SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27SUNDAY OpinionM
ario Valadez, now 67, hadn’t
intended to stop working yet.
Starting as a busboy at 16, he
had moved from one Los
A ngeles-area dining establishment to
another, eventually working his way up
to restaurant manager. When he lost a
position in January 2020, he thought it
would be a temporary pause.
Then covid-19 hit. The longer Valadez
was out of work, the less he wanted to
return to 12-hour days in the stressful
environment of the restaurant industry.
When the e conomy reopened and p oten-
tial employers began to reach out, he
surprised himself by saying no. “I talked
to my wife, I talked to my sons, and they
told me, ‘Don’t work. You work too
much,’ ” Valadez told me. Instead, he
filed for Social Security.
And that’s how Valadez came to take
part in the Great Retirement of the baby
boomers — a workplace exodus with the
power to upend both the workplace and
the U.S. economy.
Goldman Sachs estimated last fall
that more than half o f those w ho h ad l eft
the workforce during the covid era’s
Great Resignation were over 55. An
analysis released by the Federal Reserve
Bank of St. Louis found workforce exits
are higher among baby boomers than
pre-covid trends would indicate, with a
report last month finding women —
many of whom work in public-facing
positions and are between the ages of
65 and 74 — among the groups leading
the way.
Employers are dependent on the out-
size baby boomer cohort, whose exit is
contributing to growing shortages of
workers everywhere, from nursing to
school bus drivers to the service indus-
try. It’s not just 22-year-old baristas who
have had it with working conditions.
Those understaffed stores? Retailers be-
came increasingly reliant on older work-
ers in the wake of the Great Recession.
Many are now making an exit.
This is a significant reversal. In the
years leading up to the pandemic, many
Americans said they wanted to w ork well
past the traditional retirement age. In
2013, a solid 10 percent told Gallup they
would “never” exit the workforce. Sure,
some of this was driven by financial
necessity — Americans, famously, do not
have enough money set aside for their
senior years — but it also reflected an
obsession with work as a way of finding
meaning in life.
By refusing to go gentle into the good
retirement night, baby boomers were
doing the economy a favor. Their contin-
ued presence in the workforce helped
compensate for everything from reduced
immigration to the falling birthrate.
Their sudden exit, on the other hand,
raises a host of gnarly issues. It’s poten-
tially inflationary because employers
competing for scarcer labor will have to
pay higher wages, so they will raise the
prices of their products. This could con-
tribute to a wage-price spiral, where
rising prices lead empowered workers to
demand raises to keep up, fueling even
more inflation.
It could also turn into an economic
drag. Long before c ovid, there were fears
the baby boomer retirements would
stress the finances of Social Security.
And the new retirees — many currently
flush with outsize gains in the stock and
housing markets — could find them-
selves in a more difficult economic posi-
tion than they expect if those assets
decline significantly in value.
All this provides yet another reason
for American employers to improve la-
bor conditions — for older workers and
for everyone else. The American work-
place is often harsh and takes more than
it gives back. There’s no mandated paid
sick leave or v acation time. Age discrimi-
nation is rife. The vast majority of us are
at-will employees, which means we can
be let go at any time. The mass layoffs
and remote commuting of the covid
period, it seems, finally gave Americans
reasons to decide they no longer wanted
to take part in it.
Many older employees, however, say
they would l ike to s tay connected to their
jobs in retirement, but worry that they
won’t be able to do so. In a recent survey
conducted by the Harris Poll for Express
Employment Professionals, a staffing
agency, a vast majority of respondents
expressed interest in semiretirement,
where they could either work a flexible
schedule or reduced hours or consult —
but only 1 in 5 of their employers offered
up such an option.
Let me be clear. The boomers are
going t o retire at s ome p oint a nyway. B ut
it would be better for all of us in the
immediate future if we could entice
them to do it on a gradual basis. Valadez
provides an example. When he found he
needed more money than his Social
Security check provided, he took a part-
time position selling organic fruit at
farmers markets. The gig is pleasant, and
if he wants to t ake time off to see his mom
in Mexico, no one complains.
He doesn’t rule out the possibility of
returning to restaurant work. But it
would need to be in a place with enough
staff — something not common in the
covid era. And he doesn’t want to put in
any more monster workweeks. Now, “I
can spend more time with the family,
with the friends, go to visit my mom, my
brothers, my sisters,” Valadez told me. “I
start enjoying life.”HELAINE OLENThe GreatRetirementIt has often been tempting, but
never a safe wager, to predict the
demise of Donald Trump.
He lost the presidency and both
houses of Congress, and was im-
peached for high crimes and misde-
meanors twice. He’s being investigated
in New York for business fraud, and in
Georgia for election fraud. He’s being
probed by the House’s Jan. 6 select
committee — and, one would hope,
ultimately by the Justice Department
— for whipping up a riot and attempt-
ing a self-coup.
Yet somehow he has managed to
survive, legally, financially and politi-
cally. Indeed, astonishingly, he re-
mains far and away the leading candi-
date for the Republican presidential
nomination in 2024.
But maybe, just maybe, this time
will be different.
On Thursday, a judge in New York
ordered Trump, along with his daugh-
ter Ivanka and his son Donald Jr., to
testify within 21 days at civil deposi-
tions in the New York attorney gener-
al’s investigation of potential fraud at
the Trump Organization. The judge’s
opinion brutally rejected Trump’s ar-
guments for blocking the depositions:
It would have been “blatant derelic-
tion of duty” for the attorney general
not to take the testimony, the judge
explained, because prosecutors have
unearthed “copious evidence of possi-
ble financial fraud” in Trump’s
b usiness.
That evidence includes a letter that
might turn out to be, as a practical
matter, the biggest blow Trump hasever suffered, even bigger than his six
corporate bankruptcies and two presi-
dential impeachments. A blow dealt
not by prosecutors, plaintiffs, politicos
or the press — but by his own longtime
accountants.
As the judge noted, and as revealed
in court papers filed on Monday by the
attorney general, Trump’s accounting
firm, Mazars, sent a letter on Feb. 9 to
the Trump Organization terminating
its relationship with Trump. The letter
was astounding in many respects.
Mazars said that 10 years of Trump’s
financial statements, from 2011 to
2020, “should no longer be relied
upon,” and that Trump should tell that
to the people he gave them to. The
accountants explained that they
reached this conclusion based upon
court filings previously made by the
New York attorney general, as well as
the accountants’ own investigation
and other sources.
And then they quit. Under the
“totality of the circumstances,” Mazars
wrote, “we have also reached the point
such that there is a non-waivable
conflict of interest with the Trump
Organization. As a result, we are not
able to provide any new work product
to the Trump Organization.” Oh, and
by the way, Donald and Melania’s tax
returns are due in four business days
— but, hey, we promise “to facilitate a
smooth transition to your new tax
preparers.” Best regards, Mazars.
Translated from legal-accountingese,
the letter was an unmitigated disaster
for Trump, far beyond his possibly
having to file late returns. By saying thestatements “should no longer be relied
upon,” the accountants effectively an-
nounced, You misled us. By “totality of
the circumstances,” they likely meant,
The prosecutors investigating you, and
the case they’re making, are serious.
By pronouncing “a non-waivable
conflict of interest,” they were all but
saying, We’re on team A.G. — or we
might have to join someday soon. And
by saying no “new work product” and
quitting, they essentially declared, We
don’t trust you — and we’re certainly
not going to jail for you.
All this could threaten Trump’s
livelihood — his all-important mogul-
hood — in a way no setback ever has
before. Even a guilty verdict in a
Senate impeachment trial would have
affected only his entitlement to tempo-
rary government housing. And when
he ran into financial trouble in the
1980 s and ’90s, he had legions of
lawyers and accountants to help him
work things out w ith the b anks a nd the
courts.
Now, the man who long has had
trouble finding decent legal represen-
tation might find it all but impossible
to find new auditors and tax preparers.
It’s hard to imagine that any reputable
accounting firm will touch his tax
returns, let alone fix and bless his
financials for a decade or more.
Even if lenders don’t exercise any
rights they might have to call in their
loans, Trump apparently still needs to
refinance hundreds of millions’ worth
of them soon. As Trump biographer
Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg
Opinion puts it, “Good luck refinanc-ing your debt when the accountants”
— who have just declared a decade of
your financials utterly worthless —
have “just walked out the door.”
So Trump would face a heap of
problems even if the New York attor-
ney general (and the Manhattan dis-
trict attorney she’s working with)
closed up shop tomorrow. No wonder
Trump’s son Eric was all but crying
when he mentioned the prosecutors
last week on Fox News.
But as Thursday’s ruling makes
clear, the prosecutors aren’t going
away anytime soon. And in 21 days,
absent some relief from a higher court,
Trump will face a profound conun-
drum at his deposition.
Will he testify and (assuming he’s
even capable of it) tell the truth, and
possibly implicate himself in crimes?
Or will he provably lie under oath, and
virtually guarantee himself an indict-
ment for perjury?
Or will he do the sensible thing —
plead his Fifth Amendment right
against self-incrimination hundreds
of times, as Eric Trump and the
company’s finance chief, Allen Weis-
selberg, already have done — and face
the political embarrassment (and, in
civil litigation, the negative infer-
ences) that would entail? In court
Thursday, Trump’s lawyer said that he
was advising his client to do precisely
that.
Stay tuned. Could this be, at long
last, the beginning of the end for
Trump?
As always, don’t bet on it — but this
time, don’t be surprised if it is.BY SONJA WESTSarah Palin has lost her defamation
suit against the New York Times,
first in a ruling by the presiding
judge, then in a jury verdict. That i s
good news for the Times, and Palin’s
challenges on appeal will b e steep. But the
outcome of the case still leaves advocates
of press freedom plenty o f cause for worry.
First is the fact that the Palin lawsuit
made it as far as it did: to a jury trial. An
early ruling by the trial judge dismissing
the case was overturned on appeal. The
Times was forced to defend itself before a
jury for the first time in decades — piling
up legal bills for the newspaper that were
no doubt multiples of any potential dam-
age award.
The surprising endurance of Palin’s
case is only one of several recent signs
suggesting that we are in increasingly
perilous times for the news media and
the core First Amendment protections it
relies on to do its work. The “actual
malice” standard that ultimately served
to insulate the Times from liability is at
more risk of being eroded than at any
time in the n early s ix decades since it was
established.
Under that standard, laid out by the
Supreme Court in the 1964 case of New
York Times v. Sullivan, public figures
must show that defamatory statements
were made with knowing or reckless dis-
regard about their truth or falsity.
In Sullivan a nd the cases that followed,
the court recognized that the press needs
“breathing space” to function as an effec-tive watchdog and that the price of a free
press i s accepting that journalists inevita-
bly make mistakes, even careless ones.
For decades, the court’s decisions only
strengthened these protections.
So when then-candidate Donald
Trump declared in early 2016 that he
would “open up our libel laws,” the gener-
al reaction among legal scholars was be-
musement. Neither presidents nor Con-
gress have the power to diminish consti-
tutional protections. T he only real path t o
change would require persuading the Su-
preme C ourt to overturn a half-century of
precedent.
It also made no logical sense why
Trump, or any particular political group,
would seek such changes. Even under
current law, plaintiffs can win in situa-
tions where, as Trump complained, jour-
nalists “write purposely negative and hor-
rible and false articles.” Defamation is
also a two-way street. As fond as Trump is
of suing people for saying things he does
not like, he is also protected by these same
broad speech protections for anything
that he might say about others.
The ground shifted in 2019 when Jus-
tice Clarence Thomas first raised the
issue of revisiting Sullivan, arguing that
its protections are not supported by “the
original understanding” of the Constitu-
tion. Two years later, a prominent federal
appeals court judge called Sullivan a
“threat to American Democracy.”
He was followed soon after by another
Supreme Court justice, Neil M. Gorsuch,
who pointed to “momentous changes in
the Nation’s media landscape since 1964”as reason to take another look at the case.
Thomas took this opportunity to chime in
yet again, decrying the spread of con-
spiracy theories and disinformation on-
line. This is what it looks like when
changes in the law are gaining steam.
These messages have not been lost on
defamation plaintiffs and their a ttorneys,
who have started explicitly asking the
court to use their case as the vehicle for
reconsidering the actual malice rule, par-
ticularly in scenarios involving public
figures who aren’t government officials.
In a move that caught the attention ofcourt watchers last month, the justices
issued a “call for response” to one such
petition — a small but noteworthy step
indicating that someone at the court is
listening.
Other forces add to the challenges
faced by news organizations. The public’s
trust in the news media has evaporated
since the days of the Sullivan decision,
thanks in part to a changing media land-
scape that has blurred the lines about
who is the press and heightened the
pressures on journalists to publish on
increasingly frantic timelines.
Meanwhile, the financial health of
most of the nation’s news organizations
has plummeted. Without the resources
needed to fight back against threats of
even meritless litigation, journalists are
left more vulnerable to being silenced.
This brings us back to the Palin case,
which is only one of a number of high-
p rofile defamation lawsuits in recent
years that have been brought by powerful
public figures or fueled by wealthy, some-
times mysterious, funders. Palin might
have lost this case, but she succeeded in
staying on her feet far longer than would
have been predicted not long ago.
Proponents of press freedom who were
watching this case understandably ex-
haled a sigh of relief at the judge’s and
jury’s decisions last week. But i t will likely
not be long before the bell rings for the
next round.The writer is the Brumby distinguished
professor in First Amendment law at the
University of Georgia School of Law.Sarah Palin lost her libel case.The news media still should worry about what’s next.JANE ROSENBERG/REUTERS
Sarah Palin in court in New York
on Feb. 14.JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Former president Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Oct. 9, 2021.GEORGE T. CONWAY IIITrump’s luck may finallybe running out