WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21
CORRECTION
In his Aug. 26 op-ed, “America’s high-
stakes deficit gamble,” Robert J. Samuel-
son incorrectly wrote that Congress
might reverse some temporary tax cuts
and spending increases. Rather, Congress
might make permanent some temporary
tax cuts and spending increases.Y
ou could say many things to
describe a week in which Presi-
dent Trump got in a snit about
buying Greenland, called the
Federal Reserve chairman an “enemy,”
reversed his position repeatedly on Chi-
na, and rebuffed European allies by
saying he’s ready to invite Russia to a
global summit at one of his Florida golf
resorts.
But “exhausting” would be the word at
the top of my list after Trump’s whirling-
dervish performance. Yes, I’m shocked,
confused, sometimes indignant about
his erratic policy statements. But there’s
a deeper feeling that others may share:
I’m tired of Trump’s antics. They take up
too much emotional space. Every day,
there’s a new narcissistic boast, a new lie
to correct, a new violation of what people
used to call presidential “decorum.”
Trump seems to love each manic
minute. He craves the chance to com-
mand the public spotlight. He has two
main foils in his daily extravaganza: the
news media (“Fake News!”) and liberal
Democrats (especially ones of color),
whom he baits every chance he gets. It’s a
stand-up comedy of insults, more than a
presidency.
But every performer knows the cruel
truth: The public eventually gets bored
with even the most novel act. It takes
ever-greater energy to produce the same
shock value. A veteran such as Trump
surely understands the Hollywood reali-
ty that today’s star becomes tomorrow’s
has-been. With cruel speed, the cycle
goes from “You gotta get me Donald!” to
“Who’s Donald?” That’s not a political
judgment; it’s just showbiz.
Data gives a hint of this Trump fatigue.
His popularity remains low, with just a
41.5 percent average approval rating,
according to the website FiveThirtyEight,
and it hasn’t budged much for the past
year. Trump’s tweets get less than half as
many interactions (retweets plus likes)
as they did in early 2017, according to an
analysis by the analytical firm Crowd-
Tangle, cited in May by Axios.
And Trump’s Twitter impact is less
than the public furor (and his 63.6 mil-
lion official followers) suggests. A recent
Gallup poll found that only 8 percent of
U.S. adults who have a Twitter account
say they follow Trump’s account and only
4 percent say they regularly read it.
Trump is catnip for political junkies,
but even here the appeal may be fading.
According to an analysis of roughly
3,000 websites by the analytics firm
Parse.ly, the demand for political stories
about Trump (measured by average
views per post about him) declined
37.8 percent in the first six months of
2019 from its level in the six months after
his inauguration, said Kelsey Arendt, a
senior data analyst with Parse.ly.
Trump fatigue is a subset of a deeper
public disaffection with politics itself,
and news about it. Everybody’s always
squawking in the age of Trump, and
pollsters find that the public increasingly
is tuning out. The louder the argument,
the more people seem to distrust the
news organizations that amplify the
intensely partisan debate.
This news overload was described by
the Pew Research Center in polling
released in June 2018. Pew found that
68 percent of those polled described
themselves as “worn out by the amount
of news.” The demographic breakdown
was fascinating: More Republicans ex-
pressed fatigue than Democrats; more
whites than blacks; more women than
men; more college graduates than those
with a high school education.
Interestingly, among age groups, re-
spondents over 65 had the largest per-
centage of those who “like the amount of
news” they’re getting.
The fatigue factor is also clear in a Pew
poll of social-media users released this
month. Asked if they were “worn out by
how many political posts and discus-
sions they see,” nearly half (46 percent)
said yes. The numbers were roughly the
same for men and women and old and
young, but Republicans were more
“worn out” than Democrats, and whites
were significantly more so than non-
whites.
As Trump-era politics get noisier, a
weary public seems to be tuning out.
What are the political implications of
this trend as we head toward the 2020
presidential election? Certainly, turnout
will be critical; motivated voters will
drive the outcome in a country that’s
turned off by politics.
But who’s the Trump defuser? Who
can calm a country that has frazzled
nerves from the daily Trump barrage?
The best candidate, in theory, would be
someone who promises to restore sanity,
fairness and national unity.
But that’s a high bar. Any Democrat
who can win the nomination will prob-
ably sound shrill to many Republicans.
In the angry scrum of American politics,
the sensible center seems as mythical as
Camelot.
Twitter: @IgnatiusPost
DAVID IGNATIUS
People are
tired of the
craziness
A
question for this moment: If the
Earth’s lungs were on fire and the
doctor refused to treat it, would
there be cause for a third-party
intervention?
This is a rhetorical query for now, but it
surely nags the conscience of an outraged
international community as the Amazon
rainforest is ablaze in Brazil and at least
two other countries whose boundaries
include sections of this crucial ecosystem.
Most maddening is Brazil’s at-times lack-
adaisical attitude toward the inferno —
actually a collection of more than 26,000
separate fires — and its president’s initial
rejection of $22 million in aid from the
Group of Seven nations.
It isn’t as though Brazil, which con-
tains 60 percent of the Amazon rainfor-
est, or other countries with smaller
holdings suffer the impact of such de-
struction in isolation. This rainforest, the
largest in the world, is often called the
Earth’s lungs in part because it absorbs
about 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide
annually, thus reducing greenhouse gases
that contribute to global warming.
What, if anything, should the rest of
the world do to save a critical organ in our
planet’s body?
Before some readers start choking on
the word “colonialism,” let’s take a deep
breath (while you can) and stipulate that
we’re not going there (although Brazil’s
president has). “Colonialism” describes
the occupation of territories and the use,
abuse and, effectively if not wholly, en-
slavement of native people. What is
suggested by the line of questioning
herein is: How can the world help sover-
eign people preserve and protect the
treasures within their borders for the
benefit of all mankind?
It’s a fair question. If Jack and Jill
shared a set of lungs and Jill decided to
fill her half with smoke, most people
would think Jack had a right to seek
redress. If Jill refused to cooperate,
despite clear evidence that her actions
were causing Jack harm (essentially the
argument against secondhand smoking),
then other measures would be justified.
But as executed by whom and by what
power?
In a similar vein, Brazilian President
Jair Bolsonaro essentially has stoked the
fires now sweeping through his chunk of
the river basin. He has done so since
taking office in January by cutting
budgets and staff in governmental envi-
ronmental enforcement institutions and
by promoting development, logging and
agricultural expansion.
Fires have a way of getting away from
people — as these have. Although some
Amazonian fires are naturally occurring
during the dry season, there have been far
more this year than in previous years.
Bolsonaro initially blamed nongovern-
mental organizations for setting the blaz-
es to discredit him. But recently, follow-
ing weeks of international condemnation
and domestic protests, he has begun to
take the issue more seriously.
Even so, his wounded ego and chauvin-
istic pride apparently wouldn’t allow him
to immediately accept the G-7 aid pack-
age. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro retreated a
bit from this position, suggesting that he
might consider the package, but only if
French President Emmanuel Macron
apologizes for comments he recently
made praising the Brazilian people and
expressing hope that they “soon have a
president who is up to the job.” Macron,
who has described the Amazon fires as an
“international crisis,” had also released a
statement Friday calling Bolsonaro a liar.
Bolsonaro, who has accused Macron of
promoting a “colonialist mentality,” in-
sists that foreign intervention is really
aimed at “interfering with our sovereign-
ty.” This defensive posture may look
paranoid to some, but it is also at least
somewhat understandable in the context
of Bolsonaro’s historical orientation. Like
President Trump, he has appealed to
constituents’ (and voters’) sense of mar-
ginalization to juice his ratings. Not
surprisingly, Trump tweeted his support
for Bolsonaro on Tuesday, saying, “He is
working very hard on the Amazon fires
and... doing a great job for the people of
Brazil — Not easy.”
Other nations, meanwhile, are dou-
bling down. Germany and Norway are
withholding millions of dollars in contri-
butions to the Brazil-run Amazon Fund,
which collects money to combat defores-
tation. France has threatened to pull out
of the Mercosur free-trade deal between
the European Union and four South
American countries, including Brazil. Ire-
land has threatened to do the same.
Such reasonable measures are what
civilization demands. But as extreme
weather incidents increase and other
climate-change-related conditions wors-
en, people’s survival sense may demand
more direct action and new ways of
balancing sovereign interests with global
priorities. Earth’s lungs may reside most-
ly in Brazil, but they belong to the world.
There’s no denying that.
[email protected]KATHLEEN PARKERBrazil, we need
to talk about
the Amazon
I
keep expecting President Trump
to ditch Vladimir Putin for a
younger, more glamorous auto-
crat, but apparently this is the
marriage he intends to take to the
grave. What other conclusion can we
draw from his obsession with restor-
ing Russia to the Group of Seven?
Reasonable heads of state can see
that Putin is a spent force. His popu-
larity is plunging. Protesters routine-
ly swarm the streets of Moscow. The
Russian economy is as dead as a
Siberian winter. The lame coverup of
a recent nuclear accident rings
echoes of Chernobyl and the dying
gasps of Putin’s beloved wreck — the
Soviet Union.
At this point, Putin fits better in a
Group of Three alongside his friends
Bashar al-Assad, the barrel-bombing
butcher of Syria, and Nicolás Ma-
duro, from the failed state of Ven-
ezuela.
Russia’s inclusion in the group of
leading industrial nations in 1997
was intended as a carrot to lure the
limping post-Soviet nation toward
democracy and free markets. At the
time, a case could be made that the
former superpower had at least the
prospect of becoming an important
economic player.
Instead, the overmatched alcohol-
ic Boris Yeltsin permitted the looting
of the Russian economy and, in 1999,
gave way as Russian president to the
former spy from St. Petersburg. Putin
brought order to the looting by creat-
ing a mafia of oligarchs. He kept the
people happy for a while with prom-
ises to restore a glory that never was.
At 20 years, he has reigned longer
than any Russian leader since Joseph
Stalin, but with the usual dreary
results.
Today, the case for including Rus-
sia at the table of major players is
nonexistent. Measured by total gross
domestic product, Russia is not evenamong the top 10 countries in the
world. Measured by per capita GDP,
it doesn’t make the top 60. And it’s
going backward. The purchasing
power of the average Russian has
fallen by more than 10 percent over
the past five years. In the same
period, foreign investment has
dropped to virtually nothing while
more than $300 billion of Russian
wealth has been shifted out of the
country. These financial trends are a
clear vote of no confidence in the
future of Putin’s leadership.
Moreover, what puny powers Putin
does possess are marshaled in direct
opposition to the interests of the G-7
members — and to the G-7 itself. The
point of the annual meetings is to
encourage cooperation; Putin seeks
to encourage division in the Western
alliance. Hackers linked to the Rus-
sian military have interfered in elec-
tions in the United States, Britain,
France and Italy, according to intelli-
gence agencies. They’ve targeted en-
ergy firms in Germany and stolen
cryptocurrency in Japan. The Aspen
Security Forum recently heard from
Microsoft that only Iran and North
Korea are in Russia’s league when it
comes to being state sponsors of
digital mischief.
It’s unfortunate that the Trump-
Putin romance has been encumbered
with so much of the most polarizing
baggage in America today: the Muel-
ler report, the Steele dossier, the
stolen Democratic National Commit-
tee emails and so on. While one
senses there must be some connec-
tion, the exact wiring diagram — if
there is one — has not been discov-
ered, despite lots of people looking
for it.
During his rambling post-
conference remarks, Trump suggest-
ed the affection stems somehow from
their shared antipathy to former
president Barack Obama. It wasObama, after all, who kicked Russia
out of the club in 2014 as punishment
for Putin’s annexation of Crimea. In
Trump’s telling, Putin “outsmarted”
Obama with the move — but I don’t
see what’s so smart about inviting
international sanctions at a time
when prices for your nation’s leading
exports — fossil fuels — are plunging.
For that matter, what was so smart
about the Trump administration’s
halfhearted encouragement of Juan
Guaidó’s April attempt to oust Ma-
duro in Venezuela? The Trump ad-
ministration recognizes Guaidó as
the troubled nation’s true leader yet
sat by while Putin’s team on the
ground reportedly ordered Maduro
to hang tough. In the aftermath,
Putin instructed the United States to
stop interfering in Venezuela, while
James Monroe turned somersaults in
his grave.
Looking at such an unlikely cou-
ple, we wonder what keeps them
together. What does Trump see in
Putin? Where’s the spark?
Some theorize that it’s all about
money. The Putin mafia has funneled
billions into high-end real estate in
major cities around the world, and a
pile of it wound up with the Trump
Organization. During his investiga-
tion, then-special counsel Robert
S. Mueller III found that Trump was
secretly angling to build a Trump
tower in Moscow at the same time
that he was running for president in
2016.
But maybe they stay together for
the sheer outrageousness of the
thing, like the retail heiress Chloe
Green’s now-ended relationship with
Jeremy Meeks, a guy Internet-famous
for his police mug shot. Nothing
turns Trump on like getting people to
buy balderdash. If he can sell the
world on Vladimir Putin’s greatness,
he can sell anything.
[email protected]DAVID VON DREHLEWhat does Trump see in Putin?
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018.W
hen I argued last week that
conservatives ought to give
up on President Trump, I
knew what I would hear
back. Religious conservatives were going
to point to the Obama-era policies, such
as forcing nuns to buy birth control for
their employees, that led them to believe
their communities and institutions were
under existential threat from the govern-
ment. But I also knew I’d hear an
increasing fear about the private sector,
and what culturally liberal compa-
nies were trying to do to conservatives.
“Woke capitalism” has triggered great
alarm on the right. I have heard it
described, with no sense of irony, as the
greatest threat facing Western society.
Conservatives aren’t just angry that
corporate America seems to be siding
against them in disputes such as wheth-
er football players should kneel for the
national anthem; they worry about a
future in which their views are censored
by Big Tech, declared anathema by
employers, targeted for angry mob-
bings by the media. And so they feel
forced to support politicians such as
Trump who promise to take the fight to
their enemies.
I would question the effectiveness of
this strategy, since, if anything, Trump
seems to have emboldened the culture
warriors within corporate America. But
I won’t try to argue that conservative
fears are ungrounded. There really is an
increasingly militant wing of the left
that wants to use economic as well as
political power to destroy their oppo-
nents, from Mozilla chief executive
Brendan Eich (forced to step down for
donating in support of California’s Prop-
osition 8) to James Damore (a Google
engineer fired for a memo he wrote
about the company’s diversity policies)to the hapless NRA conventioneers who
made the mistake of flying Delta. And as
these examples suggest, the liquida-
tionist wing seems to have a surprising
amount of influence over corporate
behavior.
But “surprising” doesn’t mean “large,”
since it is surprising for them to have
any influence at all. In fact, I suspect
that what little power they had has
already peaked.
Consider Google, which just issued a
rather tart advisory about the free-
wheeling internal discussion boards
where Damore’s infamous memo began
its viral career. The company warns that
“disrupting the workday to have a
raging debate over politics” doesn’t
build community, adding, “Our primary
responsibility is to do the work we’ve
each been hired to do, not to spend
working time on debates about non-
work topics.” This is a pretty stunning
turnaround, given the company’s long
history of supporting these kinds of
discussions.
Yet there’s a reason companies have
historically discouraged workers from
spending much time arguing politics;
when the argument is over, the anger
often lingers. Google got away with it for
so long because its core business, a
virtual monopoly over Internet search,
throws off so much money that it can
afford to indulge worker desires for an
activist workplace. Effectively, bringing
your politics to the job site was a form of
compensation for the woke workforce.
Only that market position isn’t quite
as impregnable as it looked a few years
ago. For reasons that have nothing to do
with the political skew of the company’s
workforce, governments are getting
more and more interested in curbing the
power of tech firms, and thus theirrevenue. Meanwhile, Google faces com-
petitive pressure in its non-search mar-
kets, including from Amazon (whose
founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos,
owns The Post). The company can’t
necessarily afford the luxury of an
internal message system that’s getting
everyone riled up, without any commen-
surate increase in productivity — or
worse, one that helps workers to orga-
nize to force the company out of poten-
tially profitable lines of business.
Moreover, the wokest firms are ex-
tremely geographically concentrated
along the coasts. Apple chief executive
Tim Cook can rail against Indiana’s
religious freedom law, but practically
speaking, what can he do — close the
state’s two Apple stores? The geographic
concentration is what drives the woke
warrior phenomenon, since it’s easiest
to want to destroy people if you don’t
know them. But it also dramatically
limits its scope.
And that scope is already limited,
because large public companies aren’t
going to pursue their principles at the
expense of any sizable self-interest. Note
how many of the firms that are loudest
in their denunciations of American
political groups are quiet about the
Chinese government, which is violently
suppressing protest in Hong Kong and
herding religious minorities into reedu-
cation camps. I don’t say that this is
admirable, but I do say that it is a fact.
So while I sympathize with conserva-
tives who fear that woke capital is
selling them out, I can’t agree that those
fears justify selling the soul of conserva-
tism to Trump. It’s true, woke capitalism
will sell you out. The thing is, if you wait
long enough — and not very long at that
— it will sell out your opponents, too.
Twitter: @asymmetricinfoMEGAN MCARDLEWhat’s worse, woke capitalism or Trump?
Who’s the Trump defuser?
Who can calm a country that
has frazzled nerves from the
daily Trump barrage?