Monday, September 17, 2018

U.S. on trial for responsibility for climate change: 'Juliana v. United States'

On Oct. 29, "a judge in Oregon will begin hearing a case brought against the United States government on behalf of 21 young people, supported by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, who allege that the authorities’ active contributions to the climate crisis violate their constitutional rights," as Peter Singer wrote for Project Syndicate in 2018.

Singer said:

"The first climate litigation to win a positive decision was Urgenda Foundation v. The State of Netherlands, in which a Dutch court ruled, in 2015, that the government must ensure that the country’s emissions are cut by one quarter within five years. In response, the Dutch government did step up its actions to reduce emissions, but it also appealed the judgment. In October, The Hague Court of Appeals will deliver its verdict on that appeal.

Important as Urgenda has been, Juliana v. United States is by far the most significant climate case to date.

* * *

If we take the view that every person on this planet is entitled to an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our greenhouse-gas emissions, then the US is emitting 3.5 times its fair share. ... Moreover, the principle of equal per capita emissions is generous to the old industrialized countries, because it ignores their historical responsibility for the past emissions that have led to the situation we face today."

On Monday, Oct. 29, groups will rally in support of the youth plaintiffs at federal courthouses around the United States. (Example: Moakley courthouse in Boston) They are using the hashtags
#YouthVGov
#TrialoftheCentury
#JusticeforEachGeneration

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Evangelicals disappointed in Trump's character

President Trump is perhaps the least demonstrably Christian U.S. president ever. When he and First Lady Melania Trump attended the funeral service for George H. W. Bush on Dec. 5, 2018, they did not recite the Apostle's Creed that was printed in the program. Seated next to them, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton recited the prayer.

But how do contemporary Christians perceive him?

It can be tricky to pin down what evangelicals think of Trump, in part because it's an impermanent demographic based on self-identification.

It is well known that 81% of self-identified white evangelicals told exit pollsters they voted for Trump in 2016. However, as Napp Nazworth points out, this self-identified group may not correlate to the people who actually attend church or the people who don't vote. There may be many churchgoing Americans who aren't active voters but nevertheless don't like Trump.

The most often cited number when it comes to evangelical support for Trump is "81%," which is likely what Falwell had in mind. But that number comes with many caveats: 1) it only includes white evangelicals, 2) it only includes self-identified evangelicals, which means non-churchgoers and people who don't hold evangelical beliefs could be included, 3) non-voters were not polled and so their numbers are not included in the denominator, and 4) it was based upon exit polls, which are among the least reliable polls.

It's important to note the decline in Christian influence in the United States. Many commentators have suggested that Christians are making a kind of "deal" with the man who happens to have gained power, someone who — just perhaps — they otherwise would not have admired.

Nina Burleigh wrote for Newsweek on April 16, 2018 that white evangelicals have experienced a sharp demographic decline over the last decade. Burleigh attributes this to their children "leaving the faith in droves over its anti-LGBT and anti-science positions"; today, 92 percent of white evangelicals are over age 30. "During the 2016 primary season, white evangelicals were largely divided in their opinion of Trump...But once Republicans nominated him, his favorability among white evangelicals jumped to 61 percent in September 2016...Now, according to a poll conducted in late March [2018], after the Stormy Daniels story was widely discussed, support has risen to a record 75 percent." This suggests that this demographic is substantially unconcerned "by his lawyer’s hush money to Stormy Daniels," "revelations that the married President had a year-long affair with an adult film actress after First Lady Melania gave birth to their son Barron," and "shady business deals". After all, as Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels wrote in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, "A great many of his supporters were thrilled to hear white Christian America forcefully defended against its perceived enemies. Those were their identities. He was their hero. Whether he got the facts right did not matter."

Angie Maxwell wrote in the Washington Post in July 2019 that the Republican Party's late 20th-century "Southern strategy" has "finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him."

White evangelicals "went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service," an article in the New York Times said in June 2018, referencing a September 2017 article in the paper.

As an example of how Trump merges his lifelong interpersonal habits with his policy: On December 13, 2019, reporter Bob Woodward interviewed Trump, who said he instantly had a good feeling about North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump said, as Woodward quoted him in his book Rage: "You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it's all going to happen. It doesn't take you 10 minutes, and it doesn't take you six weeks. It's like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."

John Pavlovitz wrote a searing indictment of the inconsistency of Trump's evangelical supporters. In January 2018, he wrote an open letter addressed to "White Evangelicals," berating them:

For eight years [during the Obama administration] they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.

* * *

you never once suggested that God placed him where he was,
you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family,
you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities,
you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance,
you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy,
your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership,
your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him,
you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

* * *

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth — that the mind boggles.

* * *

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities.
They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus.
They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.
They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus — not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

Ross Douthat wrote for the New York Times in September 2018 that a new survey by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins for the Voter Study Group found that whether a Trump voter attends church predicted their views on race. Among Trump voters who never go to church, only half had positive feelings about Black people, and a quarter said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. Among Trump voters who frequently go to church, 71 percent had positive feelings about Black people, and only 9 percent said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. While the religious and secular groups in the survey had similar incomes, the secular people were "less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general." (Emily Ekins wrote a separate article about it, concluding that "encouraging conservatives to disengage from religion...may in fact make it even harder for left and right to meet in a more compassionate middle.") But why did the churchgoing people vote for Trump, if they disagree with him about race? It seems they made "a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery." Early Christianity made such a bet with the Roman emperor Constantine. However, with Trump, it's "the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism....it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it."

Others have a different interpretation. Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, notes the study's conclusion that "religious participation may serve a moderating function in our politics" [emphasis mine] and he clarifies that he believes that "white evangelicals are no moderating force. They are the core of our extremist president’s support." [emphasis mine] Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an Episcopalian, and an openly gay man running as a Democratic candidate for President in 2020, said in an April 2019 television interview that evangelicals' "hypocrisy is unbelievable" when it comes to their support for Trump.

Paula White, the "spiritual adviser" to Trump, who said a prayer at his inauguration and who formed a White House evangelical advisory council, "has ratcheted up support among evangelicals for the president’s hard-line immigration policies and used her Facebook following of more than 3 million to champion the idea that God has blessed Trump’s plans," according to the Washington Post. When challenged with the proposition that Jesus was a refugee, she once answered, that Jesus had done nothing illegal. "If he had broke the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah." (Other Christians have challenged this interpretation, as Jesus was, famously, executed.) When she spoke at the rally in June 2019 at which he announced his reelection campaign, she told the crowd, "let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!” she prayed. She added: "I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy — every strategy — and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny."

Whether or not conservatism today is stripping Christianity of its religious content, it is giving it power, and this does reverse the decline of the influence of Christian institutions. Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children wrote in a May 2018 op-ed for the New York Times:

"There is a story going around, on both the left and the right, that America’s 'true believers' are a declining force and are now conducting desperate, defensive maneuvers in a secularizing society. But that is not how the leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement see it — because it is not true. They played a key role in putting President Trump in power. They are protecting him now, as they giddily collect their winnings in legislatures and in the courts. Why should they doubt that they can pull off the same trick again?

What Christian nationalists know — and many of us have yet to learn — is that you don’t need a majority to hijack a modern democracy. You just need a sizable minority, marinating in its grievances, willing to act as a bloc, and impervious to correction by fact or argument. Make this group feel good about itself by making other people feel bad about themselves, and dominion may well be in reach."


Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, planned ten "campaign-style rallies" throughout California in late May and early June 2018 in advance of that state's primary election. The goal is to turn out the evangelical vote. Other kinds of Christians are not receiving the same outreach to attend these rallies, "a tactic that plays directly into the growing separatist sentiment among many white evangelicals," according to Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. Of this attempt to stoke "white evangelical resentment and outrage," Young wrote: "Such a dark and alarmist vision might seem to contradict the hopeful joy evangelicals claim their faith provides, but it aligns perfectly with the cynical and conspiratorial worldview Trump has brought to the center of American politics. As such, white evangelicals’ support for Trump doesn’t expose their hypocrisy, as plenty have contended, so much as it plainly reveals their heart." On 13 June, even Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump's policy of separating would-be immigrant families at the border is "disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit." He stopped short, however, of holding Trump accountable: "I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today."

(Franklin Graham later complained about the ten Republican congresspeople who voted to impeach Trump for incitement to insurrection in 2021. He said they must have betrayed him for "thirty pieces of silver" — i.e., he couldn't imagine they had cast their votes on principle — though he said one must "wonder" what the material reward was.)

Whether Christian power is seen to be declining or rising, many see the new administration as an opportunity to advance a theocratic-leaning political agenda.

This was how it worked on an institutional level. Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, in conversation with Andrew Keen, published May 18, 2020 on the "Keen On" on LitHub (recording: 5:30–6:30)

I think that the relationship between the leadership of the Council for National Policy and Donald Trump is as purely transactional as you’re going to get in politics. There was a deal cut in fairly stark terms in 2016, in June, where the conservatives from the fundamentalists and these business interests came to Trump and said, 'You don’t have any campaign organization. You don’t have a war chest. You don’t have people on the ground. We’ve got all of those. We’ve got campaign in a box. What we want from you is the right to nominate your federal judges. We want our guy, Mike Pence, as your running mate. We want to write the social platforms for the Republican National Convention.' And the deal was struck, and both sides have honored them. So I think it’s the ultimate quid pro quo.

The deal has also been internalized on an individual, personal level by many people. The theologian Roger E. Olson wrote for Patheos in August 2018 in "Is Trump “Our Cyrus?"

Here I’m not talking about those evangelical Christians who, among others, voted for Trump in order to vote against Hilary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils.” I’m talking about the many evangelical Christians who are now lionize Trump as a kind of new national messiah—not on a par with Jesus Christ but...on a par with whom?

A growing common answer is "He’s our Cyrus.'

* * *

During his approximately thirty year reign he [Cyrus] released the Hebrew people in exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple that was destroyed earlier by the Babylonians....the Hebrew people did not consider Cyrus one of them, of course, but a powerful ally — and one raised up by God to deliver them from exile and bondage."

Olson issues a warning: "I strongly suspect that he [Trump] is manipulating his conservative Christian 'base' and would turn on them in a moment if it suited his agenda to be powerful."

Is it hypocritical? Well, yes. Kathleen Parker on Aug. 31, 2018 in the Washington Post decried "the utter hypocrisy of allowing such a foul-mouthed, race-baiting misogynist to occupy the Oval Office after many of these same paragons of virtue impeached Bill Clinton for lying about his irresponsible affair with an intern." But it can be politically expedient to ignore the personal failings of one's own candidate. James Traub wrote in the Atlantic on July 18, 2018:

Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party. Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes. Thus Christian conservatives hold their tongue rather than jeopardize their chances of getting a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The party of personal morality thus becomes the party of indifference to personal morality.

On another front, where Christians are trying to consolidate political power, it isn't exclusively white Christians who are doing so.

Katherine Stewart profiled Jim Domen for the New York Times on June 20, 2018. Domen (who considers himself a "former homosexual") founded Church United and has led it since 2014. It is "a multiethnic group of pastors from a variety of traditions — including Pentecostal and Catholic clergy members" with a mission of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” Domen supports Trump, saying that he has “done more for the Church than many Christian presidents have.” Church United's work to "politicize pastors," as Stewart put it, "started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors."

Some people feel torn.

An example of a middle-of-the-road position is given by Rev. Samuel Rodríguez, who serves at a church in Sacramento, Calif. and who has had private conversations with Trump in the White House. He publicly condemned Trump for his misogynistic, crude comments on the Access Hollywood tape and is also fighting Trump's immigration agenda, but he is willing to work with Trump overall. In May 2018, Rodríguez told BBC World:

"Trump ha hecho más por el movimiento evangélico que cualquier otro presidente desde la época de Ronald Reagan. Se puede medir. Hay 20 puntos que uno puede decir claramente: aquí firmó una orden ejecutiva, aquí firmó una ley, aquí avanzó..."

* * *

"El movimiento latino evangélico no está casado con Donald Trump. Tampoco estaba casado con Obama. Estamos casados con una agenda que va mucho más allá de la personalidad."

Independently of whatever "deal" may be struck here, what do evangelicals feel about Trump's character?Many are disappointed. Molly Wicker wrote for the New York Times on May 19, 2017:

"Evangelical voters have long demanded that politicians exemplify Christian character and morality in the public sector. In Donald Trump, however, evangelicals were confronted with a candidate who pledged allegiance to conservative ideals, but embodied none of them.
* * *
Claire Waugh, a senior from Woodbridge, Va., told me that she refused in November to have a Trump vote on her conscience, and that she hates to see the country being "led by a man who spews vitriol against anyone who is unlike him, a man who tries to invoke God’s name when he is acting utterly ungodly.""

Some Christians think that theology, not secular politics, is the way forward.

David Kuo, who worked for the George W. Bush administration, wrote in his 2006 memoir Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction when he was facing a terminal illness (pp. 262-263):

"We Christians need a short fast from politics.

We need to eschew politics to focus more on practicing compassion. We need to spend more time studying Jesus and less time trying to get people elected. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in support of conservative Christian advocacy groups such as the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, and the panoply of similar groups, let's give that money to charities and groups that are arguably closer to Jesus' heart. And we Christians should spend less time arguing with those on the other side and more time communing with them."

More recently, Daniel Burke wrote for CNN on 13 June 2018 about the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Dallas that "a small but significant slice" of the 10,000 participants objected to the planned address by Vice President Mike Pence. Younger people seemed more concerned with evangelizing the message of Jesus (what they call "The Great Commission") than with aligning themselves with the Republican Party. Garrett Kell, a pastor, said alignment with the Republican Party was also strategically fraught as it could affect the Southern Baptists' interracial and international relations. (The Southern Baptists formed as a pro-slavery splinter group in 1845, and Pew's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study found that the Southern Baptists remain 85 percent white.) Pence did address the Convention that day, and Burke followed up, saying that "much of Pence's speech was dedicated to praising the accomplishments of his boss, President Donald Trump." He added: "The denomination's executive committee will consider a motion to cease inviting elected officials to speak at national conventions."

Jonathan Merritt, writing for The Atlantic on 16 June, said that the crowd at the annual meeting was significantly younger than he remembered from his childhood. He quoted Baylor University history professor Barry Hankins as saying that this demographic change "has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis". They elected 45-year-old J.D. Greear as the president of the Southern Baptists who has promised to make an effort to proportionately represent women and people of color in leadership roles. The denomination addresses public policy through its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which opposes President Trump, and Greear said that inviting Pence to speak "sent a terribly mixed signal" about whether the Southern Baptists stood for religion or politics. At least some Southern Baptists, Merritt said, "appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump...places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk." Furthermore, although "Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines," they, too, are experiencing the same decline; they have lost 1 million members in the past 15 years. Tying themselves to conservative politics is therefore, many conclude, not the answer to reversing this trend.

Michael Gerson, a white evangelical conservative, noted the demographic decline in an August 2019 op-ed for the Washington Post, pointing out that a quarter of Americans over age 65 are white evangelical Protestants, but only 8 percent of Americans ages 18-29 have that identity. Gerson said it is a "scandal" that white evangelicals are not in a state of "panic" about this decline." Gerson said that evangelical support of "religious liberty" legislation reflects "a larger anxiety about lost social standing." He argues that evangelicals should reemphasize their "religious calling," as they did "in late-18th-century and early-19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America," rather than continuing to behave "like another political interest group."

In her article "The Religious Right Has It All Wrong. Trump is a 'Test,' Not Their Savior," Cynthia Dagnal-Myron said she believes that Jesus is "asking Christians, through Trump, to follow His lead repeatedly," — note that the capitalized "His" refers to Jesus, not Trump — by having Trump break every law in The Book to see if we're paying attention."

Carol Kuruvilla wrote for Huffington Post in April 2019:

"In a 2011 poll from PRRI and the Religion News Service, 60% of white evangelicals surveyed said that a public official who 'commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.' But in October 2016, right after The Washington Post published an 'Access Hollywood' recording of Trump making lewd comments about sexual assault, the number of white evangelicals who weren’t willing to give politicians a pass for immoral behavior dropped to 20%. ...white evangelicals were even less likely in late 2018 to connect politicians’ private and public lives in this way. Only 16.5% said they believed privately immoral behavior translates to unethical professional conduct."

In the most recent study, people did not seem to be responding based on principle as much as they seemed to be responding to a particular politician. When white evangelicals had Bill Clinton in mind, they were four-and-a-half times more likely to say that privately immoral behavior was relevant to public life than when they had Donald Trump in mind.

In May 2019, the Jim Bakker show offered viewers the chance to buy a coin with the faces of Cyrus and Trump for a $45 donation. On the show, Lance Wallnau described Trump as "a Cyrus to navigate through the storm" of American politics. He described the coin as "a point of contact" to use in prayer.

There is also faith-based activism on the left, and, of this, Laura E. Alexander wrote in August 2019:

"...there’s always been progressive Christian activism in the United States.

I have studied religious thought and action around migrants and refugees for some time – including analyzing the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches that offers refuge to undocumented immigrants and advocates for immigration reform.

* * *

Talk of an emerging “religious left” is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation.

But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump’s immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America."

A Fox News poll conducted October 6-8, 2019 found that, among white evangelicals, 71% of approved of the job Trump is doing. Only 44% had confidence in Congress and only 26% approved of the job Congress is doing. These white evangelicals had favorable opinions of Trump (70%), Pence (64%), the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani (46%), the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (21%), Adam Schiff (17%), Bill Barr (34%), Mitch McConnell (37%), Hillary Clinton (24%), the Democratic Party (24%), the Republican Party (63%). And 57% of them were at least somewhat troubled by the situation surrounding Trump's scandal with the Ukrainian president. 73% were concerned about Trump's allegations against Joe Biden in that scandal. While 28% of white evangelicals said that Trump should be impeached and then removed from office, 64% said that he should not be impeached at all. 38% of them said it is, in general, appropriate for a president to ask foreign countries to investigate their political rivals. 34% said they believe Trump feels it is more important to do what is best for him as an individual rather than what is best for the country.

That 71% approval rating among white evangelicals represents a decline from "the 81 percent that backed him over Hillary Clinton in 2016," Eugene Scott wrote in the Washington Post, and it is possible that Trump's military decision that enabled violence against Christians in Syria will cause him to lose more Christian support among American voters.

In October 2019, the Public Religion Research Institute found that, as reported by Relevant Magazine, "75 percent of white evangelicals say they approve of him and, what’s more, 31 percent of that group say there’s 'almost nothing' Trump could do to lose their support." By contrast, "86 percent of black Protestants disapprove of Trump, 67 percent of which say there’s almost nothing Trump could do at this point to change their minds," and a majority of black Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Catholics believe that he encourages white supremacists.

A majority of white evangelicals (60%) think that Trump is morally upstanding, a Pew survey found in early 2020. "The evangelical assessment," an NPR article explained, "does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say 'morally upstanding' describes Trump 'very well,' while another 45% say the term applies to Trump 'fairly well.'" (Here, they differ from the American population as a whole, two-thirds of which say that "morally upstanding" does not describe Trump.) Furthermore, in the NPR summary: "Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals see Trump as at least 'somewhat religious,' despite his profanity, his sporadic church attendance, and his evident unfamiliarity with the Bible."

Between April and June 2020, white evangelicals' approval of Trump's performance dropped from 78% to 72% in a Pew survey, and yet 82% of them still said they would vote for Trump over Biden. (Pew found that 77% of white evangelicals voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016.)

Other polls had more drastic results. Over two months (March-May 2020), white evangelicals' support for Trump dropped from 77% to 62%. (PRRI survey) "Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism," Kristin Kobes du Mez wrote. "They denigrated feminism, pacifism, and political correctness, and championed war, law enforcement, the military, and the Second Amendment in order to promote a culture where men could exercise their God-given, testosterone-driven authority." That is why, Kobes du Mez argues, one of his biggest problems for his image in the summer of 2020 has been "his West Point commencement address was derailed by his halting descent down a ramp and apparent difficulty in lifting a glass of water to his lips." Any hint of weakness, physical or otherwise, damages his standing with the "family values" crowd.


On the other hand, though, people who approve of Trump may be more likely to declare themselves evangelical essentially on his behalf. From 2016–2020, Ryan Burge wrote in the New York Times, "there was no significant decline in the share of white Americans who identify as evangelical Christians. Instead, the report found the opposite: During Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of white Americans who started identifying as evangelical actually grew." This is based on a 2021 report from the Pew Center. However, Burge writes: "The number of self-identified evangelicals has likely not increased over the last few years because evangelicals have been effective at spreading the Gospel and bringing new converts to the church." Instead: "millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P." In recent years, the share of evangelicals who say they rarely attend church has grown, and the non-churchgoing evangelicals are simultaneously becoming more likely to say they are politically conservative. It also appears that non-Christians — for example, Muslims — are adopting the label "evangelical" because they think it means "very religiously engaged and very politically conservative." So the label "evangelical," as a self-descriptor, is changing to mean politically conservative and also some kind of religious, whether that is cultural Christianity or another religion. The result is that "more and more Americans are conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power."


Many white evangelical Christian voters, says Jennifer Rubin in November 2021,

essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government [in their view] is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. ... The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation.

Katherine Stewart said in May 2022 that some Christian nationalism "overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general," although among Latino Christian nationslists, "the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.” Stewart prefers to call it "religious nationalism": "a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the 'right' religion in recovering that lost greatness."


Kathleen Belew writes:

White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.

Although, a distinction is added in this January 2021 academic article by Ruth Braunstein "identifies two ideal-typical versions of this [Christian nationalist] narrative: the white Christian nation and the colorblind Judeo-Christian nation."


From a New York Times story by Ben Smith:

Though Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "wrote in 2016 that Mr. Trump was 'the Great Evangelical Embarrassment,'" nevertheless in 2020 he supported Trump "because Democrats are 'antagonistic to biblical Christianity' on issues like abortion and transgender rights."

By contrast, Marvin Olasky, the editor of the Christian magazine World since 1994, has continued to oppose Trump. He wrote that he "deplored the 'Flight 93' approach — a reference to the hijacked flight on 9/11 where passengers banded together to storm the cockpit — that he sees among many conservatives, who, he says, believe they must use any means necessary to keep America from being destroyed by liberals." He submitted his resignation in November 2021 because he disagrees with the magazine's direction toward American political conservatism. He plans to produce the annual Roe v. Wade issue in early 2022 and then leave.

As Thomas Zimmer explained ("Do Americans Value Democracy?", Substack, Democracy Americana, November 19, 2023):

"Trump’s appealed to the Right in 2016 precisely because he made it clear he wouldn’t be bound by the rules. That’s exactly what reactionary intellectual/pundit Michael Anton captured so precisely in his infamous “Flight 93” essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, in which he made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11: Anton called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive,” who would keep playing by the rules of the game, and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t constrained by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93 on 9/11. What the American Values Survey is picking up here is how the “Flight 93” mentality is taking over not just the rightwing intellectual sphere, where it’s been hegemonic for a while, but ever larger parts of the Republican Party and its voters as well. It is now “Flight 93” politics, all the time."

A Trump speech in October 2023:

"'On Day One, I will immediately restore and expand the 'Trump travel ban,'' he pledged to the cheering crowd.

* * *

Then Trump again expanded his rhetoric.

“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?”

The crowd cheered enthusiastically. Trump vamped: “We don’t want you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”

* * *

This is all Trump is getting at. “Our religion” — the religion of those in the room at his event — is right-wing, often evangelical Christianity. In 2020, the density of White Christians in a county was a very good indicator of whom voters in the county supported.

* * *

Parsing Trump's comments is excessive, of course; as stipulated, we know what he means. He means that certain categories of people are inherently dangerous and unacceptable ... He is saying, once again, that he will defend American Christians against perceived threats — threats that might be framed in vague religious terms but which are not fundamentally religious...

He is telling those Americans — White Christian conservatives — that he will make them the focus of America’s protective power."

Trump pledges to turn away those who don’t like ‘our religion’ (gift link), Philip Bump, Washington Post, October 24, 2023


In 2009, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked Americans whether it was ever justifiable to torture suspected terrorists during interrogation, and respondents were 50% more likely to say yes if they were white evangelicals than if they were "religiously unaffiliated."

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Highlights of Bob Woodward's two Trump books: 'Fear' and 'Rage'

This blog post looks at Bob Woodward's two most recent books. It was originally devoted to Fear and has been updated with Rage. Please also see the 2020 Books Are Our Superpower article about these books.


In his book Fear, Bob Woodward's interviews with White House insiders fill in the backstory to many publicly embarrassing moments of the Trump presidency. The title, Fear, refers to Trump's concept of what "real power" is. He also believes, however, that personal rapport matters more than strategy. Thus, Trump acknowledges that China is an "economic aggressor" and President Xi may be "using" President Trump to meet some agenda, but Trump nevertheless feels that he is powerful in this situation insofar as he feels he has a friendship with Xi. According to Steve Bannon, however, Trump did not have any "genuine friends."

Military

Afghanistan

As the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were traced to Afghanistan, U.S. policy for the past 17 years has centered on preventing another major terrorist attack from launching from that specific place. U.S. funds were poured into the pockets of Afghan warlords with the idea that they will help fight terrorism even though these funds are diverted to their own internal corruption and violence. Today, the U.S. spends $50 billion per year in Afghanistan. Neither Bush nor Obama wanted to end the war. Trump wanted to end it completely. (His opinion: "We’ve got to figure out how to get the fuck out of there. Totally corrupt. The people are not worth fighting for...NATO does nothing. They’re a hindrance. Don’t let anybody tell you how great they are. It’s all bullshit." His mentors, however—Lindsey Graham, for one—repeatedly explained to him the risks of pulling out. In July 2017, he said: "You should be killing guys. You don’t need a strategy to kill people."

Iran

Trump always wanted to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal that had been negotiated under Obama. Priebus, Tillerson, and Mattis argued with the president about this, as they knew that Iran was in compliance with the terms of the deal. Trump persisted: “They are in violation, and you should make the case that this agreement is done and finished....And that maybe we’d be willing to renegotiate.” Tillerson eventually caved.

Syria

When Bashar al-Assad chemically attacked his own people on April 4, 2017, Trump was emotionally affected. His position was: “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.” Mattis told Trump he'd do it, but privately he told everyone else: "We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured." The middle ground turned out to involve launching 59 missiles at Syria. Trump bragged: “A hundred countries have called...patting me on the back." Trump was interested in launching additional strikes, but he "soon forgot his questions."

North Korea

The public is aware of how Trump nearly escalated a nuclear war via Twitter. Woodward reveals that Trump wanted to evacuate dependent family members of the 28,500 U.S. troops serving in South Korea, an action that would have lent credibility to his plans to attack North Korea. Lindsey Graham had to talk Trump out of this step.

Transgender soldiers

Trump wanted to stop the military from paying for transgender-related surgeries and he wanted to remove transgender troops from service. He had incorrect information about how much certain surgeries cost. Woodward noted:

Gender reassignment surgery can be expensive but also is infrequent. In a Pentagon-commissioned study, the RAND Corporation “found that only a few hundred of the estimated 6,600 transgender troops would seek medical treatment in any year. RAND found those costs would total no more than $8 million per year.”

Priebus gave Trump four options — make no changes, ban all transgender people from service, and two more moderate options — and Trump agreed to discuss it later that morning at 10 a.m. At 8:55 a.m., however, Trump tweeted that transgender people would not be allowed "to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military." Dunford refused to make the change, as, in Woodward's words, "tweets were not orders," and he advised the service chiefs: "we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect...we will all remain focused on accomplishing our assigned missions.” Mattis claimed he would reflect upon next steps, but this was a delaying tactic. Four courts entered preliminary injunctions against Trump's order. On Jan. 1, 2018, the military began accepting new servicemembers who are transgender, following the original schedule of Obama's policy.

Interpersonal problems

In 2015, Trump had said of a Republican senator, John McCain, "He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero [only] because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured." He also gave out the cell phone number of another Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, during his rival presidential campaign, but he soon reconciled with Graham. As Trump prepared to take office, Graham warned him about the sorry state of the Republican Party: "We have no idea what we’re doing. We have no plan for health care. We’re on different planets when it comes to cutting taxes. And you’re the biggest loser in this."

Woodward shows Trump maligning his own staff and supporters. To Rudy Giuliani, he once said: "Rudy, you’re a baby! I’ve never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?" On the advice of Rosenstein, he fired Comey via a letter. He said Reince Priebus was "like a little rat. He just scurries around...Just come talk to me. You don't have to go through him." He eventually fired Priebus and replaced him with Kelly; both men learned about the job change via a tweet. Kelly felt he had no option but to accept the job. Priebus later said: “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”

Of the scandal with Russian prostitutes, he once said: "I’ve got enough problems with Melania and girlfriends...I can’t have Melania hearing about that." The allegations were compiled into a dossier. Woodward once appeared on television calling the dossier a "garbage document...Trump’s right to be upset about that." At the beginning of Fear, Woodward said he still holds this opinion, although, as a journalist, he was "not delighted to appear to have taken sides." The dossier "played a big role in launching Trump’s war with the intelligence world, especially the FBI and Comey."

Economy

Of the economy, Cohn had to keep explaining to Trump that an increase in the trade deficit is the sign of a growing economy and that Trump should abandon his goal of shrinking the trade deficit at all costs. Furthermore: "The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines. Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories." Soon after the G20 summit, Trump wrote "TRADE IS BAD" on a draft of a speech he was editing with Porter. He could not understand that, if China is the world's leading manufacturer of penicillin, refusing to buy directly from China does not save money; it only increases the price of penicillin because another country will serve as the middleman. Trump tried to make Mnuchin declare China to be a currency manipulator, while Mnuchin said there was no legal validity behind that statement.

Trump had a letter drafted that he intended to sign to pull out of a trade agreement with South Korea, an important ally. "Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kelly — everyone on the national security side — agreed that if the trade deficit with South Korea had been 10 times greater, it still wouldn’t justify withdrawing." To solve this problem, "at least twice Cohn or Porter took [the letter] from his desk. Other times, they just delayed. Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete."

Racism

After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., he gave comments that took many aback. After his scripted comment, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he ad libbed, “On many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country..." Rob Porter had a difficult time explaining to him what he'd done wrong." Trump insisted that no side has a monopoly on hate. "It’s not as if any one group is at fault or anything like that. With the media, you’re never going to get a fair shake. Anything that you say or do is going to be criticized.” Porter explained, "There’s no upside to not directly condemn neo-Nazis," and he played to Trump's ego by telling him he could be a uniter. White House speechwriters provided a draft, and Porter edited it with Trump looking over his shoulder (the President cannot type, Woodward tells us). Trump felt ambivalent and disappointed, not wanting to seem weak or nodding toward political correctness. Two days after his original "on many sides" comment, he delivered the five-minute canned conciliatory speech "[l]ooking stiff and uncomfortable, like someone coerced to speak in a hostage video." Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn praised Trump: “This was one of your finest moments as president," and Fox News hailed it as a "course correction." Trump, however, was angry: "I can’t believe I got forced to do that. That’s the worst speech I’ve ever given. I’m never going to do anything like that again." The next day, he said, “There is blame on both sides... you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too...there are two sides to a story.” For this, he was praised by ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The leaders of the military branches then came out and stated their opposition to racism. Privately, Trump told Cohn: "I said nothing wrong. I meant what I said." In Porter's words, "This was no longer a presidency. This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.”

[Update: see also Jonathan Karl's book Front Row at the Trump Show, from which this adapted excerpt was published in June 2020: "Never again would he be browbeaten into delivering a speech of reconciliation, a speech unequivocally condemning racial injustice and violence. Never again would he let anybody talk him into admitting a mistake or doing anything with even the faintest hint of an apology. There would be no more course corrections."]

At a meeting, he said he wanted more immigrants from Norway and Asia and fewer from Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa, which he famously referred to as "shithole countries."

Immediately after approving a $8.6 trillion two-year budget without any money for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, he assured his crowd: "You’re getting the wall. Don’t worry. Had a couple of these characters in the back say, oh, he really doesn’t want the wall. He just used that for campaigning....every time I hear that, the wall gets 10 feet higher...we’re going to have the wall."

Odd behavior

Trump "doesn’t touch type or use a keyboard" and has others type for him. He referred to Twitter as "the reason I got elected." Woodward wrote: "He ordered printouts of his recent tweets that had received a high number of likes, 200,000 or more. He studied them to find the common themes in the most successful." He watched as many as eight hours of television a day and usually started work at 11 a.m.

Woodward wrote: "The operations of the Oval Office and White House were less the Art of the Deal and more often the Unraveling of the Deal. The unraveling was often right before your eyes, a Trump rally on continuous loop. There was no way not to look." In Cohn's view, Trump's "theory of negotiation was that to get to yes, you first had to say no." In Bannon's view, "Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary."

Dowd told Mueller: "And the fact is, I don’t want him looking like an idiot. And I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with that idiot for? He can’t even remember X, Y, Z with respect to his FBI director."

Another response

Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN on Sept. 14, 2018:
"So Woodward has once again offered a fascinating account of parlor politics, this time in the Trump White House, but he has not provided an understanding about why this all happened and why it is allowed to continue. ... Until we have answers to these questions, we won't be able to have any assurance this will turn out OK, or that after Trump's presidency ends, his brand of politics won't outlast him."

After Fear, Trump regretted not speaking to Woodward, so he agreed to a series of interviews with Woodward for a second book. Woodward based his next book Rage on 17 interviews with Trump, together with other source material.

In my view, these are the highlights:

Intelligence: At the beginning of the Trump administration, Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana was given the job of Director of National Intelligence. Before the election, his wife, Marsha Coats, had disapproved of Trump, but she considered him the lesser of two evils. To encourage other conservatives to vote for Trump and not to sit out the election, she wrote an open letter saying: “Trump was not my first or even my second choice. He is not a humble man.” Having criticized him, she went on: “I truly believe the office will change Donald Trump.” This phrase, therefore, was originally meant as criticism and as obviously baseless flattery — an expressed aspiration or hope. As I see it, it seems that some people took it more realistically and actually expected that the office of the presidency would exert some magical change capability over Donald Trump. Marsha Coats later told someone: “He’s the kind of person that would inspire crazy people.” The job of DNI was unpleasant under Trump, from Coats' perspective (and in Woodward's phrasing), because “he saw the intelligence people as enemies.” He acted as if he were “impervious to facts,” saw “nearly everyone as an idiot, and [believed] almost every country was ripping off the United States.” His tweets related to foreign policy alarmed Coats who felt that he needed to wake up in the middle of the night to see if anything had been tweeted. “Coats heard the president was starting his work day later and later, now 11:30 a.m.” In Coats' view, as Woodward paraphrased it: “In effect, and often literally, the president said, I don’t need that to be done. I don’t need these people. I don’t need a National Security Council. I just need myself, a and perhaps three or four people I trust and work with. Trump didn’t care for assessments or options. It was just whatever Trump wanted to do...Trump’s attitude was: ‘I can solve all these problems.’ He thought he could get better intelligence on his own. Coats knew that key leaders such as Putin, Xi of China and Erdogan of Turkey would lie to Trump. They played Trump skillfully. They would roll out the red carpet for him, flatter him, then do what they wanted.”

Russia: Shortly after the 2016 election, the Republicans vetted Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil. He told them that Putin was “his closest relationship” and they often met in person. ExxonMobil did a lot of exploration in Russia — it was their “biggest oil exploration area in the world.” Trump talked about Tillerson this way: “Not part of the Washington establishment, untainted by the swamp. He was a dealmaker who negotiated oil contracts all over the world, including billions with Russia. For years he has negotiated with Putin, who awarded him the Russian Order of Friendship.”

Israel/Palestine: On May 22, 2017, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu showed Trump a video with “a series of spliced-together comments from Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who was supposed to be Israel’s partner in the peace deal that Kushner was trying to put together. It sounded like Abbas was ordering the murder of children.” Trump was immediately convinced and was outraged: “They got the guy on tape saying it,” Trump said. But to Tillerson the video seemed “faked or manipulated, taking words and sentences out of context and stringing them together.”

Military: On July 21, 2017, Bradley Byers, a Trump appointee at the Pentagon who worked with Mattis, was at the White House for the signing of an executive order. Trump said — with Byers there — “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was also there and seemed to feel that his own role was being complimented. Byers reported the comment to Mattis who was horrified and asked Byers to document it in writing, which he did.

North Korea: Woodward wrote: "The diplomatic courtship between Trump and Kim in 2018 and 2019 is captured in 27 letters that I obtained and 25 are reported here for the first time...they reveal a decision by both to become friends...They resemble declarations of personal fealty that might be uttered by the Knights of the Round Table, or perhaps suitors.” He notes: “The CIA never figured out conclusively who wrote and crafted Kim’s letters to Trump.” Although North Korea did not give up its nuclear weapons, on June 13, 2018, Trump tweeted: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” He was referring to a new 391-word agreement that, as Woodward explains, “was less specific regarding denuclearization than prior agreements Kim’s predecessors had signed in 1992 and 2005 during the Clinton and Bush administrations” and only rehashed North and South Korea’s April 2018 agreement with each other. The relations between the two leaders were not as permanently constructive as Trump had conveyed. In the summer of 2019, Kim Jong Un wrote to Trump saying that he was “really, very offended” that the US had not stopped war exercises with South Korea as promised, since “the main target of the war preparatory exercises is our own military.” On August 9, 2019, Trump told the press that he’d received a “very positive letter” from Kim, but he declined to give specifics.

Humility: On December 30, 2019, Woodward interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He asked Trump if he’d considered apologizing publicly for the Zelensky quid pro quo, but Trump said that he didn’t want to admit wrongdoing. So Woodward asked him: “When’s the last time you apologized?” Trump said: “If I’m wrong — I believe in apologizing.” But this was against a relevant background belief: “Here’s the thing: I’m never wrong.” Later, during the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Fauci said: “His attention span is like a minus number.”

Coronavirus: The CDC realized on January 13, 2020 that the coronavirus was spreading human-to-human outside China. By early February, President Xi wouldn’t let American health scientists into China and wouldn’t accept other help from Trump. On February 7, Trump called Woodward to talk. He expected the virus to disappear “in two months with the heat” because the weather would “kill the virus. You know, you hope.” Trump said at a news conference on February 26 that there were 15 coronavirus cases in the US and said that the number of infections was “going down” and would be “close to zero” within just a couple days. On March 9, he tweeted that, although there had been 22 deaths, “the common Flu” was still worse and yet “life & the economy go on.” On March 15, HHS informed Jared Kushner that there were just over 1 million swabs available in the entire country to administer COVID tests. In a March 19 interview, he told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” (Woodward did not reveal this statement until his book was published in September.) Later in March, FEMA told the Trump administration that they needed 130,000 ventilators immediately. On April 10, when there had been about 20,000 U.S. deaths, Trump acknowledged that the government was predicting there would eventually be more than 100,000 deaths, but he said, “I think we’ll be substantially under that number.” By the end of the month, the death toll had tripled, and he was saying, “It’s gonna leave. It’s gonna be gone. It’s gonna be eradicated.”

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Another jab at 'identity politics': The anti-democratic sentence at the end of the Sept. 5, 2018 anonymous op-ed

Pundits had much to say about a Sept. 5, 2018 op-ed published by the New York Times and written by a Trump administration insider whose name the Times is protecting. The op-ed writer styled himself (I presume it is a man, for reasons that will appear below) as someone who resists Trump's agenda by quietly sabotaging his boss from within the system. Most responses tended to critique whether this is really resisting or just enabling.

This sentence in the op-ed drew particular attention: "There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more." Not everyone admires these Republican policies, after all. The same day the op-ed was published, Eric Levitz complained in New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer that this anonymous official apparently believes "that making it easier for payday lenders to scam the working poor, lowering the corporate tax rate, and increasing America’s military budget (which was already larger than every other major power’s combined) are such morally urgent goals, it is worthwhile to risk autocratic rule for the sake of advancing them:" Charles P. Pierce made the same point in Esquire, translating these policies as "poisoned water, more of the nation's wealth catapulted upwards, and a massive new Navy in case Yamamoto comes back from the dead."

No one seems to have picked up on the op-ed's last line, however. The anonymous writer said: "But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans." Given the position, this must be important. It doesn't obviously connect to the rest of the article's message, which should raise eyebrows all the more. Why is it there? How does the writer go from admitting that the amoral, incompetent president is being played by his own aides (of which the writer is one) to exhorting ordinary Americans to "shed" their personal identities?

Here's my theory. The writer knows that not everyone agrees with the Republican policy agenda. He knows that he, a rogue aide, is doing a job for which he was not elected. (If he was elected, rather than appointed, to any political position, the job he was elected for wasn't the job of subverting the president's agenda.) He knows that many people will take issue with him on the policy areas he mentioned and others that he didn't mention. So he flips the blame around. According to his account, if there's a problem here, it's not that the president is amoral and incompetent, nor that he's enabling this president, nor that he's pursuing some policy agenda. No, he says, the real problem is that "everyday citizens" criticize him because they are playing "politics" and have identity "labels" that polarize them against him. If they would just "ris[e] above politics," "shed the labels," and act like real "Americans," that would make a "real difference" — to him, of course, because then they wouldn't oppose him.

Here's the problem. There are plenty of ways that people are marginalized because of their identities. Some types of oppression rise somewhat organically as side effects of systems new and old, while other types of oppression result more directly from policies that are chosen and implemented by powerful people right now today. Whether discrimination and power inequities are intentional or not, they certainly take place. Our identities matter.

The author is picking up on a trope against identity politics. This trope blames people for their own oppression and for not getting the political leaders who will help them. If they would just stop having those identities, they wouldn't be oppressed, and their neighbors and politicians would actually want to talk to them and help them. But as they persist in having identities, they continue to manifest oppression against themselves, their neighbors vote against their interests, and their political leaders are likewise disinclined to represent them fairly.

This anonymous, unelected, self-appointed guardian of good policy and saboteur of bad policy: Just what does he think a politically transcendent, label-shed, generically American policy is? Why, whatever he says it is. He is the generic American. He's defending interests that make sense to him. Any "everyday" person who hopes to see their own interests represented by a politician is accused of dragging the country down into "politics" and causing division through "labels."

(As just one of many possible examples, see Katherine Stewart's op-eds that are occasionally published in the Times. So-called religious liberty initiatives, which she prefers to view as examples of "religious privilege," are attempts to "target specific groups of people as legitimate objects of contempt." While people denied services at one business may find those services at another, "what they won’t get back is the equal dignity to which they are entitled — and that’s the point.")

So, what this anonymous writer is saying is fundamentally anti-democratic. He claims to constrain an autocratic president, but his own tendencies are equally autocratic. He has no interest in representing the actual interests of actual people. He orders us to sit down and shut up. He doesn't want to know who we are. The uniqueness of each of us is a threat to his predefined idea of what it means to be "American."

Friday, September 7, 2018

Responses to the anonymous White House insider who wrote the NYT op-ed published 5 Sept 2018

Sept. 5

On Sept. 5, 2018, an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration published an op-ed in the New York Times confessing that "many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them."

"From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

* * *

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening."

The anonymous writer also said: "The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making." The president generally opposes freedom: journalism, trade, democracy. To the extent the administration has managed to succeed in "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, [and] a more robust military," it is insofar as it has tamped down the president's "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective" character.

Furthermore, the writer said, while those who worked closely with the president had, in the early days of the presidency, discussed the possibility of using the Constitution's 25th Amendment to remove him on the basis that he was unfit for office, they decided that they preferred to avoid such a "constitutional crisis."

The op-ed was immediately parodied by Andrew Paul in McSweeney's: "I Am Part of The Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep's Death Cult."

Other parodies hit social media. For example:

In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce lamented "the careerist bleatings of anonymous sources who would like you to know that, by enabling El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago and his long, slow slide into howling madness, they are really keeping him from doing some real damage to the country, and shouldn't we all be grateful for their noble, selfless work." It isn't news, he says, that the president is amoral. "Jesus H. Christ on an auto-glass ad, everybody who watched him for 11 seconds on the campaign trail figured this out. You'd have to have had the brain of a marmoset not to be convinced of this back in 19-goddamn-79. More than 60 million people voted for him anyway. You took a job with him. When the scales fall from your eyes, make sure they don't hit you in the feet." He asked the author to come out of the closet: "None of you are heroes."

Eric Levitz similarly mocked it in New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer:

"Sure, the president is a would-be autocrat with severe emotional problems (who, technically, has unilateral command of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal). But that isn’t a dealbreaker once one realizes that the White House is full of “unsung heroes” (like our fearless author) who “have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing.” And while these patriots “are clearly not always successful,” Americans still shouldn’t feel any obligation to vote for Democrats this fall. No additional oversight is required — the “steady state” (get it? It’s like “deep state!”) has got this whole thing covered."

Levitz added that there is no ethical case to be made for

discouraging Americans from organizing politically to check the dangerous president’s power — nor is there one for wanting an administration led by this president “to succeed.”

Or, at least, there is no such case unless one believes — as this senior official apparently does — that making it easier for payday lenders to scam the working poor, lowering the corporate tax rate, and increasing America’s military budget (which was already larger than every other major power’s combined) are such morally urgent goals, it is worthwhile to risk autocratic rule for the sake of advancing them...

David Frum wrote in the Atlantic: "Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees — now that's a constitutional crisis." (Impeachment, the 25th Amendment, and "[m]ass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees" are, by contrast, "constitutional mechanism[s].") "The author of the anonymous op-ed," Frum speculated, "is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story." Those who granted "deep-background gripe sessions" to journalist Bob Woodward for his book Fear (due out Sept. 11) would have done better to testify about Trump's unfitness before Congress, and something similar might be said about the author of the op-ed. The column likely "enflamed the paranoia of the president" who will "grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous." Apostrophizing the anonymous writer, Frum said that the writer's public service "is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, antidemocratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached."

David A. Graham, acknowledging Frum's column, also wrote in the Atlantic that same day that it is "extremely worrying, and amount[s] to a soft coup against the president. Given that one of Trump’s great flaws is that he has little regard for rule of law, it’s hard to cheer on Cabinet members and others openly thwarting Trump’s directives, giving unelected officials" — that is, themselves — "effective veto power over the elected president. Like Vietnam War–era generals, they are destroying the village in order to save it. As is so often the case in the Trump administration, both alternatives are awful to consider." Graham acknowledges short-term value in "talk[ing] the president out of his worst impulses" but long-term harm in "disobeying orders and acts of deception."

Sept. 6

The next morning, Sept. 6, the press secretary tweeted an an image of a text response. The text wasn't attributed, but it used language preferred by Trump ("gutless loser" and "failing NYT"), although Trump was referred to in the third person. The text accused the media of having a "wild obsession" with the question of who had written the op-ed. (The Times is not failing; over 15,000 readers left online comments in approximately one day before the Times closed the article to comments. And, if anyone is "obsessed" with identifying the writer, it is the President himself; see comments under Sept. 8.)

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) responded to the op-ed by telling journalists that "anyone who’s had any dealings over there knows that this is the reality that we’re living in" and that the real question is "who wouldn’t have written" it. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said, "If you’re not interested in helping the president, you shouldn’t work for the president," but he said he didn't think Congress should try to identify the person.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said that they would not have published the op-ed because it doesn't meet their criteria for offering anonymity, "not least because it isn’t news. The fact that senior Administration officials have been trying to block Mr. Trump’s uninformed policy impulses, and mute his self-destructive anger and narcissism, has been reported hundreds of times." They added: "Surely the writer knew that such insider criticism in the anti-Trump New York Times would be like waving a red cape in front of a raging bull....which makes us wonder if the writer’s real purpose is to assist the looming campaign for impeachment."

David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times that the op-ed may help "persuade a small but meaningful number of former Trump supporters" about the president's "unfitness for office and the chaos of his White House." Leonhardt added that he believes that the author "should go public with what’s really happening."

Eugene Robinson wrote in the Washington Post:

"...I’m not inclined to join the chorus of commentators who say he or she is being cowardly and instead should have gone public, resigned in front of television cameras, marched up to Congress and demanded to testify and...and then what? Exactly what would such a performance achieve?

Does anyone believe the Republican leadership in the House and Senate would do anything? As Corker said, Trump’s unfitness has been obvious from the beginning. Republican officials have made the conscious decision to see, hear and speak no evil. We’re probably better off with the 'senior official' still in place, saving us from Trump’s destructive whims.

He added:

"...it’s clear that we’re already in a constitutional crisis of frightening proportions. The Cabinet will not act. Congress, under GOP control, will not act. The internal 'resistance' can only do so much.

Voters are the last line of defense. You must save the day."

Sept. 7

"We already know," said Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times on Sept. 7, "that many of Trump’s closest aides hold him in contempt." The op-ed reveals the rationalization of an enabler. Such a Republican "purports to be standing between us and the calamities that our ignorant and unstable president could unleash, while complaining, in the very same op-ed, that the media doesn’t give the White House enough credit. This person wants the administration to thrive because it has advanced Republican policy objectives, even as he or she argues that the administration is so dangerous that it must be contained by unprecedented internal sabotage." If any Republican senator wants to make a real difference, she suggests, they should vote against Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court. After all, a conservative majority on the court will stand between Trump and his legal troubles, giving the president "a measure of impunity. Republican senators who know the president is out of control have a choice — they can maintain a check on his ill-considered autocratic inclinations, or solidify right-wing power on the Supreme Court for a generation. It’s obvious which way they’ll go. Maybe they’ll tell themselves having adults in the room at the White House makes it O.K."

In an episode of WNYC's On The Media ("Adults in the Room," September 7, 2018), co-host Bob Garfield said that the White House appears to be taking the truth claim seriously and considers it a “mega-leak," which "corroborates the stories we’ve been hearing from anonymous sources for a year and a half.” Co-host Brooke Gladstone recapped some of those other stories: “For instance, Maggie Haberman talking to dozens of people (tallied, but not named) in countless news reports. We know that the Secretary of Defense has ignored the President on transgendered Americans in the military, and we know that the new Secretary of State John Bolton rushed through a joint summit declaration reaffirming NATO before Trump could get his hands on it. We’ve read in Bob Woodward’s book that the National Economic Council Director took papers off Trump’s desk to prevent him from undoing a South Korean trade deal.” Garfield thinks the anonymous op-ed is a kind of smoking gun. It is confirmation that “those previous reports were right all along. I think that is historic.” Gladstone disagreed. The anonymous op-ed "is just another headline" that the audience of On the Media already knows about; she believes her own show should focus on other issues to which she can contribute analysis.

Sept. 8

An anonymous source said that Trump is 'obsessed' with identifying the op-ed writer.

Sept. 11

Thomas Friedman pointed out in the Times that some people might support some of the Republican agenda and yet have nuanced disagreement with it. "I believe in a robust military and U.S. global engagement," he said. "But this does not automatically translate into support for a radically higher defense budget."

Pre-date

Also: While this was not a "response," as it was written over a year earlier, it's worth noting that Noah Millman predicted this situation in the American Conservative in 2017:

First of all, we may be in the middle of a quasi-coup already, in the sense that the military and the intelligence community may be preventing the President from conducting his own foreign policy (assuming that he has one, which at this point is highly doubtful). If the President continues to act in an alarmingly erratic manner, I don’t think it is far-fetched to imagine that the cordon around him will tighten further, to the point where an entire generation of senior leadership of the military and espionage services become accustomed to the notion that one of their key functions is to protect the country from its own president. This is precisely the scenario I worried about in my recent column. It is not obvious to me that four years of institutional insubordination is better for our democracy than a cabinet coup would be.

Update

In November 2019, this person, still anonymous, published a book, A Warning. In that book, the person "even admits that the thesis of the Op-Ed in The Times — the essay that led directly to the existence of this book...was 'dead wrong,'" Jennifer Szalai writes in her review for the Times, since "attempts by the 'adults in the room' to impose some discipline on a frenzied (or nonexistent) decision-making process" utterly failed.

When Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., appeared in a February 2020 interview on the satellite-radio show co-hosted by Jim Norton and Sam Roberts, he bragged that "someone in the mainstream media will write an article" complaining that he had cursed on-air. Roberts asked him: "Did you ever think, though, that you’d get to be an adult, and then there’d be somebody who wanted to write a newspaper article that you used the F-word?" Trump Jr. replied: "No, I did not, because we’re not adults, guys. The reality is, like, there are no adults in the room anymore."

In September 2020, Bob Woodward published Rage, and he quoted Jared Kushner describing the Trump administration behind the scenes: "In the beginning, 20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. Now, I think we have the inverse...20 percent — maybe less now — think they're saving the world from the president."

In October 2020, Miles Taylor revealed that he was Anonymous.

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