The Washington Post - 31.07.2019

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A

charleston, s.c.

T

he idea of a race war has long animated white supremacists, who seem to think such a conflict would result in a white victory, whatever that would mean. Dylann Roof — the white man-boy who murdered nine black worshipers during Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church here four summers ago — entertained such an idea and told his roommate that he wanted to start a race war. Roof, of course, failed in his mission. Instead of a war, he sparked a massive, community-wide and statewide demonstration of love, charity and forgiveness, as well as a deepened commit- ment to racial reconciliation. Blacks and whites hugged, joined hands and, soon after the shooting, marched by the thousands over the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in solidar- ity. If there ever was to be a “race war” in America, it would have to wait for President Trump — rhetorically speaking. Before you dash to your keyboard, I’m not comparing Trump’s recent racist remarks to a mass murderer’s bloody rampage. But the president’s cannon is loose upon the land, and his attempts to create friction between the races is not harmless. Though no one in his or her right mind can be happy about his callous comments recently aimed exclusive- ly at minority leaders, one can be fairly certain that America’s neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klanners and other white supremacists are celebrating. Meanwhile, the commentariat has been busy trying to decide whether Trump is truly a racist or merely acting like a fascist psychopath who will use any available means to indulge his impulses and advance his agenda, whatever that may be at any given moment. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that more than half of Americans think he is a racist — so congratulations, Mr. President. Some legacy. Trump’s racism, which for these purposes shall be defined as employing race for selfish or nefarious purposes, didn’t start with the racial confrontation in Charlottesville, when the president defended white-nationalist protesters by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Sorry, but white supremacists don’t get to be “very fine people” when their purpose is the domina- tion or elimination of nonwhites. “Evil” is the better word. Trump’s racism also didn’t start with the

so-called Squad, the four first-term minority congresswomen whom he told to go back where they came from — a favorite trope of racists throughout American history. Nor was it confined to his tirade against Rep. Eli- jah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and his majority- black congressional district — which in- cludes parts of Baltimore — when Trump tweeted that it was a “rat and rodent infested mess” and that “no human being would want to live there.” No human being? Recall that, in this great country, blacks were once considered and legally treated as three-fifths human. No, the president’s racism has been pre- sent since the good ol’ days when he tagged along with his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, to check on his apartment buildings in Queens, where the policy was basically No blacks allowed. Of course, people can evolve and change, but apparent- ly, the president’s moral development seems to have arrested somewhere around the middle of last century. So, yes, Trump has essentially declared a “race war,” for lack of a better term, on minority leaders and their constituents. His defenders can argue that there were other reasons for his attacks on people who just happen to be minorities. The four congresswomen ran and won in 2018 on anti-Trump platforms. Cummings heads the House Oversight Committee, which recently voted to subpoena emails and text messages writ- ten using personal accounts in the White House, which would include those of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. But Trump’s critics come in a rainbow of hues, any of whom he could single out. Recently, however, he has gone after nonwhites, and he’s done so for a reason: to distract, to punish and to reinvent an old brand, No blacks allowed, which, presum- ably, would extend to the White House, as well. After all, didn’t this guy start his political career by leading the birther move- ment? Thought so. Nothing racist about that. One would hope that Trump’s foul mouth, rather than exacerbating racial division, would foster a shared derision toward this mean-spirited, foolish man. As people did here in Charleston, we should dishonor him by embracing each other, figuratively speaking, though throwing a multiracial lovefest in Baltimore wouldn’t be the worst idea. Invite the rats! Except for, you know, that one. [email protected]

KATHLEEN PARKER

Trump’s rhetorical race war

A

mong intelligence professionals, President Trump’s nomination of an inexperienced, partisan politician to oversee America’s spy agencies prompted deep dismay — but also a stolid reaffirmation of the spymas- ter’s credo: Let’s get on with it. This combination of incredulity and stoicism was voiced by a half- dozen current and former officers I spoke with Monday about Trump’s choice of Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) to become director of national intelligence. The worry is partly that Ratc- liffe lacks any real experience and perhaps more that he has embraced Trump’s “deep state” conspiracy theo- ries about the CIA and FBI. “This makes the workforce wonder, what are we doing here?” said one veteran CIA station chief. But a few moments later, he affirmed: “This place is under siege. People say, carry on, protect the mission, avoid the firing range.” “Analysts will be asking how well [Ratcliffe] will represent our product downtown,” said a second former officer who served in a senior position under Daniel Coats, the departing DNI. This former official predicted that it would take Ratcliffe a year just to understand the vast array of 17 intelligence agencies he will oversee, if he’s confirmed. The deepest worry among intelligence professionals is how the Ratc- liffe nomination, and the intense par- tisanship that fueled it, will be per- ceived by the United States’ intelligence partners overseas. “They’re in wait-and-see mode,” said a former senior CIA officer after canvassing a group of intelligence colleagues. If the White House exerts political control through Ratcliffe, “foreign governments will be wondering if they should be sharing information” with the CIA and National Security Agency, said the veteran station chief. The most successful DNI since the creation of the post in 2004 was Coats’s predecessor, James R. Clapper Jr., a career intelligence officer whom Trump recklessly attacked because of his supposed political bias. In fact, Clapper was the model of an inde- pendent intelligence chief, who told the truth about intelligence failures in assessing the Islamic State, for exam- ple, when it made colleagues in the Obama administration uncomfort- able. Coats showed similar willingness to give honest if politically awkward assessments in congressional testi- mony in January of North Korea’s continuing nuclear weapons development and Iran’s continuing compli- ance with the 2015 nuclear deal — both contradicting Trump’s line.

This truth-telling standard is in the DNI’s job description. Trump instead chose “a man who tells the president what he wants to know, rather than what he needs to know,” said the veteran station chief. A decisive factor in how the intelligence community views Ratcliffe will be his treatment of his two most senior prospective lieutenants: Gina Haspel, the CIA director; and Sue Gordon, who has been Coats’s deputy. Haspel benefits from having a solid relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who preceded her as CIA director. Pompeo is probably Trump’s most influential adviser, and his patronage will shield Haspel, if it continues. Foreign spy services, too, are hoping Pompeo can protect Has- pel, but they will begin hedging their bets if she’s isolated. “If Gina gets cut out, the liaison services will begin to shut everything down,” said the former CIA officer who had talked with colleagues. Simi- larly, CIA employees will ask, “What the hell am I here for?” said this former case officer. The future role of Gordon, a 39- year veteran of the intelligence community, will be especially important. She would normally become acting DNI with Coats’s departure, but Trump signaled that he planned to announce a new acting director. The DNI’s lawyers have concluded that Trump has that power, legally, but it wasn’t clear Monday who would take the post, and the situation appeared to be fluid. Gordon is widely admired within the inbred, sometimes back-biting world of intelligence. She served in all four of the CIA’s directorates — operations, analysis, support, and science and technology. She helped launch the agency’s in-house technology in- cubator, known as In-Q-Tel, and ran the agency’s high-tech information operations center. If Gordon leaves, Ratcliffe’s problems will multiply. Because Ratcliffe is such a partisan and inexperienced nominee, his con- firmation hearings will be a crucial baseline. A former top-level CIA official said he should be quizzed: “If analysts say Kim Jong Un won’t give up his nuclear weapons, would you so testify? If the analysts say Iran is complying with the nuclear agree- ment, would you so testify?” Trump is governing these days with the destructive power of a sledgehammer. The intelligence shake-up could be his most dangerous move yet. If Ratcliffe doesn’t promise to strictly safeguard the intelligence community’s independ- ence, his nomination should be tossed. This one really matters. Twitter: @IgnatiusPost

DAVID IGNATIUS

Trump’s dangerous

intelligence shake-up

A

lot of writers like to dwell on the things President Trump doesn’t know, such as the location of Myanmar and the proper verb tense for discussing Fred- erick Douglass. Democrats hoping to defeat him in next year’s election had better pay attention instead to the things he does know. Trump knows in his bones the central fact of two-party presidential politics. Namely, that this isn’t a popularity contest. Less expert com- mentators often say it is, but they are wrong, and Trump is right. A presidential election is more like an unpopularity contest. Trump can win by making his opponent just a little less popular than himself. And he knows that this isn’t a question for the summer of 2019. It’s a question for one specific day in the autumn of 2020 — whatever day each voter marks the presidential ballot. For that day, and that day only, Trump seeks to be slightly less unpopular, a wisp of a whisker less loathed, than the Democratic nominee. And he knows that presidents are not necessarily elected by popular majorities. His challenge is to be only the second-least-popular candidate in just enough states to win 270 electoral votes. He can lose by millions of votes in California and New York and Illinois, but he’ll be reelected so long as he beats the Democratic nominee by a vote or two in Florida, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania — all places where he defeated Hillary Clinton, using precisely this knowledge, in 2016. Trump knows instinctively the power of an insight often attributed to the late comedian George Burns: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” In today’s lingo, the key might be called “authenticity.” But whether we call it sincerity or authenticity, Trump fakes it very effectively in his effort to be just a little bit less unpopular than his opponents. How? By doing and saying things no ordinary politician would dream of. The most common assessment of Trump I hear from his voters goes like this: I might not approve of everything he says, but I like that he says what he thinks. Trump knows that politicians, as a class, are held in contempt by much of the public. Thus, making his opponents appear to be more thoroughly political than he is can be a good weapon in the unpopularity contest. He knows this goes double for the media. Triple for Congress. When Trump says or does something to earn denunciations from Congress, the media and a host of career politicians — whether it’s an attack on Baltimore or a reverie about his imaginary see-through, solar-paneled Wall — he cashes a trifecta. All this Trumpian knowledge is useful in tracking the race for the Democratic nomination. Forget the polls that show various Democratic candidates beating the president by wide margins. The only horse race that matters is the one in the electoral college. And forget the poll that showed 54 percent of respondents pledging never to vote for Trump. That’s what Lindsey O. Graham used to say, until he ran across a less popular alternative to supporting Trump — namely, the threat of losing his Senate seat — and lo! He decided Trump was not quite so unpalatable. Trump knows that “never” has, for many people, an elastic meaning. Sort of like “till death us do part.” Furthermore, if 54 percent of voters in fact “never” vote for Trump, he’ll still have a shot at 46 percent of them, which just happens to be the percent- age he won in 2016. If Democrats are interested in polls, they might spend some time absorbing the rolling average of their own candidates as measured by Real- ClearPolitics. What it shows at this admittedly early point is a pandemic of no-mentum. Heading into the second round of two-night marathon debates, the field is nearly stuck where it was before Round One. The surge of support that Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D- Calif.) drew at the expense of former vice president Joe Biden has ebbed. The left wing appears evenly split between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose falling poll numbers seem to have found their floor, and Sen. Eliza- beth Warren (D-Mass.), whose rising numbers might have hit a ceiling. No sign here of a groundswell rising to embrace the promise of free everything. As for the rest of the field: damp kindling. Even the much-ballyhooed Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., is drawing a trend line as flat as the Texas Panhandle. Half the Democrats in the United States are running for president, yet so far no one can touch Biden — the same Biden who was whipped in 1988 by a guy named Michael Dukakis. The same Biden who won less than 1 percent of the votes in Iowa in 2008. Trump knows exactly what he thinks of that situation. And he likes it. [email protected]

DAVID VON DREHLE

Hoping for an

unpopularity

I contest

t was the Detroit Donnybrook. Tues- day’s Democratic debate was choppy but passionate, opening up wide phil- osophical divisions within the party’s presidential field and providing sound bites critical of progressive ideas and candidates that Republicans are certain to use in 2020. Moderate candidates trailing in the polls went in determined to upend Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Ber- nie Sanders (Vt.), the two strongest candidates on the stage and leaders of the party’s left. Warren and Sanders were still standing at the end. Warren was consis- tently crisp, displaying the mastery-on- the-run that has lifted her in the polls. Sanders pushed back again and again against rivals he cast as insufficiently open to change. But several of those running behind — South Bend, Ind., May- or Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Montana Gov. Steve Bull- ock — broke through the noise, of which there was a lot. CNN’s moderators kept trying to stop candidates from speaking, and the candidates did their best to ignore them. It gave the debate a disjointed feel, and a randomly selected group of candidates representing half the party’s field created a very particular dynamic. Before the encounter began, Democrat-

ic National Chairman Tom Perez spoke of the party having “the most diverse field in our nation’s history.” But all of Tuesday’s candidates were white. The five candidates of color will appear in the second debate Wednesday, which will feature the other leaders in the race, former vice president Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala D. Harris. They were probably smiling as they watched the first half of the field tear each other apart. Having the two staunch progressives onstage together did not create the fight many expected: a showdown between a rising Warren and a Sanders who has been falling behind her. Instead, the two worked almost as allies in a different battle, pushing back against others who challenged progressive ideas, including a single-payer health-care system and the Green New Deal. With former Maryland congressman John Delaney serving as a middle-of-the- road bomb thrower, attacking rivals for not understanding health care, getting their math wrong and threatening to destroy the private insurance system, Warren and Sanders got increasingly im- patient. At one point, Warren turned to Delaney and said: “I don’t know why anyone goes to all the trouble to run for president of the United States just to talk about what we can’t do and can’t fight for.”

Sanders expressed exasperation, as well. “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas. Republicans aren’t afraid of big ideas.” The debate opened with an extended scuffle about the Medicare-for-all propos- al that Sanders popularized and Warren has endorsed. Supporters of the plan no doubt cheered the defenses offered by Warren and Sanders — that it would cut paperwork, end co-pays and deductibles, take corporate profit out of the health- care equation and guarantee everyone coverage. But their foes rehearsed all the arguments Republicans will use against it, among them that it could end private health insurance (including, said Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, the generous plans negotiated by unions) and force large tax increases to pay for the new system. Buttigieg and Klobuchar both defended the alternative of adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act. Buttigieg ar- gued that if the public system worked best, Americans would flock to it and create Medicare-for-all by choice. Klobuchar spoke of the urgency of getting everyone covered and cast the public option as “the easiest way to move forward quickly.” Democrats would do well to act like a sports team, watch the film of this encounter and consider how well Medicare-for- all would hold up on the 2020 battlefield.

Tuesday’s test should be sobering. As the debate wore on, many onstage seemed frustrated at the collective por- trait the candidates were presenting. “We are more worried about winning an argu- ment than winning an election,” Klobu- char said. Buttigieg said that, “It’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists.” But the GOP would do the same, he said, if Democrats “embrace a conservative agenda.” The lesson: “Stop worrying about what the Republicans will say.” Author Marianne Williamson, who also had effective moments, including a moving plea for racial justice, expressed frustration with the divisive policy thicket simply: “Yada, yada, yada.” For Bullock, it was his first debate and an effective one. He stressed his successful fight in Montana against big money in politics, his success in a state carried by Donald Trump and spoke movingly of his conversion on gun control. In the end, it was a substantive discussion, very unlike anything Trump would engage in. But it was also an evening during which Democrats watching in their living rooms confronted the possibil- ity that the long fight between now and next summer could be irritable, difficult and fractious. Twitter: @EJDionne

E.J. DIONNE JR.

A fractious night on the Democratic debate stage

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) during a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week with former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

PAUL WALDMAN

Excerpted from washingtonpost.com/people/paul-waldman

Where the rants come from “I know you are, but what am I?” is not only a time-honored playground rejoinder, it’s also one of President Trump’s favorite arguments. I’m not a racist, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) is a racist. When Trump made that charge against Cummings in the midst of a days-long attack on the congressman’s city of Baltimore and its residents, some people found it puzzling. But he didn’t have to explain, because if you didn’t im- mediately understand, he wasn’t talking to you. Trump was talking directly to his base, for which discussions about race have a particular resonance and a particular dynamic. As someone who spends hours every day watching Fox News, Trump is tuned directly into the discussion of race that occurs on that platform and elsewhere in conservative media; he knows it well. For the uninitiated, here are some of the main features of the racial narrative Fox News and other conservative outlets weave: Actual racial discrimination is largely a thing of the past; the most common victims of racial discrimination today are white people; liberals constantly accuse conserva- tives of being racist with zero justification, an accusation that can be impossible to refute; people of color are held back by their own pathologies; and Democrats are The Real Racists, because their party was pro- slavery during the Civil War and many

20th-century segregationists were Demo- crats. Let’s not forget what the trigger was for Trump’s Twitter rant about Baltimore being “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” It was, of course, a Fox News segment meant to invoke precisely that disgust. When Trump called Cummings a racist, he was activating this entire narrative in the minds of his most ardent supporters, saying to them: You’re the victims here, and those people don’t have any right to criticize us. You can tell how desperately many Re- publicans wish he’d change the subject. But he won’t. Trump believes he is winning, because he’s getting attention and giving his core supporters what they want. He turns on Fox News and sees good friends Sean Hanni- ty and Jeanine Pirro amplify his arguments and tell him that he’s a genius executing a masterful strategy. Which is why it’s likely that we’ll be repeating this cycle over and over between now and November 2020. The president believes the endless repetition of that cycle will guarantee his victory. He believes white people are motivated by racial animus, by resentment and fear, by anger and hate, and only by bringing those emotions to the fore will he be reelected. He accuses others of hating America, but this is his odious vision of who Americans are, at least the only Americans who matter to him. If only we could be confident that he’s wrong.

The Washington Post - 31.07.2019

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources