The Washington Post - 18.09.2019

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23

WEDNESDAY Opinion

C

orey Lewandowski has b een a lternately

vulgar, pugilistic and deceitful. Now he

wants to run for S enate.

He’ll f it right i n.

The one-time Trump 2 016 campaign manag-

er volunteered t o appear before the House Judi-

ciary C ommittee on Tuesday, not to talk about

presidential o bstruction of justice — h e happily

obeyed White House orders not to discuss s uch

matters — b ut to launch his bid f or the Senate

seat now h eld b y the mild-mannered Jeanne

Shaheen (D-N.H.).

Lewandowski, now a TV c ommentator and

consultant who trades on his i nfluence with

President Trump, u sed t he hashtag

“Senate2020” i n a prehearing tweet promoting

his appearance. He requested a five-minute re-

cess in t he hearing and u sed it to tweet: “New

website just launched to help a potential Senate

run. Sign up now!”

If his testimony is a ny i ndication, he has a l-

ready s ettled on a campaign theme: unbridled

nastiness.

He r olled his eyes. He s hook h is head. He

questioned Democrats’ p atriotism. He m ocked

former s pecial counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s

work: “Nobody’s a ctually r ead the r eport.” He

made a crack about Hillary C linton’s e mails and

attacked “bad” a nd “shameful” f ederal agents,

as well as “Trump haters” t rying to “take down

a duly elected president.” He said “this fake

Russia collusion narrative is t he greatest crime

committed against t he A merican people in our

generation, i f not ever.” When asked t o read s ec-

tions of the Mueller report by lawmakers, he re-

fused. Instead, he doled out b arbs:

“Don’t ask me a question if you don’t w ant to

hear my a nswer.”

“Could you repeat the question? I didn’t h ear

it. I t was just a rant.”

“Unlike y ou sir, I don’t l ive in town.”

“I’m not ashamed of anything i n my l ife, c on-

gressman, are you?”

He a dmitted he lied on TV a bout his and

Trump’s a ctions in the Russia p robe: “I have no

obligation to be honest w ith the media.”

His combative p erformance b rought the

House Judiciary Committee, never a harmoni-

ous a ssembly, t o a new level o f acrimony. R ep.

Douglas A. C ollins ( R-Ga.) repeatedly d isrupted

proceedings with howls for r oll-call votes to

cease questioning and to adjourn, dilatory in-

terjections ( “That was 19 seconds over!”), par-

liamentary c ontretemps and a n accusation t hat

Democrats violated ethics rules. D emocrats,

riled, called L ewandowski a “chicken,” a “For-

rest Gump” o f corruption, a “hit man,” “ bag

man” a nd “ lookout.”

“I think I’m the g ood-looking man,” L ewan-

dowski rejoined.

Back and forth lawmakers and witness went:

Coverup. S ocialists. O bstruction. Lie. Con-

tempt. Fake n ews. Impeachment. Joe Biden’s

record p layer. Trump’s S harpie.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) p roposed that

“those o n the other side o f the a isle are useful

idiots” f or Russia.

Another Trump ally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.),

pointed out t hat House rules prevented h im

from disparaging D emocrats’ motives. S o he

asked Lewandowski to do s o.

“They hate this p resident more than they

love their country,” t he w itness replied.

It w as a depressing scene, and q uite a way to

honor C onstitution D ay. Five hours o f nastiness

made clear that the revolting p olitics of this

moment, t hough aggravated by Trump, are

larger than him — a nd will outlast him i f people

such as Lewandowski g ain election.

Lewandowski was charged w ith battery for

grabbing a reporter during the 2 016 campaign

and l ied about it until a video emerged to sup-

port the accusation; authorities called the e vi-

dence “legally s ufficient” b ut dropped t he

charge. S inger Joy Villa, a Trump supporter,

filed a sexual assault complaint against L ewan-

dowski in 2017. (Lewandowski maintains his

innocence.) He w as charged with a misdemean-

or in 1999 for bringing a gun into a congres-

sional o ffice building. L ast year, h e settled a dis-

pute with neighbors a ccusing him o f threaten-

ing them with a baseball bat. Under previous

questioning by the House Intelligence C ommit-

tee, Lewandowski said h e wouldn’t a nswer

Democrats’ “ f---ing” q uestions.

Mueller’s r eport recounts Trump dictating to

Lewandowski a speech he wanted Attorney Gen-

eral Jeff S essions to give directing the special

counsel to stop investigating Trump. But Lewan-

dowski, who claimed he didn’t r elay the instruc-

tions to Sessions because he took a “vacation,” r e-

fused to say anything more about the incident,

instead reading and rereading to lawmakers a

letter from White House lawyers (some seated

behind him) directing him not to talk.

Mostly, Lewandowski, with b uzz cut and e x-

tra-large flag lapel pin, c ampaigned f or the Sen-

ate. He discussed his childhood, h is time as a

cop a nd his work shaping “the greatest political

movement i n our n ation’s history.” He would

later boast a bout his g un c ollection — k ept in

the s ame s afe w ith Trump’s p roposed speech

ending the i nvestigation — a nd his support for

the New E ngland Patriots: “Tom’s a winner!”

From Air Force One, Trump, who had a lready

touted Lewandowski for the Senate, tweeted

his approval: “Such a beautiful Opening State-

ment by C orey Lewandowski!”

Lewandowski spoke about w hat he might do

when serving “in the o ther chamber.” He told

the l awmakers t hat “many people in New

Hampshire” h ave “confidence in me.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) interrupted

Lewandowski’s taxpayer-funded campaign

event.

“You’re not on the c ampaign trail yet,” h e

said. “This is the House Judiciary Committee.

Act like you know t he d ifference.”

Thanks to the likes of Trump and Lewan-

dowski, there no longer i s a difference.

Twitter: @Milbank

DANA MILBANK

WASHINGTON SKETCH

Lewandowski’s

unbridled

nastiness BY DEBBIE DINGELL

T

here is no question that the North

American Free Trade Agreement

and the United States’ failed China

trade policies require a complete

rewrite. As I have said publicly in the past, I

believe that Donald Trump was elected

president because he gave voice to the

legitimate rage many Americans feel about

decades of trade policies that have devas-

tated communities nationwide.

The federal government has certified

that almost 1 million U.S. jobs have been

lost to NAFTA and millions more have been

lost to misguided China trade policies. The

Trump administration has promised to

bring down massive trade deficits and stop

the outsourcing of jobs, but the president’s

policies have yet to deliver.

Fixing the trade policies that for decades

not only failed to deliver their promised

benefits but also undermined the nation’s

economic well-being is essential. Doing so

will help to sustain and create the good-

paying jobs that will rebuild a beleaguered

middle class and protect an industrial base

that is vital to U.S. national security.

That i s why congressional Democrats are

insisting on critical improvements to

the revised NAFTA that President

Trump signed last year. If the United

States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is

more accurately described as NAFTA 2.0,

were enacted in its current form, it

wouldn’t stop the American job outsourc-

ing that NAFTA incentivizes.

The USMCA’s labor and environmental

standards and their enforcement are insuf-

ficient to stop corporations from continu-

ing to move jobs to Mexico so they can pay

employees less and dump toxins. To day,

Mexican workers are paid 40 percent less

than manufacturing workers in China and

less than before NAFTA 25 years ago.

After decades of Republican and Demo-

cratic presidents alike enacting and de-

fending trade policies that harm working

families, more than 160,000 jobs in my

home state of Michigan already have been

government-certified as lost to NAFTA

alone. But contrary to conventional wis-

dom about its impact on manufacturing

centers in the Midwest, the greatest con-

centration of job losses from the pact is in

the congressional district around El Paso

and in California. Southern states have also

been hard-hit.

The race to the bottom, with the out-

sourcing of jobs and pollution, continues

today. A U.S. firm opened a multimillion-

dollar tire plant in Mexico recently where

they pay workers $2 to $6 per hour to make

the exact same tires that the firm’s Ameri-

can workers are paid, on average, $23 per

hour to produce. Chevrolet is paying auto-

workers in Mexico less than $3 per hour to

make Blazers shipped back to the United

States for sale. U.S. workers making Blazers

a decade ago earned more per hour than

these workers make in a day.

This year, Mexico passed labor-law re-

forms required by the revised NAFTA that

are a step in the right direction. Unless the

new Mexican labor agencies and inspec-

tions this new law requires are funded and

staffed, wages for many Mexican workers

will remain at sweatshop levels. Reasons to

be skeptical: Dozens of lawsuits have been

filed to block the new law, and Mexico

recently issued a labor-agency budget that

doesn’t appear to include the level of

funding needed to make the improvements.

Trump’s N AFTA 2 .0 would fail to discour-

age outsourcing by U.S. companies, but it

also would lock in high medicine prices by

giving new monopoly protections to phar-

maceutical companies. That would allow

them to charge North American consumers

even more. Even as Trump talks about

lowering drug prices, NAFTA 2.0 would

undermine changes that Congress wants to

enact to accomplish just that.

These realities explain why congres-

sional Democrats have insisted on further

changes. The president must add enforce-

ment of improved labor and environmental

standards to counter job outsourcing, and

the Mexican government must implement

and fund these improvements. And the new

monopoly protection for pharmaceutical

firms must come out.

China’s unfair trade policies must also be

addressed. The president is right about

that. The Chinese manipulate their curren-

cy, ban independent labor unions so work-

ers are paid wages with which the United

States cannot compete, and export billions

in products made by political prisoners in

work camps while they crush American

workers and firms with subsidized exports

and steal U.S. intellectual property. But a

chaotic White House trade policy doesn’t

fix these issues.

The president tweeted about me Aug. 31

accusing me of wanting him to “give up” on

his trade war with China. What I want is a

coherent strategy that maximizes U.S. lev-

erage behind the right set of demands, not

one that makes it easier for U.S. firms to

relocate to China.

As for NAFTA, after Americans have

endured 25 years of its damage; let’s get the

replacement right. The president must

decide whether he’ll work with Congress to

improve the 2.0 version or keep pushing a

flawed agreement that won’t address the

country’s problems. Democrats — who

deeply care about making good trade deals

and fixing bad ones — a re prepared to work

with him.

The writer, a Democrat, represents Michigan’s

12th Congressional District in the U.S. House.

NAFTA 2.0

needs an

upgrade

This column references some

ev ents of the second season of “Suc­

cession,” but not in any great detail.

E

ven if we know every unhap-

py family is unhappy in its

own way, there is still some-

thing strangely pleasurable

in watching the ways that incredible

wealth brings with it incredible

problems. Such is the appeal of

“Succession,” HBO’s horror-comedy

about the a ging, ailing p atriarch of a

giant media conglomerate and the

children he’s torturing as they com-

pete to take over the business when

he’s gone. When income inequality

is skyrocketing and elite displays of

impunity become c ommonplace, t he

only justice we can expect is the

kind that families like the Roys visit

on themselves.

It’s true that the idea of revolu-

tion is chic. Candidates for the

Democratic presidential nomina-

tion such as Bernie Sanders and

Elizabeth Warren are battling for

second place in a contest marked so

far by a seeming appetite for big

structural change. Pussy hats are

passé, but resistance-meets-

activewear apparel is still on-trend.

But, by and large, the oligarchies

remain firmly in place. Felicity Huff-

man was sentenced to a mere 14 days

in prison for paying to fake her

daughter’s college standardized test

scores. Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but

his high-flying enablers remain at

large. And most of all, President

Trump has convinced millions of

voters that he is a populist. The only

sensible conclusion from all of this is

that the super-rich will settle, plead

or hornswoggle their way out of any

attempt to cancel their status. All

that’s left to the rest of us is the

pleasure of watching.

“Succession” offers plenty of that,

and the spectacle is alternately

plush and grim. The Roy family has

many homes, many helicopters and

billions to squander. It also has a lot

of problems: Heir-not-so-apparent

Kendall (Jeremy Strong) is soiling

himself a fter d rug binges; kid b roth-

er Roman (Kieran Culkin) can’t

have sex with his girlfriend; and

golden girl Shiv (Sarah Snook)

seems intent on blowing up her

career as a lefty political strategist,

her marriage to To m (Matthew

Macfadyen) and her reputation as a

decent human. Even the patriarch

Logan Roy (Brian Cox) can’t defy

time: Though his willpower re-

mains ferocious, his body is failing,

especially at inopportune moments.

And though Logan doesn’t misbe-

have quite as ostentatiously as his

children, his inability to settle on

one of them to run his companies

and his insistence on pursuing new

acquisitions are causing as much

tsoris as their missteps.

The entertainment value in

watching the Roys destroy them-

selves is similar to the glee that

comes from devouring a personal

essay about the wildly destructive

relationship between a wealthy but

dysfunctional Instagram influencer

and her working-class ghostwriter.

The rich are different from you and

me: They have the ability to cause

themselves more problems than the

rest of us could even begin to

imagine. The Roys can buy them-

selves more and better drugs than

anyone else. Their media empire

affords them more opportunities to

wield power badly on very public

stages. They just cannot purchase

self-discipline or self-respect — or a

father’s favor.

The gratifications of schaden-

freude are the same as they have

always been, of course. But when

you’re one of the 99.9 percent watch-

ing the 0.1 percent self-immolate,

there’s something bigger at work

than mere pleasure in someone else’s

suffering. It’s despair, both theirs

and ours, that’s echoing under the

delights of dissecting the Roy fam-

ily’s damaged psyches or sighing

over Shiv’s enviable wardrobe.

Nothing will ever bring the Roys

truly low — no regulator, no lawsuit,

not even the eventual ascension of

idiot cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) to

the conglomerate’s throne, a possibil-

ity that seems more likely with every

successive episode. No matter what,

the Roys will still glide past antifa

protesters and white-nationalist

demonstrators as tasteful, expensive

cars carry them into discreet private

garages in the basements of highly

secure, highly anonymous buildings.

Our only hope is that if they come

undone, it will happen behind those

doors.

That’s not much of a political

agenda. But it makes for one h ell of a

television spectacle.

Twitter: @AlyssaRosenberg

ALYSSA ROSENBERG

A TV dream: Watching the

elites punish themselves

PETER KRAMER/HBO

Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin in HBO’s “Succession.”

A

t this point, the best informa-

tion suggests that a recent

spate of deaths from a vaping-

related lung disease — s even at

last report — h ad little or nothing t o do

with legal e-cigarettes. Rather, the

de aths, and more than 300 confirmed

cases of the disease in dozens of states,

seem to be linked to illegal cartridges,

mostly using marijuana derivatives

th at had been emulsified with vitamin

E acetate, according to Food and Drug

Administration investigators. T he F DA

has warned against using it for inhala-

tion, and it isn’t used in legally manu-

factured e-cigarettes.

Naturally, the government wants to

ban legally manufactured e-cigarettes.

President Trump is proposing to ban

flavored cartridges, apparently endors-

ing the theory — common among peo-

ple who neither smoke nor vape — that

these products appeal only to children.

In fact, the majority of adult vapers

select flavors other than tobacco be-

cause — and I speak as a former smoker

— tobacco tastes kind of gross. Most

smokers merely endured it for that di-

vine rush of nicotine.

The Michigan Department of Health

and Human Services is way ahead of

Trump; the state has already issued an

emergency directive banning flavored

vapes. New York moved on Sunday to

follow suit. And a New Jersey state

legislator is one-upping them both,

proposing to ban vaping e ntirely.

These officials are right that the

country faces a public-health c risis that

could kill huge numbers of people, and

that something s hould b e done. In fact,

they are that crisis, a crisis of hysteria

masquerading as prudence.

Most of what is known about vaping

suggests it’s saving lives. A randomized

controlled trial in Britain’s National

Health Service found that people of-

fered vaping as a replacement f or s mok-

ing were twice as likely to quit success-

fully a s those given traditional nicotine-

replacement therapy. I myself know at

least a half-dozen heavy smokers who

have kicked the habit thanks to v aping.

Collectively, my friends have prob-

ably added at l east a couple of decades of

human life by switching to vaping,

which Public Health England estimates

to be 95 percent less harmful than

breathing cigarette smoke. Given the

approximately 10 million Americans

who use e-cigarettes — most of whom

seem to be current or former smokers —

and you’re talking about life-centuries,

life-millennia, life-eons saved by the

very products that the federal govern-

ment is now proposing to ban.

But what about the children, some

will cry. I have some good news:

Though youth vaping has risen dra-

matically since 2011 (unsurprising,

since that’s about when the products

hit the mass market), the rise has coin-

cided with a sharp decline in their

smoking r ates.

In 2018, roughly 20 percent of high

school students said they had used

e-cigarettes within the past 30 days,

compared with 1.5 percent in 2011. But

only 8.1 percent of high s chool students

reported using the combustible kind o f

cigarette, compared with 15.8 percent

in 2011. A nd there is evidence t hat these

two things are causally related: Youth

smoking rates have been falling for

quite some time, but the trend appears

to have accelerated since vaping prod-

ucts came o n the scene.

Given the evidence about e-cigarettes

and tobacco use, why is the U.S. public-

health community seemingly so bent on

taking the most irresponsible route

possible?

One possible explanation seems valid

enough: Researchers don’t have dec-

ades of epidemiological data on vaping,

as they do for smoking. Heroin was

originally conceived of and marketed as

a safe alternative to morphine; public-

health officials are leery of making a

similar mistake with “safer” alterna-

tives to tobacco. The caution is admira-

ble, but remember what is known: the

absolutely enormous risks of smoking

cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Con-

trol and Prevention estimates that

480,000 Americans die from smoking-

related illnesses annually.

An equally likely explanation lies in

the broad Puritan streak that still runs

through A merican culture — e specially

the U.S. public-health community,

which often epitomizes the aphorism

that drinking w ould be seen a s a virtue,

rather than a vice, if only the hangover

preceded the i ntoxication.

One gets the sense that m any public-

health experts think that ex-smokers

should atone with ascetic self-denial,

rather than a pleasurable substitute.

One also senses that their long tussle

with the tobacco industry h as c reated a

Pavlovian aversion to anything that

even resembles smoking. So instead of

harm reduction — w hich t hey might b e

quick to suggest for opioid addicts —

they advise politicians to restrict vap-

ing as much as possible, even if that

means m ore d eaths from c ancer, stroke

and l ung disease.

And that trade-off e ven s ounds s emi-

reasonable, in the abstract. Until you

meet real people suffering the agonies

of cancer or the slow strangulation of

emphysema. The people rushing to

protect children from e-cigarettes

should remember that every one of

those patients was somebody’s kid. So

are a lot of current teens who might be

taking up cigarette smoking if a much

pleasanter, and by all evidence safer,

alternative weren’t available.

One o f those kids might be y ours; not

one o f them deserves to die.

Twitter: @asymmetricinfo

MEGAN MCARDLE

Hysteria masquerading as prudence