassionate people and whenever others suffer on this scale, it’s naturally going to affect you. Turning away might not always be admirable, but it is certainly understandable.

Over the years, though, I’ve gotten pretty good at compartmentalizing other people’s pain. I don’t think that’s anything to brag about either, but I find it necessary in order to stare at the news as intently as I do each week. I need to be able to spend an afternoon focusing on hurricane survivors, the looming climate apocalypse, America’s rising fascist movement, and dozens of other dismal developments — and then go make dinner and talk to my wife about our next vacation. Whatever might be going on out there, dragging that misery into my personal life (and spreading it out among my friends) is not going to help.

But this week I’ve found myself ducking a lot of my standard news sources. A news anchor I usually like starts interviewing a young adult who narrowly escaped the Hamas attack, or parents who don’t know where their daughter is now, or a nurse who works in a Gaza hospital that will soon be unable to provide basic services — and I think: “Not another one. Can we get on to something else? Isn’t there a game I can watch?”

It took me several days to figure out what was going on: I’ve been reacting to this crisis personally because it keeps flashing me back to 9-11. Not to the events themselves (which happened out there in the world and so were handled, more or less, by my compartmentalization processes), but to the emotions that swept through the country afterward, and that I often got swept up in. Those emotions energized us to take action — horrible actions, as it turned out. Mistakes we are still paying for.

In my internal system, those emotions got tagged as dangerous. Alarm bells go off whenever I feel them, either because they are rising from within myself or because I am resonating empathically with others. Never do that again. Simply feeling those emotions makes me anticipate making some unfixable mistake.

Nous sommes tous Américains. The 9-11 attack did not affect me directly. I was not in New York, and no one I knew personally died on that day. I had been to the top of the World Trade Center years before, but the building held no great symbolic value for me. (I do remember spontaneously beginning to cry, though, when I heard reports that hijacked Flight 93, the one crashed by the passengers, might have been targeting the Capitol. The thought of losing the Capitol seemed overwhelming.)

So the Hamas attacks against Israel haven’t been flashing me back to watching the second plane hit (that’s when we knew the first wasn’t an accident), or to people jumping off the burning towers, or to anything else that happened on that day.

What I keeping flashing back to is the aftermath.

For a few days, maybe even longer, the whole world was on our side. Even in France, which had often and noisily chafed under decades of living in the shadow of American power, Le Monde announced “Nous sommes tous Américains” — We are all Americans. Even ten years later:

The Eiffel Tower itself was flanked by 82-foot-tall scaffolding replicas of the World Trade Center, emblazoned with a new slogan of solidarity, in French and English: Les Français N’oublieront Jaimais. The French Will Never Forget.

It didn’t take long for our shock and loss to transmute into wounded pride and a determination to strike back. Three days later, President Bush went to ground zero and addressed the rescue workers through a bullhorn.

I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

And the crowd chanted back: USA! USA!

We weren’t victims any more. We were avengers.

The horribleness of the attack seemed to dwarf anything that had ever happened before. All previous moral judgments became trivial. Around the country, Americans were asking “Why do they hate us?”, as if hating the world’s hegemonic power required some deep explanation. And we did not wait for answers to that question, because we knew that there could be no answers. Even trying to answer might imply that we had this coming, and that thought was unthinkable.

Nine days after the attack, President Bush provided the only acceptable answer in an address to Congress: They are Evil, so they hate us because we are Good.

Americans are asking, why do they hate us?  They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government.  Their leaders are self-appointed.  They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.  They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East.  They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.  With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends.  They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

I remember that feeling: America was not merely a victim of evil, and we were not merely finding ourselves on the side of good: We were the avatar of Good. We now had a bottomless moral credit that would justify anything we chose to do in response.

And we used that credit.

We violated what we had agreed to in the Convention Against Torture, calculating (probably incorrectly) that the information we would get from suspected terrorists about potential attacks would prevent more suffering than we were inflicting. We violated our own constitution by setting up a “law-free zone” in Guantanamo, where we could do whatever we wanted to whomever we could ship there. We set up a means to ignore the rights of American citizens by declaring them “enemy combatants“.

Worst of all, we overthrew the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq without any notion of what to do next. Those invasions were popular when they happened, but they had been sold to the American public with a variety of shifting justifications and goals: We were preventing future attacks. We were shutting down terrorist bases. We were capturing weapons of mass destruction before they could be used against us. We were freeing people from oppression. We were spreading democracy. We would create models of government that would inspire the Muslim world.

And since neither the public nor the government had a clear picture of what we were doing, there were no principles to help us design our programs or standards to judge them by.

And it cost. At least seven thousand American troops died in combat, and half again as many contractors. Tens of thousands have committed suicide since returning home. Tens of thousands suffered debilitating wounds. The monetary cost ran into the trillions.

Notice that I have not even mentioned the death and suffering and material destruction that we inflicted on others.

And the value of what that sacrifice bought us is probably negative. In Afghanistan, we ended up giving the country back to the Taliban when the government and army we had spent 20 years building fell apart before we could even get our troops clear. In Iraq, we neutralized the regional counterweight to Iran, which is now a much bigger threat to us, to the Saudis, and to Israel than it ever was in Saddam’s day.

I can’t believe any American strategist intended those outcomes. But here we are.

The mousetrap. So that’s what I’ve been reliving: the thrill of believing I represent Good in its eternal struggle with Evil; the energy of rage running wild, unchecked by any of its usual restraints; the righteousness of a victimhood that grants me infinite moral credit, enough to balance anything I might decide to do — and how badly that all worked out.

Those feelings are the tastiest cheese any mousetrap ever offered.

How much of that cheese Israel and those who identify with Israel will now gobble up is hard to say. Maybe they’ll be wiser than we were. Maybe they’ll do better. Certainly there is one difference: President Bush enjoyed record approval ratings after 9-11, while Netanyahu has seen his popularity fall. Maybe that political reality will keep him grounded, and not let him see himself as a superhero who “will rid the world of the evil-doers“.

Maybe. We can all hope. History, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, does not actually repeat. It only rhymes. But listening for that rhyme has been wearing me down.

By weeklysift | Comments (14)

The Weirdness in the House

October 9, 2023 – 10:05 am

I admit to having been surprised when Speaker McCarthy was voted out by the House Tuesday. Ordinarily, when I see a guy getting ready to jump out of an airplane, I expect him to have a parachute somewhere.

McCarthy had been heading towards this moment since he became speaker in January: He made impossible promises to the MAGA faction, and changed the rules to give them an easy way to get rid of him if he didn’t keep those promises. When they threatened him, he said “Bring it on!“, scheduled the vote as soon as possible, and publicly announced he wouldn’t make a deal with Democrats to save himself.

I thought: “Wow! He must have some great trick up his sleeve.” And then: nothing. Splat!

This crisis wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. In January, Jonathan Chait envisioned the coming debt-ceiling negotiation, which he framed as a hostage-and-ransom situation [1]:

In the current circumstances, a successful hostage release would be all but impossible. Imagine a Republican Speaker — any Republican Speaker — figuring out a ransom that almost the entire caucus could agree on. The intraparty dynamics virtually guarantee that anything a Republican leader could agree to would immediately be seen on the far right as too little.

And I added:

The procedural concessions McCarthy has made mean that he can be recalled as speaker if he doesn’t negotiate a high enough ransom.

McCarthy had nine months to contemplate this scenario, and did manage to survive the debt ceiling deal in May. But the subsequent swerve to avoid a government shutdown nailed him. If he ever had a plan, he didn’t put it into operation. Even in retrospect, I can’t guess what he thought was going to happen.

This chain of events proves that I can’t be relied on to tell you what will happen next. So instead I’ll focus on what can happen and what should happen.

The Speaker pro tem. Since McCarthy’s ouster, the speaker’s chair has been occupied by a speaker pro tempore — literally “speaker for a time”. The temp is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, and his name comes from a list that McCarthy had to provide when he became speaker.

My first thought was that McHenry would be like the temporary buildings that got built to house the military during World War II, many of which are still standing: The Republican caucus is too dysfunctional to elect a new speaker, so the temp will wield the gavel until the next Congress is seated in 2025. (With any luck, Democrats will take back the House and we’ll be done with this nonsense.)

But that doesn’t seem like a viable option without a rule change, which might be just as hard as electing a new speaker. Rule I, Clause 8(b)(3) says:

In the case of a vacancy in the Office of Speaker, the next Member on the list described in subdivision (B) shall act as Speaker pro tempore until the election of a Speaker or a Speaker pro tempore. Pending such election the Member acting as Speaker pro tempore may exercise such authorities of the Office of Speaker as may be necessary and appropriate to that end. [my emphasis]

The first version of this I saw omitted “to that end”, which (in my reading) changes everything. McHenry’s authority appears to be limited to whatever is needed to elect a new speaker. [2]

But not so fast, claims Matt Glassman of Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute. “that end” might be interpreted not as “the election of a Speaker”, but as “act as Speaker pro tempore”. In that case, McHenry might have have broad powers. There’s no precedent for this situation, so whatever the current House allows will become the precedent.

So far, McHenry appears to be taking a narrow view of his powers, with one exception: Tossing Nancy Pelosi out of the courtesy office McCarthy allowed her doesn’t seem to serve the end of electing a new speaker. It’s trivial, but it might be a test. If the House elects a new speaker quickly, McHenry probably won’t test his powers further. If Republicans deadlock, though, the temptation to do something substantive will grow as the November 17 shutdown deadline looms. [3]

Potential speakers. So far two Republican candidates have announced themselves: Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Scalise is the current majority leader, and so would be the leadership’s next-man-up after McCarthy. However, Scalise is currently battling blood cancer and may not have the energy. Next up after him would be Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is supporting Scalise and hopes to become majority leader if Scalise moves up.

Jordan is the “Freedom” Caucus candidate and has been endorsed by Trump. When he was nominated against McCarthy in January (despite claiming to support McCarthy himself), Jordan got at most 20 votes. So I have to see Jordan’s candidacy as a test of Trump’s influence; he’d never be elected on his own.

Putting this as delicately as possible, Jim Jordan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking has rated Jordan one of the least effective lawmakers in Congress (202nd out of 205 Republicans examined), based on him sponsoring very few bills and passing hardly any of them. He has a law degree from Capitol University, but has never passed a bar exam. In his memoir of his years as speaker, John Boehner called out the “political terrorists” in the Republican caucus; in a subsequent interview, he named Jordan as an example:

I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart ― never building anything, never putting anything together.

And then there’s the whole he-ignored-sexual-abuse thing from when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State.

The Speaker needs to be a master of House procedure, skilled at forming and speaking for a consensus, and an ace vote-counter. Nancy Pelosi had those skills, which is how she managed to get so much done with a majority the same size as McCarthy’s. McCarthy lacked the skills, and Jordan seems like the antithesis of a good speaker.

Scalise has his own issues. He once billed himself as “David Duke without the baggage“. Since “the baggage” was a long history of KKK leadership, that ought to give his supporters pause.

Before he endorsed Jordan, a number of people suggested Trump himself become speaker, since the Constitution does not require the speaker to be a member of the House. However, the rules of the Republican House caucus bar anyone under indictment for serious crimes from serving in leadership, so they’d need to change that. Trump has fanned this speculation, and is still floating the idea that he might take the job temporarily, but I suspect he doesn’t want the headache of having real responsibilities.

Any of these candidates would need near-unanimity in the House GOP to get over the top, and so will probably need to make the same sorts of impossible promises McCarthy made. Presumably they’d have to prove their toughness by shutting down the government in November. But again, what possible ransom could the new speaker get from Biden and Schumer that Gaetz et al would consider enough? So aren’t we right back here by Christmas or so?

In short, I don’t see how House Republicans resolve this on their own.

Fantastic (but possible) solutions. Now we get to what should happen: Republican moderates, especially the 18 representing districts Biden won in 2020, should find their backbones and play the same kind of hardball the MAGA wing plays.

Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, whose district voted for Biden by 10 points in 2020, attacked Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for not bailing out McCarthy, as if Democrats should have agreed to an imaginary deal that McCarthy refused to offer. [4] In response, AOC suggested Lawler support Jeffries for speaker, an obviously suicidal move for a Republican who would surely lose a primary challenge afterwards.

But here’s what could and should happen: Lawler (or some similar non-MAGA Republican; Michelle Goldberg suggested Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania) should announce his own candidacy for speaker together with support from a handful of fellow moderates. He should pledge not to shut down the government, to fulfill the deal McCarthy made with Biden to avoid a debt-ceiling default in May, and to pass rules that would create a more even sharing of power between the two parties. (Not full parity, but closer to it.) Then he should ask for Democratic support. If his handful of Republicans held firm and the Democrats came through, he’d be speaker, and the House could start to function again. Republicans and Democrats could negotiate with each other in good faith, rather than tee up another hostage crisis.

Jeffries appears to be open to such an arrangement:

The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

Maybe simply threatening such a thing could get Republicans to unite around somebody like Scalise and not shut down the government. (If Scalise did shut it down, that motion-to-vacate trick would work just as well for Lawler as it did for Gaetz.)

I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, because Republican moderates are invariably spineless. But nothing prevents it.

And if the House’s leadership vacuum stretches into November, and if the government shuts down while Biden and Schumer are still waiting to find out who they should be negotiating with, the boundaries of plausibility might shift.

Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective looking backward to figure out what did happen, famously observed: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Something similar should hold looking forward: When you eliminate all the scenarios that can’t happen, one of the options remaining, however implausible, must be what will happen.

[1] One theory that explains MAGA faction’s inability to formulate coherent goals during the debt-limit and shutdown negotiations is sabotage. In other words, shutting down the government isn’t a threat, it’s a goal. The analogy would be to a kidnapper who wants to kill the hostage, and so makes shifting and impossible demands.

You might wonder why MAGA Republicans would want to cause a shutdown, but the answer is pretty simple: The Biden economy has been remarkably good, especially considering the Covid disruption he inherited from Trump. Unemployment continues to be quite low, and wage increases have begun to outrun inflation. The unemployment rate has been under 4% for 21 of the last 22 months, compared to 20 months for the entire Trump administration. When Biden took office, unemployment was at 6.3%.

The rising-real-wages phenomenon is recent, though, so the public has barely noticed and isn’t giving Biden the credit he deserves. If a lengthy government shutdown starts a recession, he never will get credit.

That explains why Trump has been pounding the drum so hard for a shutdown:

The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed. … UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!

[2] The rule suggests an in-between possibility: electing a speaker pro tem rather than taking one off a list. The pro-tem’s term might only last until a new speaker is elected, but having been elected might allow him to claim the full powers of a speaker.

[3] Politically, a government shutdown usually hurts the party that seems to be causing it, which is usually the Republicans. But this one would be even worse than the others, because it wouldn’t have any principled justification. Republicans wouldn’t be shutting down the government to cut spending or limit abortions or even hand Ukraine to their buddy Putin; they’d be shutting down the government out of sheer incompetence, because they couldn’t get their act together to elect a speaker. I can’t imagine the public taking that well.

[4] To understand what Democrats were thinking when they let McCarthy go down, here’s a tweetstorm from Democratic staffer Aaron Fritschner.

Fritschner gives McCarthy no credit for the continuing resolution that temporarily resolved the shutdown issue: McCarthy knew he needed Democratic votes to pass the CR, but sprung his proposal on them suddenly with no time to read it. Democrats manipulated the situation to get some time: Majority Leader Jeffries launched a time-wasting speech on the House floor, and Jamaal Bowman even pulled a fire alarm. Fritschner speculates that McCarthy hoped Democrats would vote his resolution down, allowing him to blame Democrats for the ensuing government shutdown.

People want us to give the guy credit for stopping a shutdown but it is still not clear to me right now sitting here writing this that he *intended* to do that.

And now that the House has until November 17, what could Democrats hope for from McCarthy?

And what is McCarthy signaling to us on funding? He’s going to steer us directly back into the crazy cuts and abortion restrictions, the Freedom Caucus setting the agenda, breaking his deal with Biden, and driving us towards a shutdown in November.

Ok we are reasonable people, maybe he’s just telling them what they have to hear and he’ll screw them at the last minute. So what’s he saying to us privately? What reason is he giving us to think any of this is going to turn out well if we help him? None.

The supposed “institutional interest” would have us not only put out Republicans’ many fires for them, it would have us do so based on our specific belief and trust that *McCarthy is lying*. Like, his lying is supposed to be a good thing, and what sells the arrangement for us.

It all called for too much trust in a guy who had (again and again) proven untrustworthy.

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