“Enemy of the people” is a phrase freighted with such history, and such horror, that it seems impossible that anyone would use it seriously. It’s four words that bring with them the sound of boots marching, the metallic smell of blood, the rumble of approaching trains. And those words are no accident.
Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, advised Americans to take President Trump’s attacks on the media “seriously,” following the president’s denunciations of the press as the “enemy.”
There’s a lie we tell ourselves. That lie is “never again.” Because of course it will happen again. It already has happened again. It happened again in Cambodia, where over 2 million people died for such crimes as being too well educated, or wearing glasses. It happened in China when the Hundred Flowers Campaign urged people to speak up … so that troublemakers could be identified and slaughtered. It happened in Rwanda where hate radio used the delightful slogan “the graves are not yet full,” as well as another blood-soaked maxim out of history, “the final solution.”
It just keeps happening. Again. And again.
Why isn’t “national leader declares free press an enemy of the people” on the list of preludes to fascism? Because it’s not a prelude.
Rule Number 3
Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU.
“Never again” may be a lie, but it’s also a promise; a commitment to fight on every day, at every step, through every means available. Because while “never” may never be true, “not this time” certainly can be.
Okay, come on in.
Leonard Pitts is beautifully pissed off.
Dear Mr. So-Called President:
So let me explain to you how this works.
You were elected as chief executive of the United States. ...
But there is one thing to which your election does not entitle you. It does not entitle you to do whatever pops into your furry orange head without being called on it or, should it run afoul of the Constitution, without being blocked.
On mornings like this, there’s little I want to say but “Go get ‘em, Leonard.”
You and other members of the Fourth Reich seem to be having difficulty understanding this. Reports from Politico and elsewhere describe you as shocked that judges and lawmakers can delay or even stop you from doing things. ...
What you do “will not be questioned?” Lord, have mercy. That’s the kind of statement that, in another time and place, would have been greeted with an out-thrust palm and a hearty “Sieg heil!” Here in this time and place, however, it demands a different response:
Just who the hell do you think you are?
Well, he thinks he’s a guy who can get a who almost 9,000 people to come out if he advertises for days in advance, offers free entertainment, and pulls up in Air Force One. Of course, that is fewer people than showed up to protest in DC. And LA. And Chicago. And Boston, And New York City. Oh, and Phoenix, Tucson, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, Hartford, Miami, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Des Moines, New Orleans, Portland, Ann Arbor, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Helena, Las Vegas, Reno, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Charlotte, Raleigh, the other Portland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Austin, Houston, Montpelier, Seattle, or Madison. But it is a bigger crowd than turned up in Unalakleet, Alaska.
Do I have to say it? Go read it all.
Jonathan Banks on why Trump’s plan to deport scary immigrants makes America less safe.
Last week, federal immigration officials seized an unauthorized immigrant at an El Paso courthouse where she had been seeking a protective order against an alleged domestic abuser. The judge who oversees the court that issued the protective order expressed dismay that such a seizure took place when the person was seeking protection from violence, and perhaps acting on a tip provided by the alleged abuser himself.
A quick pause to say that the word for such an action is: despicable. Except that’s not enough. Sickening is more like it. With a side order of infuriating.
President Trump has said his proposed actions to stiffen immigration enforcement are in the interests of public safety, but seizures such as the one in El Paso and the proposed revitalization of the 287(g) program that deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law make the public less safe and interfere with local policing priorities.
It’s not just that taking police and judges away from their normal duties to enforce an issue that’s the responsibility of the federal government means less availability to deal with real, immediate threats. It’s that flipping the role of the police in this way threatens to pervert the whole idea of public safety.
Seizing a person who is seeking refuge from violence subverts the protective function of police officers. If individuals fear as much from law enforcement as they do the criminals living among and victimizing them, they will not come forward to report crimes or cooperate with criminal investigations. Non-cooperation makes police officers’ jobs harder by emboldening and enriching criminals who, consequently, may operate with impunity where people are less willing to help investigators.
It was exactly problems like this that caused people to come up with a very good idea called sanctuary cities.
Sarah Lyons-Padilla and Michele Gelfand show why Trump’s Muslim ban is also a threat to public safety.
There were many reasons to oppose President Trump’s travel ban on refugees and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which is now blocked by a federal court’s temporary restraining order. …
But perhaps the most important objection, given the ostensible goal of protecting national security, is that these are precisely the sort of policies that can increase radicalization of Muslims already on American soil. Recently, a group of former diplomats and national security officials signed an open letter condemning the original ban on that ground, arguing that it would make the country less safe by feeding the narrative that America is anti-Islam.
Like the immigration policies, Trump’s ban isn’t based on any study, review, or even a few moments of reflection. It’s based on the idea that all Muslims are already a threat, even if they’re five years old and have spent four of those years undergoing rigorous screening in an effort to come to the US.
Mr. Trump and his advisers should know that this is not mere speculation; it is grounded in social science. In a study published in 2015 in the journal Behavioral Science and Policy, we showed that policies like Mr. Trump’s ban may very well promote the psychological conditions that fuel the radicalization he seeks to combat.
All of which would be a great argument to someone who didn’t already feel like they had all the answers and that the policy that caused the most pain is always the right solution. Read the rest to see the results of the little study they conducted.
Mark Feldstein wants to defend one of America’s oldest traditions — leaking like a sieve.
Actually, leaking is as American as Fourth of July fireworks. And just as old and venerable.
America’s grand tradition of revealing secret information about national security matters began in the winter of 1777, when the country’s first whistleblowers exposed a U.S. Navy commander for torturing British prisoners of war. The sailors who disclosed these human rights violations weren’t vilified by their commander in chief. Instead, they received the full support of Congress.
Then, as now, people in any part of the government who see their superiors violating the law don’t have a clear option other than leaking. Which is what they should do.
A few years later, President George Washington endured press leaks of what today would be considered classified national security documents: confidential Cabinet minutes, private letters between diplomats, even the verbatim text of a secret treaty with England. Although Washington was “much inflamed,” he didn’t attack the revelations as anti-American, let alone plot vengeance.
It’s goes without saying that Donald Trump is no George Washington. Hell, Trump isn’t even George Custer.
Washington, D.C., had become a sanctuary city for leakers.
And with good reason: Leaks are healthy in a democracy. They are an important check on abuse of power, a safety valve that can prevent disasters. At its best, leaking can be a supreme act of patriotism. …
Of course, some leaks — such as pending troop movements in wartime — can pose legitimate threats to national security. But political security — the covering-up of blunders and crimes by our leaders — has too often been the real reason for condemning leakers.
Feldstein gives more examples of past leaks, as well the way that administrations—including Obama’s—have played tough cop / no cop depending on whether or not the leak benefited them. Another good read.
Frank Bruni discovers the Gish Gallop.
That’s actually his secret. That’s his means of survival: the warp speed and whirl of it all. He forces you to process and react to so many different outrages at such a dizzying velocity that no one of them has the staying power that it ought to or gets the scrutiny it deserves.
They blend together under the numbing banner of what a freak show he can be, of Trump being Trump. And so the show screams on.
Part of this excess is his nature. Part of it is design. Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.
Yup. You’re just noticing? I believe if you mention Russia enough times, Donald Trump will set something on fire on national TV. Anything to divert attention. (And I really want to try it, because if we’re lucky, it’ll be Bannon.)
Sabrina Tavernise is your designated Concern Troll for this morning.
Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous. But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right. In recent interviews, conservative voters said they felt assaulted by what they said was a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one. Disagreeing meant being publicly shamed.
Conservative voters. As in, the people who voted for Trump. Let me think. Am I upset that conservatives are disturbed by liberal activism. Noooooo. .
I suspect we’re going to get one of these every week, as a weekend break from the “Trump voters still like Trump” piece that the Times feels compelled to run every weekday.
Kathleen Parker is aware that Trump voters still like Trump … which doesn’t make them right.
Maybe there was nothing much to the chats between short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador. Maybe there was no collusion between Trump campaign aides during multiple communications with Russian operatives during the 2016 election.
But given (1) Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin, (2) the administration’s willingness to declaim moral equivalence between Russia and the United States, combined with (3) Trump’s campaign threat to rethink U.S. involvement with NATO — wouldn’t the media be derelict in their duty if they did not relentlessly scrutinize these issues and events?
There’s nothing “fake” about these reports. And although the media can be accused of vigorously pursuing such stories, even at the risk of appearing “negative,” isn’t this their job? Resistant as I am to the cheap comparison, can you imagine the Republican reaction if this same set of facts emerged during the first month of a Hillary Clinton administration — especially if Trump had won 3 million more votes?
There’s no point in making this comparison. Trump voters have a built in illogic circuit that takes any mention of Hillary and routes conversation directly to a “she shouldn’t have been running in the first place” subroutine supported by a random selection from “because she should have been in jail / under the jail / fed to hippos.”
Nicholas Kristof looks at the options on trumping Trump.
We’re just a month into the Trump presidency, and already so many are wondering: How can we end it?
One poll from Public Policy Polling found that as many Americans — 46 percent — favor impeachment of President Trump as oppose it. Ladbrokes, the betting website, offers even odds that Trump will resign or leave office through impeachment before his term ends.
Sky Bet, another site, is taking wagers on whether Trump will be out of office by July.
The only reason I don’t have money in that game is my superstitious belief that my betting on something makes it less likely.
Maybe things will settle down. But what is striking about Trump is not just the dysfunction of his administration but also the — vigorously denied — allegations that Trump’s team may have cooperated with Vladimir Putin to steal the election. What’s also different is the broad concern that Trump is both: A) unfit for office, and B) dangerously unstable. One pro-American leader in a foreign country called me up the other day and skipped the preliminaries, starting with: “What the [expletive] is wrong with your country?”
Say. Maybe I should lay a few bucks on Trump to stay. That will really put the luck gods in a quandary.
Sebastian Mallaby on some of that “mess” Obama left behind.
President Trump asserts that the U.S. economy is a disaster and that he alone can fix it. The truth is that the U.S. economy is doing better than most Americans realize, and activist attempts to fix what ain’t broke are one of the gravest threats to it. What’s at stake is not simply that the president is vague or wrong about the facts. It’s that bad facts make for bad policy.
But Trump voters feel that they aren’t getting what was promised to them. Worse, they think some other people are getting a good deal. So naturally, the whole government has to go.
With the economy at near full employment, workers have felt the benefit. The Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta reports that wage growth has picked up to around 3.5 percent per year, up from less than 2 percent at the start of this decade. The Census Bureau reports that median household income rose in 2015 at the fastest rate on record . The number of people living in poverty fell 8 percent.
I’m willing to bet that 46% of the nation would tell you that all the credit for a good economy belongs to Trump. Until he screws it up. Then it’s Obama’s fault.
Gail Collins and the happy members of the James Buchanan appreciation society.
There’s a bright side to everything. It’s true that Donald Trump could turn out to be the worst American president ever. But think how happy that’s going to make James Buchanan fans.
Buchanan’s been on the bottom for 150 years, but his days may be numbered. Sure he sent the country careening into civil war. But he never tweeted about it.
“We’ve heard that from some visitors,” said Patrick Clarke, director of Buchanan’s home in Lancaster, Pa.
I would like to lobby for some kind of special exclusion clause. Something that just lets us ignore this unpresidented era and go right on to the next guy. I don’t want Trump in the history books, even if he is acting as Buchanan’s footstool.
You may have been unnerved by the president’s description of Obamacare. (“I mean, they fill up our alleys with people that you wonder how they get there, but they’re not the Republican people that our representatives are representing.”)
And perhaps his riff about Russia weirded you out. (“… probably Putin assumes that he’s not going to be able to make a deal with me because it’s politically not popular for me to make a deal. So Hillary Clinton tries a reset. It failed. They all tried. But I’m different from those people.”)
Stop this. We’re trying to think positive. The good news is all this was not actually evidence the president is suffering a mental collapse. He’s always been like that.
For all those who think Trump has recently developed some form of late stage STD-related brain rot, ask yourself: is this Trump really crazier than Obama birth certificate Trump? Is he really crazier than I don’t care if those kids in Central Park are innocent, string ‘em up anyway Trump? is he really crazier than gee, Howard, how about my daughter’s ass Trump?
Of course he’s crazy. But if it’s something that takes 30 years to develop, he must have gotten started on it when he was -12.