TUESDAY, AUGUST 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY ANTHONY SCARAMUCCIP
resident Trump’s online in-
sults directed at me on Mon-
day were predictable after I
publicly said that he’s unfit
for office. The tenor of his abuse only
reinforces my thinking: I can no
longer in good conscience support
the president’s reelection.
This isn’t a Road to Damascus
moment; my concerns have been
building publicly for a while. And
I’m not seeking absolution. I just
want to be part of the solution. The
negatives of Trump’s demagoguery
now clearly outweigh the positives of
his leadership, and it is imperative
that Americans unite to prevent him
from serving another four years in
office.
When I decided to support
Trump’s candidacy and later to work
in his administration, it wasn’t be-
cause I agreed with all of his policies
or liked every aspect of his personal-
ity. As former New York mayor Ed
Koch used to say, “If you agree with
me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for
me. If you agree with me on 12 out of
12, see a psychiatrist.”
My public praise of the man was
over the top at times, but my private
estimation of him was more mea-
sured. I thought Trump, despite his
warts, could bring a pragmatic, en-
trepreneurial approach to the Oval
Office. I thought he could be the
reset button Washington needed to
break through the partisan sclerosis.
I thought he would govern in a more
inclusive way than his campaign
rhetoric might have indicated, and I
naively thought that, by joining the
administration, I could counteract
the far-right voices in the room.
I thought wrong. And, yes, many
of you told me so.
Even after leaving the administra-
tion, I supported the president based
on my belief that the positive results
achieved during his time in office,
especially concerning the economy,
outweighed the corrosive effects of
his unpresidential behavior. Most
notably, his pro-business govern-
ance has driven unemployment to
record lows for almost every seg-
ment of the population and boosted
wage growth — even if his lack of tact
in trade negotiations with China
now threatens to cause a recession.
However, in the yes-or-no matter of
supporting the president, I have
reached a tipping point.
For those paying attention, my
public criticism of the president has
been mounting over the past twoyears. His response to the neo-Nazi
march in Charlottesville was repel-
lent. I was appalled by the adminis-
tration’s child-separation policy
along the southern border. His rant-
ing about the news media as the
“enemy of the people” was danger-
ous and beyond the pale. But the
final straw came last month when
Trump said on Twitter that four
congresswomen — all of them
U.S. citizens, and three native-born
— should “go back and help fix the
totally broken and crime infested
places from which they came.”
While it’s difficult and embarrass-
ing to admit my errors in judgment, I
believe I still have the ability to make
amends.
I’ve been accused of turning on
Trump only because he turned on
me. If that were the case, the time to
be vindictive would have been after I
agreed to sell my company to serve in
the administration, only to be used
as a hatchet man and then summari-
ly fired after 11 days as White House
communications director simply be-
cause I used naughty words to tell a
reporter, whom I had mistakenly
trusted, the truth about bad people.
I broke from Trump because not
only has his behavior become more
erratic and his rhetoric more inflam-
matory, but also because, like all
demagogues, he is incapable of han-
dling constructive criticism. As we
lie on the bed of nails Trump has
made, it’s often difficult to see how
much the paradigm of acceptable
conduct has shifted. For the Republi-
can Party, it’s now a question of
whether we want to start cleaning
up the mess or continue papering
over the cracks.
I challenge my fellow Republicans
to summon the nerve to speak out on
the record against Trump. Defy the
culture of fear he has created, and go
public with the concerns you readily
express in private. Hold on to your
patriotism, and help save the coun-
try from his depredations. And to
members of the so-called resistance,
please leave room on the off-ramp
for those willing to admit their mis-
takes.
My personal odyssey took longer
than it should have, but I’m not
concerned with being on the right
side of history — I’m determined to
ensure that good people are the ones
who end up writing it.The writer is managing partner of
SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative
investments firm, and served as White
House communications director.I was wrong about
Trump. Here’s why.
M
eanwhile, in the semitropical
vastness of eastern Congo, a
killer is loose.
The second-largest Ebola
outbreak in history has entered its
second year. It has taken more than
1,900 lives and shows no signs of
abating. Compared with West Africa’s
outbreak in 2014-2015 that spread like
wildfire, this one is more of a slow burn.
Disease hunters discover about 10 new
infections per day. Because children are
disproportionately infected, the mortal-
ity rate is high. For every infected
person who survives the disease, two
will die of it.
This crisis may seem less significant
because the memory of West Africa’s
suffering looms so large. That earlier
outbreak was supercharged by jumping
to the large coastal cities of Freetown,
Sierra Leone; Monrovia, Liberia; and
Conakry, Guinea. So far, the outbreak in
eastern Congo has been confined to
smaller population hubs such as Beni,
Butembo, Katwa and Mangina. Cases in
the bigger city of Goma have been
contained.
But the situation in eastern Congo is
groundbreaking in a different way.
Because of the outbreak’s longevity and
durability, it raises the prospect that one
of the most dangerous threats to human-
ity could become endemic.
Experts are still pondering why this
outbreak smolders rather than rages.
One possible answer, according to
J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, is
that “the international response is con-
taining it even while failing to arrest it.”
On the plus side, the response is larger
(about 1,200 health professionals on the
ground), better trained and more experi-
enced than in 2014-2015. The World
Health Organization’s emergency re-
sponse has improved. An effective Ebola
vaccine has been given to roughly half
the contacts traced to specific infections,
as well as to health workers involved in
the response.On the negative side, this is a health
campaign conducted in a war zone. More
than 100 different militias roam eastern
Congo. Armed groups rape, exploit and
murder with impunity. The Congolese
military has sometimes joined in the
general cruelty. The region’s traumatized
civilians are naturally suspicious of out-
siders. Local politicians spread rumors
that Ebola is a myth created by the
government or a disease purposely im-
ported by foreigners. Health workers
attempting to identify cases, trace con-
tacts and put infected people in isolation
have been attacked and killed. The
U.S. government has deemed it too
dangerous to have its own health offi-
cials on the front lines of the effort.
The Congolese response is now under
the direction of a respected health minis-
ter, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who be-
lieves that improved community engage-
ment might mitigate the security situa-
tion. But eastern Congo is a long, long
way from the capital in Kinshasa, and
the central government often lacks local
power and legitimacy.
U.S. government health officials be-
lieve the next few months will be critical
to see if Muyembe’s approach has results.
One American health expert I spoke
with, however, was not hopeful. “The
outbreak is not under control,” he said,
“and there is no coherent plan to estab-
lish control.... The Congolese won’t fix
this. That much is clear.”
Even if the outbreak were contained
to its current geography, endemic Ebola
would raise terrible risks. Infected peo-
ple can spread the disease sexually for
months after they recover. Like HIV, it
can pass from pregnant mothers to their
unborn children.
And there is no guarantee that the
disease would stay contained. It could
easily spread to neighboring Uganda,
Rwanda or South Sudan. It could emerge
in African capitals. Or it could make its
way to Western countries.
If the current outbreak remains un-
controlled, the next steps are far from
clear. Most health experts think that
going in with guns to protect health
workers would make matters worse.
More funding for international organi-
zations and nongovernmental organiza-
tions might allow for a broader mix of
services and a larger supply of vaccines.
Ultimately, however, the Congo out-
break demands a redefinition of “Ameri-
ca First.” When it comes to disease, the
frontiers of the country’s security can’t
be drawn at ports and airports. The
safety of Americans may be determined
by the success of disease control in the
far reaches of Congo. And this may
require the return of U.S. health person-
nel to the front lines of the Ebola fight.
And this may further require the United
States to take the lead in seeking an-
swers to the chaos and violence in
eastern Congo. And all this would de-
pend on a type of presidential leadership
we haven’t recently seen but desperately
need.
[email protected]MICHAEL GERSON‘America First’
won’t stop
Ebola
U
h-oh. President Trump is in
such a state of panic about his
dimming reelection prospects
that he’s getting his lies mixed
up and occasionally blurting out the
truth.
“It’s tough for Apple to pay tariffs if it’s
competing with a very good company
[Samsung] that’s not,” the president told
reporters Sunday — flatly contradicting
the ridiculous and utterly false narrative
that he has spent months trying to sell.
Trump apparently forgot his standard lie
that China is somehow paying “billions
of dollars” in tariffs, acknowledging in-
stead that they are taxes paid by
U.S. companies and, ultimately, the
American consumer.
This reflects more than just the diffi-
culty of juggling multiple lies. Evidence
suggests that Trump is melting down.
Again.
And for good reason.
Fears of a global recession, greatly
exacerbated by Trump’s erratic and self-
destructive trade policies, have sent
financial markets tumbling. A sharp
downturn would close off one of the
principal lines of attack the president
was hoping to use against his Democrat-
ic opponent. He tried it out at a rally in
New Hampshire last week: “You have no
choice but to vote for me,” he told the
crowd, “because your 401(k)’s down the
tubes, everything’s gonna be down the
tubes” if he loses. “So whether you love
me or hate me, you gotta vote for me.”
Fact check: No.
Trump is flailing. He berates his hand-
picked chairman of the Federal Reserve,
Jerome H. Powell, for not cutting inter-
est rates fast enough to goose the econo-
my. He practically begs Chinese Presi-
dent Xi Jinping for a meeting to work
out a trade deal — any trade deal,
apparently — and is met with silence. He
threatens more tariffs but then backs
down, at least for now. According to
published reports, he sees himself as the
victim of a conspiracy to exaggerate the
growing economic anxiety in order to
hurt his chances of winning a second
term.
He entertains grandiose, almost Na-
poleonic fantasies — purchasing Green-
land from Denmark in what he calls “a
large real estate deal,” perhaps, or impos-
ing a naval blockade to force regime
change in Venezuela. He apparently
spent much of this past weekend fuming
about not getting credit for how his New
Hampshire rally broke an attendance
record for the arena that had been set byElton John.
And Trump can’t seem to stop railing
against a recent Fox News poll that
showed him losing to four of the leading
Democratic contenders. The president
seems to consider Fox News his adminis-
tration’s Ministry of Propaganda — in-
deed, that is the role the network’s
morning-show hosts and prime-time an-
chors loyally play — but the polling unit
is a professional operation. “There’s
something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you
right now. And I’m not happy with it,”
Trump told reporters Sunday. He added
a threat, saying that Fox “is making a big
mistake” because he is “the one that calls
the shots” on next year’s general election
debates — the implication being that Fox
News might not get to broadcast one of
them if it doesn’t toe the party line.
For the record, Trump’s claim about
his political standing is that it couldn’t
be better — but could be better.
“Great cohesion inside the Republi-
can Party, the best I have ever seen,” he
tweeted Monday. “Despite all of the Fake
News, my Poll Numbers are great. New
internal polls show them to be the
strongest we’ve had so far! Think what
they’d be if I got fair media coverage!”
An hour later, he was back on Twitter
to attack Anthony Scaramucci, who fa-
mously spent 11 days as White House
communications director and recently
became the latest Trump supporter to hit
the “eject” button. Predictably, Trump
called him a “nut job,” claimed to barely
know him and dusted off the ultimate
insult, calling him “bad on TV.”
The astonishing thing is that the
president of the United States is, let’s
face it, raving like a lunatic — and
everyone just shrugs.
The nation is still reeling from two
mass shootings. The financial markets
are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A
bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at
war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding.
Tension between the United States and
Iran continues to mount. North Korea
keeps testing new missiles. India is
playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong Kong
has been convulsed for months by mas-
sive protests seeking to guarantee basic
freedoms.
And Trump obsesses about buying
Greenland.
The truth is that we don’t have an
actual presidency right now. We have a
tiresome reality show whose ratings
have begun to slide — and whose fading
star sees cancellation on the way.
[email protected]EUGENE ROBINSONThe lunatic raves. We shrug.
W
hen Barack Obama was pres-
ident and the economic sta-
tistics were good, then-
candidate Donald Trump
said they were fake. When Trump be-
came president and inherited the exact
same stats, they suddenly became real.
Now that they’re turning south,
they’re apparently fake once more.
Trump, aided by his economic brain
trust of cranks and sycophants, believes
any indicator showing the U.S. economy
could be in trouble must be fabricated.
It’s all part of an anti-Trump conspiracy,
he rants, according to reports in The
Post, the Associated Press and the New
York Times.
And move over, Illuminati, because
this particular conspiracy is massive.
It’s led by the Federal Reserve, Demo-
crats and the media, of course, or so say
Trump and his Fox News minions. But it
also includes the entire U.S. bond
market, which flashed a warning sign
last week when the Treasury yield curve
inverted (meaning long-term bonds
had lower interest rates than short-
term ones, which usually predates a
downturn).
Also colluding are the many farmers,
retailers, manufacturers and econo-
mists who have been warning for more
than a year that the burden of Trump’s
tariffs is mainly borne by Americans,
not China or other trading partners, and
also that uncertainty over trade tensions
can paralyze hiring, investment and
purchasing decisions, which we need to
keep the economy expanding.
The cabal even transcends borders.
Besides Trump’s trade wars, after all, the
main risk to the U.S. economy involves
contagion from abroad. And right now,
nine major economies are either in a
recession or on the verge of one. Never
fear, though: All nine countries’ statisti-
cians are surely cooking their books to
hurt Trump, too.
The White House has reportedly de-
clined to develop contingency plans for
a downturn because it doesn’t want to
validate this “negative narrative.” This
is, in a word, idiotic. As others have
analogized, it’s like refusing to buy a fire
extinguisher because you’re afraid of
feeding a “negative narrative” that you
might someday face a fire.
Administration officials decided the
best way to deal with recession risk,
which they of course aren’t personally
worried about, was through a show of
force on TV. There, Trump’s economic
advisers assured Americans they defi-
nitely, certainly, cross-their-hearts-and-
hope-to-die don’t see reason to worry.
White House trade adviser Peter Na-
varro’s strategy was to deny that the
data show Americans are paying higherprices on tariffed goods (though we are)
and also that the yield curve had
recently inverted (though it did). On
that latter point, Navarro said the curve
was merely “flat” and therefore doesn’t
signal a possible recession. In virtually
identical language across interviews, he
told audiences that he had authority in
this matter because he “didn’t write the
book on the yield curve,” he wrote
“several books on the efficacy of the
yield curve as a leading economic indi-
cator.”
What Navarro failed to mention,
though, is that these books say that both
inverted and “flat” yield curves are
usually signs of impending recession.
One such book, from 2006, explicitly
mocked business leaders for failing to
prepare for the 2001 recession because
they had ignored “the ominous progres-
sion of the yield curve” that began with
the curve’s flattening.
So, yeah, you can add mid-2000s-era
Navarro to the list of anti-Trump con-
spirators, too.
Trump’s National Economic Council
Director Larry Kudlow hit the Sunday
shows, too. For his part, he bizarrely
pretended other troubling economic
data (in this case, on consumer senti-
ment) didn’t exist. He also repeatedly
told viewers: “Let’s not be afraid of
optimism.”
And look, yes, it would be unhelpful
for public officials to go on TV and tell
everybody to panic, pull their money out
of the market and stuff it under their
mattresses. The White House obviously
wants to project confidence instead.
But that confidence is convincing
only if it’s credible — because, say, the
White House has acknowledged how its
own trade policies are contributing to
recession risk and is committed to
reversing them. Or because it has a
competent team in place if recession
strikes.
Neither is true.
Instead, Kudlow’s call for optimism
has a whiff of Peter Pan logic about it: If
only we believe in fairies hard enough,
we can always save Tinker Bell — even
when we’re sending her out into a
hailstorm. If you believe, clap your
hands; don’t let Tink die!
It’s hard to imagine nervous Ameri-
cans are really this credulous. Then
again, perhaps we were never the in-
tended audience for such performances.
Sure, maybe White House aides are
trying to fool the public into believing
recession warning signs don’t exist. But
maybe they’re actually just trying to fool
their boss.
A frightening conspiracy theory, in-
deed.
[email protected]CATHERINE RAMPELLTrump’s recession strategy:
Deny, deny, deny
PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Trump in Morristown, N.J., on Sunday.JENNIFER RUBINExcerpted from washingtonpost.com/people/jennifer-rubinTrump’s predictable cave
To the surprise of no one who has
watched President Trump cater to the
National Rifle Association’s whims and
repeatedly pull back from meaningful
gun-safety legislation, the president is
already sounding timorous on new legis-
lation he briefly seemed interested in
after mass shootings in El Paso and
Dayton, Ohio.
On Sunday, he told reporters, “I’m
saying Congress is going to be reporting
back to me with ideas.” He then qualified
immediately that suggestions will “come
in from Democrats and Republicans. And
I’ll look at it very strongly.” And then the
NRA-approved line: “But just remember,
we already have a lot of background
checks. Okay?”
This is precisely what gun-lobby pro-
pagandists have been saying for years.
Just enforce the laws on the books. Don’t
close the gun-show loophole. Don’t change
laws so that abusive partners would be
barred from getting guns. And if Trump
has now reverted to NRA talking points,
you can bet Republican support for a ban
on assault weapons and limits to maga-
zine capacities is once again out of the
question.
Senate Minority Leader Charles
E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was having none of it.
In a written statement on Monday, he
declared, “We’ve seen this movie before:
President Trump, feeling public pressure
in the immediate aftermath of a horrible
shooting, talks about doing something
meaningful to address gun violence, but
inevitably, he backtracks in response topressure from the NRA and the hard-
right.”
Practically speaking, the real way for-
ward may be for Democrats to run on gun
safety in 2020 and call out Trump and his
Republican allies as cowards. That would
be smart politics given that the NRA’s
approval is underwater and new gun laws
are exceptionally popular among the
same groups of voters already fleeing the
GOP (e.g., women, college-educated vot-
ers, suburbanites). The Republican Main
Street Partnership, a moderate group that
backs “red flag” laws, recently released
the results of a survey of 1,000 registered
voters across five suburban House dis-
tricts: The result should scare the GOP. Of
the women in these districts, “72% said
they think gun laws should be stricter...
90% support requiring universal back-
ground checks for gun purchases at gun
shows or other private sales... 88% said
they would support requiring a 48-hour
waiting period... [and] 84% back a
national red flag law that would permit
law enforcement to temporarily retain
firearms from a person who may present
a danger to others or themselves.” Clear
majorities also support bans on assault
weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Trump and congressional Republicans’
obsequiousness to the NRA will be an-
other reason for these voters to abandon
the GOP, in addition to the president’s
racism, bullying, climate-change denial,
attacks on health care and abject cruelty
toward migrant children. Then the rest of
the country can pass rational gun laws.
With Trump and the GOP out of power,
real progress is possible.U.S. government health
officials believe the next few
months will be critical.