WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019 The Boston Globe Opinion A
P
resident Trump apparently learned a kind of
code from one of his mentors, Roy Cohn: Al-
ways hit back. Never apologize.
Aroughandoccasionallyviciouslawyer,Cohn
was chief counsel for Joe McCarthy. He practiced
what he preached.
Was Cohn right? There is a lot of evidence that he was.
But existing evidence is preliminary, and it does not
involve presidents, let alone Trump. If a president, par-
ticularly this president, does something offensive or hor-
rifying, is he better off if he says that he is sorry? And if
not, why not?
With the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I recently
investigated these questions. I asked about 400 demo-
graphically diverse Americans how they would react if
Trump apologized for his recent tweet suggesting that
fourDemocraticcongresswomenofcolorshould“go
back” to the countries from which they “originally came.”
I asked people whether an apology would make them
more inclined to support Trump, less inclined to support
him, or neither more nor less inclined to support him.
The results were clear. A majority — 51 percent — said
that they would be neither more nor less likely to support
him. Thirty percent said that an apology would make
them less likely to support him. Only 19 percent said that
an apology would make them more likely to support him.
If we did a little deeper, the picture gets even more
striking.
Because Trump’s tweet targeted women, you might
think that the apology would be more likely to help with
women. Wrong.
In fact, the percentage of women who were likely to
show less support, as a result of the apology, was higher
than the percentage of men.
Trump’s tweet targeted Democrats, and you might
think that the apology would move at least Democrats. It
didn’t. Democrats, Republicans, and independents
showed essentially identical numbers.
To my amazement, I was unable to find any group
that would be more likely, on net, to support Trump if he
apologized for his tweet.
Why is this? Any answer would be speculative, but in
speculating, we might want to do some disaggregating.
Democrats don’t much like Trump, and most of them
probably abhorred his tweet (as they would abhor
anything for which he might be asked to apologize). For
them, an apology is not exactly exculpatory. They might
well think: “He apologized only because he had to do
that; he isn’t sincere. He’s a creep.”
If that’s what they’re thinking, they will hardly be
more likely to support him as a result of an apology.
When they say that they are less likely to support him, we
might understand them to be saying something much
simpler: “I’m really, really not going to support him.”
For their part, Republicans are not likely to be
especially excited about an apology from their president.
To them, a mea culpa might be a demonstration of
weakness. They might even feel betrayed, thinking that
their efforts to defend him, and to stand by his side, have
been called into question.
Recall, though, that 19 percent of people said that an
apology would make them more likely to support Trump.
That’s not huge, but it’s not exactly small.
It follows that for some people — including
Democrats, Republicans, and independents — a
statement of contrition is a positive step. It signals a
willingness to take responsibility for an offensive action,
and to show a measure of respect to those who have been
offended. A lot of people appreciate that.
Roy Cohn was not known as a lovely man, and his en-
thusiasm for always hitting back, and never apologizing,
was part of his unloveliness. From the moral point of
view, apologizing is often the right thing to do.
It may not be wise political strategy. But even for the
president of the United States, it’s a way of showing
grace.Cass R. Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School
and author of “Impeachment: A Citizens Guide.’’Would support
for Trump
increase if he
apologized?
Inbox
Lapseinhospicecare
leavespain,stirsreaction
In care of dying, patients must
be placed ahead of paperworkOur deepest condolences to Joan Wickersham and her
family for the experience she recently shared about a loved
one in hospice (“The night we hung up on hospice,”
Opinion, July 26). As a community and a philosophy,
hospice prides itself on person- and family-centered care
that goes beyond addressing the medical needs of the
patient. Compassion and understanding throughout the
end-of-life care journey are part of the hospice paradigm —
truly the heart and soul of hospice care. No one should ever
experience such an inadequate response when calling on
hospice for crisis support.
Wickersham points to the clerical focus of the on-call
nurse as the core of the problem, and in her case, it may
have been. She also offers the right solution, which should
have been for the person who answered the hospice line to
hear the concern of the family first. Unfortunately, in this
instance, administrative tasks overshadowed the need for
family support and expertise.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has
launched an initiative to place patients ahead of
paperwork, and nowhere is this needed more than in the
care of the dying. The hospice community has voiced its
desire to work with the administration and Congress on
these efforts to address issues of quality and oversight
within our provider community.
We owe our community nothing less than the highest-
quality, person-centered, interdisciplinary care that hospice
can provide.
EDO BANACH
President and CEO
National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization
Alexandria, Va.Hospiceworkersunderstandthey
must always strive to do betterI read Joan Wickersham’s “The night we hung up on hos-
pice” with great sadness. The scenario she described is like
what I have experienced, as both a caregiver and a patient
with a long-term chronic illness. The problem is not with
hospice — the problem is in lack of training around how to
cut through the fog of confusion in difficult moments.
If anything, hospice workers know and acknowledge the
challenge of moments like this. Accordingly, there has been
a rise in the development of protocols and trainings that
focus on how to help individuals and their families through
these scenarios. It is in these trainings where I have learned
how to meet each moment in the dying process with the
clarity, compassion, groundedness, and imagination that
Wickersham feels was lacking.
At the National Partnership for Hospice Innovation, our
members know that we get only one chance at helping
someone. This is precisely why our members invest in
opportunities for continuing education — we know that we
must always strive to do better.
It is my sincere hope that the on-call clinician in the case
of Wickersham’s family will be able to learn from that
encounter and to take advantage of trainings similar to
those I have attended. As hospice workers, we owe it to the
families we serve to better help in moments of fear and
confusion.
CATE BONACINI
Communications manager
National Partnership for Hospice Innovation
Washington, D.C.We’re living in an age of
poor customer serviceI empathize completely with the heightened level of
frustration Joan Wickersham experienced while interacting
with a seemingly rude and hostile hospice representative
during a loved one’s final moments. Unfortunately, this
mutation of what was once considered essential in business
— good customer service — is now a common experience.
It’s as if some wedge of human cognition has gone dark,
leaving people unable to listen, process, and respond in
appropriate fashion. I cringe every time I call a business
seeking information, knowing I’ll have to repeat, rephrase,
simplify, then often abandon my request.
Minds more robust than mine may be able to point to
shrinking interpersonal exchanges in modern life as the
cause. It’s just unfortunate that, in situations as sensitive as
Wickersham’s, this lapse leaves such an ugly mark.
JUDY NEE
WinthropThere is a new space race at Logan Airport (“Delta makes
Logan one of its hubs,” Jon Chesto, Business, July 18). Delta
Airlines will endeavor, in this decade, to provide 200 daily
departures while JetBlue organizes the best of its energies
and skills to do the same. People in and around Boston will
feel the earth shake and air shatter and will lift their heads
to the skies with wonder, asking, “Why are there so many
planes constantly flying overhead?”
The communities I represent fall under high-traffic
flight paths and can experience 400 noisy flights overhead
in a single day, including some well after midnight. Since
2012, when Logan reached its post-recession low, total op-
erations have increased 27 percent. The change to area nav-
igation, or RNAV, technology in 2013 aided this growth but
concentrated almost all the burdensome traffic on a few
communities. Now JetBlue and Delta aim for more than 30
percent increases to their daily departure rate, which al-
ready accounts for about a quarter of Logan’s operations.
If the Massachusetts Port Authority lets airlines sched-
ule more flights, the agency must take into account the im-
pact these additional flights will have on surrounding com-
munities. If the race to provide more daily flights continues
beyond 200 per carrier, the need will intensify for signifi-
cant changes in flight patterns, dispersion, and noise abate-
ment procedures.
SENATOR PATRICIA D. JEHLEN
Democrat of SomervilleThe writer represents Somerville, Medford, Cambridge,
and Winchester.AsairlinesvieforleadatLogan,nearby
communitiesbraceforturbulenceThose who deplore Barr’s decision make no attempt to argue
that these men deserve to live. Instead, they denounce capital pun-
ishment itself, and accuse the administration of changing its policy
out of “raw political calculus” (Slate) and as “one more stunt to dis-
tract Americans” (The Atlantic).
Of course politics were involved inBarr’s move. But if anyone
here is being political, it is Democrats like Biden, who favored the
death penalty when it had widespread public support and didn’t
turn against it until it became unpopular among Democrats. As
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, Biden
championed a crime bill that created 60 new death penalty offenses.
“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill,” he
proudly declared at the time. That measure passed by sweeping ma-
jorities in the Democratic-controlled House and Senate and was
signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
What has changed since the Clinton era? Why has there been
such a marked decline in the share of Americans who say that they
support the death penalty? Death-penalty abolitionists credit
themselves with making better, stronger, or more effective argu-
ments. Here’s a more likely explanation: Public opinion shifted be-
cause of murder rates, not policy debates.
In the 1990s, when Americans approved the death penalty by
sky-high percentages, Americans were also being killed with sky-
high frequency. There were fewer than 10,000 homicides annually
in the United States in the early 1960s, but three decades later
there were more than 24,000. The nation’s murder rate soared
over the same period, from 5 per 100,000 to 9.5 per 100,000.
It was against that background that support for capital punish-
ment, which had been falling since the 1950s, began to climb. In
1966, Gallup found that only 42 percent of the public favored exe-
cuting murderers: an all-time low. In 1994, the year Clinton
signed that crime bill, pro-death-penalty sentiment had risen to 80
percent: an all-time high.
And just as Americans embraced the death penalty when kill-
ings were on the rise, they backed away from it as killings de-
creased.
After hitting 9.5 in 1994, the murder rate began a downward
plunge that criminologists are still trying to understand. It sank
all the way to 4.4 in 2014 — and as it did, so did public approval of
the death penalty. According to the Pew Research Center, the frac-
tion of Americans supporting capital punishment dropped to 49
percent in 2016, the lowest level in four decades.
And since then? In 2014, the pendulum shifted again. Murders
and the murder rate began moving back up. Sure enough, support
for the death penalty did too. It rose to 54 percent in 2018.
To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But six decades
of correlation are hard to discount: The willingness of the public
to put murderers to death rises and falls with the threat murderers
pose. If homicides are back on an upward trend, more and more
Americans will want killers put to death — and more and more
politicians will decide they do, too.Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on
Twitter @jeff_jacoby.By Cass R. Sunstein
ILLUSTRATION BY LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF; ADOBE; GLOBE FILE PHOTO