Last week I had the chance to talk with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the two Harvard professors behind the book How Democracies Die. Later this week, I’m putting out a longer piece that includes my interview with both authors, as well as a review of the book, but considering the week the nation just went through, it seems appropriate to start this morning with something of a spoiler.
The book is a stellar deep-dive into a series of modern democracies that ceased to be — not because their military rose up, or an opposing military rode in, but because the country devolved into autocracy. In many cases, nations went from a recognizable, constitutional democracy to a single-party autocracy along steps that came with surprising ease — and terrifying familiarity.
Considering the events of the past week, it seemed only appropriate to ask them about the term that appeared in seemingly every news story for what seems to have been a year, but in reality was only a fortnight: The memo.
Question: This was one of those days in which it seemed that the principles and practices of our institutions were strained, if not cracked. There was the Devin Nunes-authored memo, the apparently forced early retirement of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and the failure to recommend new sanctions against Russia. Do you think these events mark a significant acceleration? Do they take us past any sort of 'red line' in the erosion of Democracy?
Levitsky: I don’t think we ever know if it’s a “red line” or not. There were a couple of important things that reinforced that this was a bad day. First, it was a very good day for our book sales, so a lot of people are showing increased concern about the future. Second, Trump is continuing with something that autocratic leaders do — go after the referees. Go after the institutions that serve as neutral arbiters,.
Trump has been concerned about the FBI from the beginning and demonstrated repeatedly that he would like to bring it under control. He’s made clumsy efforts to put the agency directly under his personal control both when Comey was the director and after. When those failed, he moved to making attacks on the integrity of the FBI.
The much-referenced article on surviving autocracy that Masha Gessen wrote on the day of Trump’s electoral victory warns against expecting any institution to save the nation, and points up the speed with which law enforcement apparatus were brought under control of autocrats like Putin and Erdogan. Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate that this grab for the handles of law enforcement is often the first move of the would-be autocrat. It serves as both a protective measure, ending any effective way to bring the budding dictator to heel through legal means, and provides an offensive tool that can be turned on enemies.
On that point, both authors expressed concern about the memo, but from at least one perspective, the memo isn’t all bad, because it shows just how ineffective Trump has been at turning the FBI into his own personal police. Yes, he fired Comey, but he hasn’t been able to replace the FBI and DOJ leadership with hacks under his thumb. A year in, Trump is still fighting the FBI, rather than using it as a weapon to turn on others. That’s not so true everywhere …
Levitsky: We were over optimistic in the book on one point. The members of the Republican Party in the House and Senate have become lapdogs. They’ve increasingly not just looked away, but acted in complicity with Trump’s abuses. Some institutions have held up well — the courts, media, public — but not Congress.
More on this discussion later in the week. But now, let’s get below the line and listen to some pundits.
The Trump–Nunes Memo
Walter Shapiro shows that Republicans eat their own dog food — along with what comes out the other end of the dog.
The Piltdown man – perhaps the most famous fraud in the history of paleontology –combined a 600-year-old skull, an orangutan’s jaw and a chimpanzee’s tooth to feign being the remains of the Missing Link between man and the apes.
Now, more than a century later, the Piltdown man has come to US politics with Friday’s release of a declassified memo by Devin Nunes, the chairman of the misnamed House intelligence committee. The Nunes memo connects mismatched shards to suggest a missing link between Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and the Hillary Clinton campaign’s efforts to discredit Donald Trump.
There is a big difference here. Piltdown Man, for all it’s silliness in retrospect, actually fooled a lot of people for some time after its ‘discovery.’ Nunes’ masterwork was already exposed as not just a slanted attempt to demean the FBI, but a political dud, even before it reached the eyes of the public.
To Trumpian true believers, the Nunes memo proves that the FBI and the rest of the Deep State were conspiring to throw the election to Hillary. Of course, this omits the pesky detail that on 28 October 2016, the FBI director, James Comey, announced that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation based on what had been found on Anthony Weiner’s computer.
Guess which late October event had more effect on wavering 2016 voters: Comey’s dramatic public statement raising fresh doubts about the Democratic nominee or a secret warrant against a peripheral Trump adviser.
That would be the last minute letter that Comey wrote along with noted subject of endless right-wing hand-wringing, Peter Strzok.
Max Boot, and his hat, have been added to the Washington Post editorial page, where this week he has another angle on … the memo.
“When you’re attacking FBI agents because you’re under criminal investigation, you’re losing.”
That was White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeting on Nov. 3, 2016. Back then, it was Democrats who were complaining about the FBI, and with ample justification: The bureau had released a letter 11 days before the election announcing that it was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton based on emails found on former New York congressman Anthony Wiener’s laptop. Nate Silver later concluded, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28.” Comey’s supposed anti-Clinton bias was even (disingenuously) cited by President Trump as his rationale to fire the FBI director.
That was, of course, in Trump’s second-draft firing Comey memo, the one that he forced Rod Rosenstein to write, rather than in the first-draft he-wouldn’t-stop-talking-about-Russia version put together by Trump and Monsters U alum, Stephen Miller. And then Trump went on TV two days later to say he had fired Comey over the Russian investigation anyway, leaving his PR team to pick up the mess.
Republicans (and Russian trolls) had been pinning their hopes on Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to deliver the goods. But his four-page memo was such a nothingburger that he left everyone wondering: Where’s the beef?
The week’s best pairing of a catch phrase that was worn out decades ago, with a coinage that was pretty much worn out the day it arrived. But that doesn’t make Boot wrong on the facts.
The case against the FBI that’s being assembled by Trump and his minions is not designed to convince dispassionate observers. It’s only supposed to give the thinnest of cover to true believers — and at least 34 senators — to do what they are predisposed to do anyway, i.e., protect the president at all costs.
Honestly, if I had to guess, the Nunes memo was such a disaster, I suspect it peeled away at least a couple of Senators on the bubble.
Dana Milbank goes on the road to investigate the world events from the perspective of a guy who’s actual expertise is in beef cattle.
Wouldn’t it be great to be Devin Nunes?
Not only does the California Republican get to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but he simultaneously gets to serve President Trump by making public tidbits of classified information given to him by the White House. He is recused from the Russia investigation but still gets to use committee staff to undermine the Russia investigation.
Nunes gets all the cake, can do all the eating, and gets no consequences … except the next time he jumps from an Uber it may be more a matter of rolling out the door.
Now, best of all, he gets to release a memo (possibly written with White House help) to exonerate Trump in the Russia probe by using cherry-picked information implying wrongdoing by the FBI — while at the same time blocking declassification of a memo from committee Democrats providing context and exculpatory information that Nunes omitted. And the FBI, which under its Trump-appointed director says it has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” can’t defend itself because, well, the information is classified.
The idea of doc-blocking the FBI using classifications isn’t half bad. Fortunately for democracy, they left it up to Devin Nunes, making this his third godawful attempt to start a scandal on White House orders. Also, given two opportunities to deny the White House involved in writing the memo, Nunes flunked both times. Excellent choice in stooge.
Richard Ben-Veniste was chief the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office, and he has a message for Christopher Wray and Rod Rosenstein.
The long tradition of the House Intelligence Committee — heretofore an island of bipartisan protection of national security within an ever more partisan Congress — has become collateral damage in the quest to protect President Trump from the conclusion of the Mueller investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray urged Trump not to allow the public release of an inaccurate memo that recklessly reveals classified national security sources and methods. Now that he has allowed the memo to be made public, many will ask whether Wray and Rosenstein should resign in protest. They should not do so. America needs these principled public servants to stay at their posts.
Back up there at the top, Dr. Levitsky and Dr. Ziblatt mentioned that the institution most in trouble at this point is Congress. With Trump directly pulling the strings of people like Nunes and Mark Meadows, and Paul Ryan having discovered that his interests lie in having no interest, Most democracies may fail from law-enforcement up, but it doesn’t have to go that way. Congress can fall first. After all, if you have to eat that elephant one bite at a time, it’s perfectly feasible to start at the ass.
The campaign of denigration directed against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III , the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, the demands for personal loyalty from government officials whose first loyalty is to their oath of office and the Constitution are among a growing mountain of evidence that raises the question — “Why does the president fear the results of an unfettered Mueller investigation?”
Because as many times as Trump says “no collusion,” that doesn’t make it true.
Eugene Robinson doesn’t think the memo will amount to a speed bump, much less a road block, for Mueller’s investigation.
The memo released Friday by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee purports to be an expression of shock, horror and dismay at alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. But the document’s real purpose is to dishonestly suggest that the whole Robert Mueller investigation is politically motivated, cooked up by partisan Democrats in the FBI and the Justice Department.
Anyone who reads the thing can spot the holes where parts of the story have been left out — the details that would undercut the memo’s thesis. I recognize the technique. I have it on good authority that opinion columnists have been known to cherry-pick a fact or two, though of course I have no personal experience with that sort of thing.
Just like I have never been known to cherry-pick opinion columnist. Next up, someone who is not George Will, Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat, or Bret Stephens ...
Joe Walsh remembers his collegue Devin Nunes … though fondly would be an overstatement.
I served in Congress with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Based on my experience working with him, nothing about the way he’s behaving now as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — overseeing part of the so-called Russia-Trump investigation — is particularly shocking.
The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal. When it comes to exercising good judgment and discharging his duties in service of the Constitution, he’s just not up to the task. …
So it doesn’t surprise me to see Nunes today, acting more like the chairman of the president’s reelection campaign than chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He wants to please whomever he sees as the person or people running the show. Back then, it was House GOP leadership. Now it’s President Trump. And it’s pretty clear Nunes has decided his job is to protect Trump no matter what collateral damage results. How else do you explain his careless and dangerous rush to release his already infamous “memo”?
Walsh, by the way, is not just a Republican a Trump supporter. I think there’s a federal law that says everyone has to consult a Trump supporter at least once a day, so my quota is done.
Race
Leonard Pitts on why even talking about race is so often so painful.
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Except it’s not really failure. It’s actually unwillingness to communicate, fear of what communication might mean. After all, if you communicate, you might understand some painful truths — and then where would you be?
That’s why discussing race with a white person is often one of the most vexing things an African-American person can do. You quickly come to understand that understanding is the last thing they want.
What Pitts goes on to demonstrate is how often white people feign an ability to not understand the point of what black people are telling them about race. Because admitting that what black people are saying is comprehensible … means admitting that it’s also sensible and just.
At some point, you begin wondering if the words you hear in your head are coming out in English. How is it you’re both speaking the same language, but you’re doing such a miserable job of being understood?
The answer isn’t that the black person in this conversation isn’t being clear, it’s that the white person has developed a very advanced form of selective deafness.
It’s a frustrating, exhausting experience. If you’ve ever had it, you’ll likely be touched by a recent story out of Vermont. It seems that, with the unanimous support of the school board, the Racial Justice Alliance, a student-led anti-racism group at Montpelier High, is commemorating Black History Month by flying a flag on campus. A flag that says, “Black Lives Matter.”
It’s a nice story, and a brief one. Go read it.
Christine Emba on a surprise that white Americans will find in the 2020 census.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau revealed its proposed questionnaire for the 2020 Census in advance of a March 31 deadline for its delivery to Congress for review. The updated format did not accommodate many suggestions made since 2010. It doesn’t ask about citizenship status (despite a request to do so by the Trump Justice Department) and won’t include a separate Middle Eastern and North African category in its question about race.
But there are some key changes to the questions about race and ethnicity. In particular, black and white respondents will be asked to provide specific information about their origins. Rather than just marking a single race, respondents will be prodded for a bit more information: For the text box under the “White” checkbox, the census instructions helpfully state: “Print, for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.”
Don’t forget Normay.
Economy
Jill Abramson on the hand that’s really been at the wheel of the economy.
The strength of the economy was the keystone of President Trump’s State of the Union speech. There was no need to exaggerate how good things are – low inflation, lower unemployment, soaring stock market. Nonetheless, as usual, he had to inflate his boastful claims with hot air.
There were so many encomiums for various Americans in the president’s speech that the personal, anecdotal stories blurred into each other. But there was no word of thanks for the person most responsible for the strong economic winds keeping the Trump administration afloat.
Janet Yellen, perhaps the most successful Federal Reserve chair in modern history and the first woman to hold the job, was completely unrecognized. President Trump gave her the boot, making her the first Fed leader not to be renominated for a second term. All of her predecessors were renominated by presidents of the opposite party. But not Yellen, whom President Barack Obama appointed in 2014 and whose last day on the job is 3 February.
Yellen had two big strikes against here. One, she’d actually met Barack Obama, and two … Trump’s profound respect for women in business. Or lack thereof.
And just as Yellen is going out the door, Trump’s stock market boom is going with her. Trump will surely find some way to make Yellen the scapegoat for any market collapse. Devin Nunes can prove it with a memo.
General Trumpism
Eric Posner maintains that Trump is bad … but too incompetent to be evil.
David Frum’s new book, “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic,” is only the latest statement of the case that Trump is a danger to the Constitution. But it is critical to distinguish Trump’s bark from his bite. He has disparaged judges, called the media the enemy of the people, praised torture and compared the intelligence community to Nazis. But he has not followed up on these statements. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, he hasn’t tried to pack the Supreme Court (not that Trump needs to). Unlike Barack Obama, he hasn’t (yet) targeted journalists in leak investigations. Unlike George W. Bush, he hasn’t actually taken a page from the Nazis by ordering the intelligence community to use coercive interrogation.
Unlike George Washington, he has never told the truth. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, he has never ridden a horse. And unlike Eric Posner he has never taken a hugely selective reading of Trump’s actions to try and pass off a near endless list of assaults on liberty as no big deal … oh wait, never mind.
Ruth Marcus has a somewhat different take.
“Nixonian” is not the right word to use to describe the behavior of President Trump. In important ways, that characterization smears Richard Nixon.
It is hard to believe I am writing this. But it is also hard to believe it has come to this: The president is in open warfare with his Justice Department and the FBI — asserting flatly that its “top Leadership and Investigators . . . have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago.”
Do you have Posner’s email? Because he could really use a copy of this.
“The sacred investigative process.” “Unthinkable just a short time ago.” Oh please. Nothing is sacred to Trump except protecting himself. And what is unthinkable — except that Trump has made it all too thinkable — is that a president would impugn the integrity of his own Justice Department. That a president, confronted with evidence that a hostile foreign power had tried to influence the election, would repeatedly reject those findings and fail to take action to shore up the nation’s defenses against a repetition.
And, most unthinkable, that a president, confronted with evidence that his own top officials found probable cause to surveil a former campaign aide, Carter Page, for acting as the agent of a foreign power, would react with indignation — not at the aide but at the accusation.
David Graham and the not all that slow motion disaster.
In the current scandal, so often compared to Watergate, there’s a tendency to seek direct parallels. This is enhanced by the clear threat to special counsel Robert Mueller from the president, complete with reports that Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, and backed down only when McGahn threatened to resign.
The current, unnamed scandal won’t work in the same way, and the search for a Saturday Night Massacre is misguided for two reasons. First, people are already being fired. And second, even when they’re not, Trump is accomplishing many of the same things that would otherwise be accomplished with firings via other means.
Can we have a name this scandal contest? Personally, I would take points away from anything that ends in ”gate.”
Not only is the president openly feuding with parts of the executive branch, he elides the fact that the top leadership of the FBI and Justice Department are, with McCabe and Comey’s departures, entirely appointed by his own administration.
If the goal is to purge officials who Trump thinks represent some sort of threat to him, that’s already under way. But Trump also doesn’t have to purge them to achieve what he wants. He just has to create an environment that stifles things he believes represent a threat to him.
If Rosenstein goes, don’t expect an immediate firing of Mueller. Look instead for budget cuts, resource restraints, and a re-write of the investigation’s limits that allows them look at a much narrower range of time and behavior.