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Hurricane Dorian's Nightmarishly Slow Pace Is Linked to Climate Change |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45467"><span class="small">E. A. Crunden, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 September 2019 12:45 |
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Crunden writes: "Hurricane Dorian's historic destruction in the Bahamas earlier this week is already emerging as the latest example of a disconcerting trend. The storm hit the islands with Category 5 wind speeds and then stalled over land for hours before inching towards the United States."
An aerial view of houses in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian shifts north. (photo: Adam Stanton/US Coast Guard/Getty Images)
Hurricane Dorian's Nightmarishly Slow Pace Is Linked to Climate Change
By E.A. Crunden, ThinkProgress
04 September 19
Like Harvey and Florence before it, Dorian's biggest danger comes when it stalls over land.
 urricane Dorian’s historic destruction in the Bahamas earlier this week is already emerging as the latest example of a disconcerting trend. The storm hit the islands with Category 5 wind speeds and then stalled over land for hours before inching towards the United States.
According to some estimates, Dorian may be the slowest-moving Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean in history.
Dorian’s slow crawl is similar to other major hurricanes in recent years, and seems to be an increasingly common trend for these devastating storms. Scientists worry climate change is playing a role, allowing hurricanes to become more destructive as they slow down due to warming temperatures. When they stall, hurricanes are able to do far more damage than when they move quickly.
As of Wednesday morning, Dorian was moving towards the Southeastern United States after decimating several Bahamian islands. Forecasts indicate that Florida and Georgia could largely be spared the worst of the storm, even as images of mass-destruction in the Bahamas begin to emerge.
The storm has weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 2, lowering its deadly windspeed but expanding in size, thereby widening the area in its path.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a warning in advance of the storm, forecasting “very heavy rainfall totals of up 15 inches” in parts of the Carolinas, with flash flooding also a significant possibility. The wider Southeast is bracing for impacts into the end of the week, including storm surges and high winds.
It is likely, however, that the worst of Dorian’s damages have already happened in the Bahamas. After destroying much of Great Abaco, a 10-mile-wide island, on Sunday, for eight and a half hours, Dorian headed toward Grand Bahama. There, the storm sat for 40 hours, moving at a snail’s pace of just over one mile per hour, sometimes becoming completely stationary.
During that time, the storm did unprecedented damage. The death toll in the islands now stands at seven, but officials have said many people remain unaccounted for, and they expect the number of casualties to rise. Around 70% of homes in impacted areas are also reportedly underwater.
Prime Minister Hubert Minnis called the event “one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history” and said that more would be known in coming days as the country seeks to recover.
Hurricanes are naturally occurring phenomena, and it is common for them to stall, especially over land. But they typically move at a much faster pace, which can help mitigate the colossal damage they cause.
But that hasn’t been the case with Dorian, or with other recent memorable hurricanes.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas Gulf Coast, hovering over Houston for days and unleashing a mountain of water, claiming dozens of lives and racking up over $100 billion in damages. One year later, Hurricane Florence similarly devastated the Carolinas as it stalled over land, dumping so much rain it turned one town into a temporary island. Florence was only a Category 1 storm when it made landfall in the United States, but due to its glacial pace and its heavy rains, the hurricane’s damages were catastrophic.
A study published in June by federal scientists found that hurricane speed in the North Atlantic Ocean decreased 17% between 1944 and 2017. While it is hard to connect any one disaster to climate change, scientists have linked the stalling pace of hurricanes to slowing global winds, which in turn seem to be impacted by ice melt in the Arctic.
That trend means that there could be more storms like Dorian in the future, and occurring more often, especially if recent years are an indicator. There have only been 35 Atlantic hurricanes with Category 5 speed winds in reordered history. Of those, five have been in the last four years.
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FOCUS: Witnessing a Federal Execution |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51540"><span class="small">Peter Slevin, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 September 2019 11:46 |
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Slevin writes: "When William Barr, the attorney general, announced plans to put five federal prisoners to death by the end of January, he set in motion what could be the U.S. government’s first executions since 2003."
'In 2001, at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, I witnessed the execution of Juan Raul Garza. What, I wondered then, does the death penalty accomplish?' (photo: Tannen Maury/AFP/Getty Images)
Witnessing a Federal Execution
By Peter Slevin, The New Yorker
04 September 19
 hen William Barr, the attorney general, announced plans to put five federal prisoners to death by the end of January, he set in motion what could be the U.S. government’s first executions since 2003. In fact, the federal government has carried out the death penalty only three times in the past fifty-six years, most prominently against the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bomb was responsible for the deaths of a hundred and sixty-eight people, in 1995. The other two condemned men have largely been forgotten: Juan Raul Garza, a marijuana smuggler who murdered a Texas-trucking-company manager and ordered two other deaths, and Louis Jones, Jr., a Gulf War veteran who kidnapped a teen-age soldier from a military base, then raped and murdered her.
Barr said that “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” He made no mention of any other purpose to the executions. Not deterrence, in the face of studies that show no positive correlation between the death penalty and murder rates. Not removing felons from society, a task that lengthy sentences do effectively. Not cost, considering research that demonstrates it’s more expensive to sentence an inmate to death than to sentence him to life. Rather, Barr explained that the capital-punishment laws were duly constituted by Congress, and the Justice Department “upholds the rule of law.” A press release from his office ended with a declaration: “Additional executions will be scheduled at a later date.”
The Trump Administration’s return to the death penalty hardly seems likely to change the direction of the debate around the country, where only half of the states currently enforce it, or the world, where a hundred and twenty countries voted last year, in the United Nations General Assembly, to recommend a moratorium on the practice. More than anything, it is a political signal. As I heard the news, I couldn’t help but think of Garza, who was executed eight days after McVeigh, in the same room, at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. As a reporter for the Washington Post, I joined a small group of journalists who witnessed his execution. What, I wondered then, did his death accomplish?
Sunrise came early on June 19, 2001, one of the longest days of the year, and the media witnesses, whose names had been drawn from among the willing, assembled for the walk through the prison yard to a squat, red brick building that contained the execution chamber. The building had a series of windowless doors, allowing different groups of witnesses, including those present for the victims and for the condemned man, to enter without encountering one another. The reporters stood in a small, unadorned room facing a curtained picture window, and waited.
The turquoise curtains opened, as in a theatre production. We beheld a setting resembling an operating room, with tile walls and floors. Lying silently, on an elevated bed, a laundered white sheet pulled up to his shoulders, was Juan Raul Garza, age forty-four. With the curtains now open, he looked from window to window in an effort to see the witnesses’ faces. Four relatives of his victims were in one room. A person identified by authorities as his spiritual adviser was in another. Garza, who received multiple visits from his relatives in his final days, had asked his children, including a son, age twelve, and daughter, age ten, to stay away. They waited across town. “I don’t want to be in the place where they kill my father,” his son said.
At 7:04 A.M., Garza said, from the bed, “I just want to say that I’m sorry, and I apologize for all the pain and grief that I have caused. I ask for your forgiveness.” U.S. Marshal Frank Anderson picked up a red telephone receiver and asked someone in a Justice Department command center, “May we proceed with the execution?” The Supreme Court had already turned down his final appeals, and President George W. Bush had rejected a plea for clemency. Anderson listened for a moment. He then said, at 7:05 A.M., “Warden, you may proceed with the execution.”
Garza moved his feet nervously. The drugs that would stop his lungs, and then his heart, flowed through tubes that stretched from a far wall, each taking about sixty seconds to cross the room and enter his body. He blinked a few times. I wrote at the time that his eyes looked distant, and then went dull. The edges of his lips turned slightly blue. He died with his eyes open. It was all over in four minutes. The warden, Harley G. Lappin, announced, “Inmate Garza died at 7:09 A.M., Central Daylight Time. This concludes the execution.”
With that, the curtains in our witness room closed, and we emerged into the crisp morning air. What I remember is a blast of brilliant, blinding sunshine in a grassy prison yard filled with inmates busily getting on with their day. As workers inside the death chamber moved through the protocol to remove Garza’s body, his defense attorney, Greg Wiercioch, was standing in another part of the prison grounds, getting ready to tell us, in anger and defiance, “Someday, this precise savagery will end, but not today. Today, President Bush had the last word, but he will not have the final say on the death penalty. History will.”
What stayed with me all these years was the bleakness of the scene in the death chamber. Not just the fact that a man had been put to death by the U.S. government in the year 2001. That would be stark enough. But the anonymity of it. How many people would take note of Garza’s death, much less remember it? That day, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said that President Bush believed that the death penalty, fairly administered, “serves as a deterrent to crime.” For whom would Garza’s death be a lesson?, I wondered. Would a drug smuggler, tempted to commit murder, have second thoughts because Garza was executed? If we follow Bush’s reasoning, would the smuggler be more likely to kill if he merely faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison? Are we a safer country as a result of Garza’s death? Are we a better one?
About two years after Garza’s execution, Jones was put to death. One obstacle to further federal executions was the refusal of drug companies to provide one of the drugs used in them. Another was a series of executions that went awry. Judges questioned the humanity of the three-drug protocols that make up what is called lethal injection. Barack Obama, who favored the death penalty in certain cases, ordered a review of execution methods, following a botched execution in Oklahoma, where an inmate writhed in pain before slowly dying. Barr’s decision appears likely to energize a lawsuit, filed in 2005 by seven federal death-row inmates, challenging the three-drug protocol. In a notice to the court, the Justice Department announced that it intends to use a single drug, pentobarbital.
During the years since the executions of Garza and Jones, public support for the death penalty has declined significantly, even as state authorities have executed nearly seven hundred inmates. In the past three years, a hundred and ten people were sentenced to die nationwide, compared with more than eight hundred in a comparable period two decades ago. Doubts have climbed, parallel to an increasing number of exonerations, which number a hundred and sixty-six since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. On the Supreme Court, where a majority favors the death penalty, Justice Stephen Breyer has been outspoken in opposition, calling the practice “random” and “capricious.” He wrote in a 2015 dissent, “I see discrepancies for which I can find no rational explanations.”
No other Western democracy permits capital punishment, and there have been bipartisan efforts in an array of states to abolish it. One of the most noteworthy attempts came this year, in Wyoming, where the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted thirty-six to twenty-one for repeal, before the bill was defeated in the Senate. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, shut down the country’s largest death row this year and granted a reprieve to seven hundred and thirty-seven inmates by declaring a moratorium on executions and dismantling the storied death chamber at San Quentin State Prison. He called the death penalty a failure: “It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Most of all, the death penalty is absolute. It’s irreversible and irreparable in the event of a human error."
While support for capital punishment has fallen from seventy-eight per cent, in 1996, to fifty-four per cent, last year, according to the Pew Research Center, the division in public opinion remains highly partisan. Seventy-seven per cent of Republicans remain in favor, compared with thirty-five per cent of Democrats. With the 2020 Presidential campaign underway, and all of the major Democratic candidates in favor of abolishing the death penalty, I couldn’t help but notice that all five of the men Barr hopes to put to death committed their crimes in states that voted for Donald Trump: Missouri, Arizona, Iowa, Arkansas, and Texas.
Each of the five men on Barr’s list was sentenced to die for a horrific crime. The killings, absent a new judicial finding, would be lawful under U.S. code. And yet, the Trump Administration’s sudden enforcement of the death penalty reflects the President’s over-all approach to criminal justice, marked by caprice, contradiction, and a certain brutishness. He has accused his political opponents of treason, denied the rights of asylum seekers, and called for capital punishment for opium traffickers. It bears recalling that, in 1989, soon after the New York City Police Department wrongly implicated a group of black and Latino teen-agers in the rape of a white jogger, Trump took out a full-page ad in four daily newspapers, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York. Beneath the large type, he wrote, “Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.” Many years after the teens were convicted and imprisoned, the true attacker confessed, and police matched his DNA to the crime scene. The city paid the men a forty-one million dollars settlement, but Trump continued to deny their innocence.
Then there is the other side of the ledger, where Trump, with relish, exercises his Presidential power to excuse lawbreaking, often on the recommendation of friends and courtiers. Just four days after Barr’s death-penalty announcement, the President granted clemency to seven people. One was Ted Suhl, who owned two companies that received more than a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in Medicaid funding for faith-based mental-health services and paid bribes to a state regulatory official. In allowing Suhl to leave prison more than three years ahead of schedule, Trump credited the lobbying efforts of the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the father of his fiercely loyal former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Earlier, he pardoned the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who illegally funnelled contributions to a Republican Senate candidate. He also pardoned Joe Arpaio, the hard-line anti-immigration sheriff in Arizona who broke the law by defying a federal judge’s order to stop detaining people solely because they were suspected of being in the United States illegally.
And yet, Barr insists that a return to executions is necessary in the name of justice and the “rule of law.” Indeed, putting convicts to death, he seems to be saying, is the only legal and moral option. He could have left the federal death penalty unenforced, but he didn’t. He could have, at least, waited to see whether the judiciary approves a new lethal-drug protocol that executioners could use in place of older techniques—the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the noose. He didn’t do that, either. As I did in Terre Haute all those years ago, I found myself wondering what public purpose, beyond retribution, the execution of these five men would fulfill, compared with, say, life without parole. In other words, if these men must die, as Juan Raul Garza did, to what end?
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FOCUS: The Proud Boys' Real Target |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27142"><span class="small">Garrett Epps, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 September 2019 10:54 |
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Epps writes: "I haven't seen Justice Hans Linde in more than a decade, but I thought of him last Saturday, when I found myself locked in a science museum with frightened parents and children while neofascist thugs marched by."
Portland police officers flank a participant at a free speech rally organized by the right-wing group Patriot Prayer in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 10, 2017. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
The Proud Boys' Real Target
By Garrett Epps, The Atlantic
04 September 19
They are endangering both American citizens and American ideals at large.
 haven’t seen Justice Hans Linde in more than a decade, but I thought of him last Saturday, when I found myself locked in a science museum with frightened parents and children while neofascist thugs marched by. Hans was a child in Weimar Germany; I suspect he would have known how I was feeling.
The museum was the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, in Portland. The occasion was a rally organized by the Proud Boys, an all-male group that exalts “Western values” and promotes Islamophobia. Other affiliated groups joined in—a loose conglomeration of racists, chauvinists, and just plain thugs. Some of them were connected to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years ago, at which a right-wing marcher drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a woman named Heather Heyer. The Proud Boys aren’t from Portland, but they have selected the Rose City as the site for their rallies, threats, and clashes with local “antifa,” or antifascist activists. The rally Saturday was nominally to demand that Portland suppress the antifa groups so that the Proud Boys can march unopposed whenever they choose.
As a washed-up reporter who covered 1960s street protests, I felt the impulse to watch what happened when the Proud Boys confronted both police and a mix of local groups, some seemingly violent and others committed to overwhelming the occasion with harmless absurdity. (Some dressed as bananas, others in unicorn costumes.)
But Saturday was a family day. I was with my son, my daughter-in-law, and two little boys under five years old. We did not want my grandchildren anywhere near fascists. The Portland police bureau had published a map promising that OMSI, across the river from the planned site of the rally, would be safe. Alas, as police defused the main rally, some of the fascists found their way across the river and marched past the museum.
While the kids played in the beautiful Science Playground, the public-address system announced that the museum was in “lockup”; no one could enter or leave until further notice. We could not see the street; none of the staff knew what was going on; no one could tell us how long the lockup would last; no one knew whether the marchers might assemble in front of the museum, making escape impossible.
In any event, the group of marchers near the museum was apparently relatively small; within a few minutes, the lockup was lifted. But the walk back to the light-rail system through a stark industrial area was, for me at least, heart-in-mouth. We had no place to hide on the street if something went wrong. When we made it back to our hotel, I felt relief, unreality, and fury.
Citywide, the rally was largely anticlimactic; Portland police kept marchers and counterprotesters separate. Only after the main event ended did sporadic violence occur. Willamette Week described the aftermath as
a game of cat-and-mouse that felt more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon—and kept the two groups more than a mile apart at all times, even as some said they wanted a confrontation. Police made 13 arrests, and the few moments of violence arrived mainly as the right-wing groups attempted to leave downtown in two small buses. Antifascists were seen on videos shattering the bus windows, and a right-wing protester appeared to attack the leftists from inside the bus with a hammer.
I am glad the violence was not worse. But I’m sure I will never forget that moment in the museum. It was the second time in one week that my family’s vacation was disrupted by groups simulating a war zone on Oregon streets. The previous Saturday, we had planned to show my grandchildren the sheer magic of Eugene’s Saturday Market, where artisans sell their own creations, local bands perform, and farmers offer fresh produce from all over the lush Willamette Valley. But then a shadowy group calling itself “God, Guns, and Trump” (later changed to “God, Guns, and Liberty”) announced a pro-gun rally across the street from the market. The group’s Facebook post proclaimed that only “bold conservatives” should attend; those who had no firearms, it suggested, should buy them for the occasion. The group told those who wanted to march with Confederate or Nazi flags to stay away.
That rally was largely peaceful, with counterprotesters tangling with marchers using only words. But we couldn’t have predicted that in advance. Saturday Market was out. Who would bring a child near this unknown threat, only days after the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio? Across the river, meanwhile, Eugene’s LGBTQ community was holding its Pride rally. That gathering went on as planned, but there was anxiety throughout the city.
What has this to do with Hans Linde? Hans was born in 1924 to a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin. He once told me that his first clear memory was of watching from the family apartment while Nazis in brown shirts brawled with Communists on the Kurfürstendamm below. When Jewish life in Germany became untenable, the Lindes relocated to Denmark, and then, by good fortune, obtained U.S. visas. The Lindes settled in Portland; Hans attended Oregon public schools, and then Reed College, in the city’s Eastmoreland neighborhood. He served in the Army, attended law school at UC Berkeley, and began a brilliant career as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk, a Senate aide, a law professor, and finally the greatest justice ever to serve on the Oregon Supreme Court. I came to know Linde because, many years ago, I wrote a profile of him.
Linde’s jurisprudence sparked a national movement to revive judges’ interest in the constitutions of American states. State courts, Linde said, should construe their state’s constitution first before diving into the Supreme Court’s federal case law; a state constitutional text might make a federal ruling unnecessary. Linde left the bench nearly two decades ago, but his “first things first” approach lives on. As recently as last year, Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit, in his book, 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law, called on state judges to “revive Linde’s idea—to make constitutional arguments the first line of defense in individual rights disputes.”
Perhaps the most important legacy of the Linde years were his opinions interpreting Oregon’s free-speech guarantee much more broadly than the federal First Amendment. That protection has helped preserve Oregon’s wide-open democratic culture, where ideas from the Neanderthal to the utopian can contend, and where human experience comes in many shades.
That very culture, I suspect, is what has drawn out-of-state fascist leaders to focus on Portland. From years of study—and personal experience—I know about Oregon’s dark racist past and the shadow it casts over the state today. Nonetheless, in recent years, leaders here have worked to create an inclusive culture—one that the fascists would like to discredit, stigmatize, and eventually destroy. Since the Saturday demonstration, the Proud Boys have announced that they will be back every month until the City suppresses the antifa movement, whom they call “domestic terrorists.”
The impudence is striking. The Proud Boys are threatening violence to achieve political change. That is the textbook definition of terrorism. Moreover, even before Charlottesville, domestic terrorism had emerged as a danger from people motivated by the far-right ideology—that is, from the political forces (if not the actual individuals) now demanding that the government crush their enemies so that they can own the streets. Consider a very partial list of horrendous crimes motivated by right-wing racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism: a mass killing at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina; pipe bombs sent to public figures who oppose Donald Trump; a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue; and 20 people—mostly Latino—gunned down at an El Paso Walmart.
Meanwhile, some antifa protesters have worn masks or armor, or have shouted down speakers; some beat up the conservative journalist Andy Ngo at a demonstration earlier this year; some have thrown milkshakes, and some have threatened violence or physically fought at right-wing rallies. But the number of mass shootings committed by people identified with antifa is zero, and so is the number of lives taken. The demonstrators that trapped my family in the museum were there to disrupt the politics of a city they have no stake in. Many, if not most, of the counterprotesters were there to defend their hometown. Most of them were nonviolent and came to oppose violence.
Having lived in the Northwest for many years, I am familiar with left-wing forces that use violent tactics. Violence is self-defeating and morally wrong, and I want no part of it or them. But there is simply no equivalence here.
Although no major political figure has embraced antifa activism, the Republican Party has begun to embrace the Proud Boys. Last fall, the Metropolitan Republican Club invited a Proud Boys leader to speak at a club event. (After the event, two Proud Boys beat four protesters so badly that a jury on Monday convicted two of them on charges of assault and riot.) The Republican activist Roger Stone has said he was initiated as a Proud Boy, and Proud Boys appeared at a federal courthouse when he turned himself in on charges brought by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stone and the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson posed in the Fox greenroom with two Proud Boys accompanying Stone.
This summer, Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy are sponsoring a resolution that would designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist group.” No mention of the Proud Boys or any of the other neofascist groups who feel empowered by the ascent of Trump.
But the group’s greatest triumph came on the morning of last Saturday’s march. Trump tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’ Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!” One Proud Boy leader hailed the tweet as part of the protest’s aim: “We wanted national attention and we got it,” the organizer Joe Biggs told The Oregonian. “Mission success.”
Linde’s life was shaped by gangs of thugs deployed to shatter democratic order and impose racist dictatorship. Portland provided his family a haven and a life as citizens of a democratic nation.
Now the right has targeted Linde’s haven for destruction. The real target, though, is not Portland or antifa but all of us, and our sense of security that we are free citizens of a democratic nation, free to take our children downtown to play or to assemble peacefully to advocate values that the Republican Party does not approve. That party under Trump is now taking sides in the uneven war in Portland’s streets—and it is taking the dangerously wrong side.
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Governing by Owning the Libs |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51536"><span class="small">Tom Scocca, Slate</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 September 2019 08:32 |
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Scocca writes: "Fine: Donald Trump wanted to buy Greenland, or at least wanted to talk about wanting to buy Greenland. Presidents are allowed to be silly and imperialist; taking over Greenland is mild stuff compared with, say, planting a flag on the moon."
General view of Upernavik in western Greenland, Denmark July 11, 2015. (photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Linda Kastrup/Reuters)
Governing by Owning the Libs
By Tom Scocca, Slate
04 September 19
When a president’s entire motivation is to antagonize the people who didn’t vote for him.
 ine: Donald Trump wanted to buy Greenland, or at least wanted to talk about wanting to buy Greenland. Presidents are allowed to be silly and imperialist; taking over Greenland is mild stuff compared with, say, planting a flag on the moon.
But the original Wall Street Journal story that broke the news of Trump’s desire contained one truly alarming passage, and it was supposed to be reassuring: One of the Journal’s sources said that the president’s interest in buying Greenland was probably not “a serious inquiry,” because “Mr. Trump hadn’t floated the idea at a campaign rally yet.”
This—like the rapid melting of the Arctic that would make Greenland an attractive future acquisition—was simply a background fact: If the president of the United States is serious about doing something, he will announce it at a campaign rally.
There are many recurring themes that help explain what’s happening in the United States under Donald Trump: incompetence, cruelty, racism, self-dealing, misogyny. But the perpetual campaign rally gives shape to all the others. The Trump presidency is the result of politics organized around unending partisan aggression, which has driven out even the pretense of other aims. The only goal of power in the Trump era is to own the libs.
Owning the libs is the purpose behind an otherwise purposeless policy agenda. Why would the administration roll back methane emission limits and fuel-efficiency restrictions, when the power and automotive industries have asked it not to? Why would it go to the trouble of announcing restrictions that would make it harder for a small fraction of members of the armed forces to get citizenship for their children? Why force a losing legal battle on adding a citizenship question to the census?
“As president,” Eric Levitz wrote in New York magazine last week, “Trump has shown a singular disinterest in appealing to—or showing even the smallest bit of deference to the interests of—those outside his party’s coalition.” Levitz was responding to the president’s expressions of contempt for Puerto Rico, as another hurricane closed in on the island, and to a Trump-Pence fundraising email declaring, of the Democrats, “this is our country, not theirs.”
It’s true that Donald Trump has no interest in acting as president of the entire country. At most, he gestures toward the idea of making the country so rich and so proud that the people who’ve been against him will eventually have to submit to him in gratitude. But the us-versus-them message is not just an expression of Trump’s individual personality defects—rather, Trump is president because his personality defects harmonize with the political movement that was already in control of his party.
Last month, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin dropped by the Kentucky Democratic Party’s booth at the state fair. For the occasion, Bevin was wearing a bright blue-and-white blazer printed all over with images of Donald Trump’s face. Matt Bevin was elected in November 2015, before Trump had even won the Republican nomination for president.
It’s notable—though far from dispositive—that the Democratic booth staffers disputed news reports that called the governor’s visit “trolling,” saying instead that they had a “nice long conversation.” The Trump regalia, then, was part of what passes for the everyday order of business. It was normal, for people who live in Kentucky, that the governor of their state, performing his ceremonial duties at a century-old event for the full citizenry, should choose to make himself a billboard for the president’s face. In the same way, it’s normal for Bevin to be fighting a running court battle to try to force hundreds of thousands of people off Medicaid, because Medicaid expansion was part of the Affordable Care Act, and the Affordable Care Act was a win for the Democrats. It’s just the team he’s on.
In the permanent campaign rally, the point of governing is to let everyone know who’s who. This is why Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services and another figure whose taste for partisan warfare predates Trump, gloated on Twitter about the work his office was doing to block immigration, writing “the best is yet to come!” It’s why when pressed about the poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the tired and the poor and so on, he disavowed the message—just as Stephen Miller, the baleful engineer of the administration’s anti-immigrant machinery, had disavowed it two years before. The ruling party has no use for the Statue of Liberty, because the Statue of Liberty is understood to belong to everyone.
This has been developing for a long time: Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the government shutdown led by Newt Gingrich, when the speaker of the House decided it was better to disable the day-to-day operations of the country than to cooperate with a Democratic president. At the time, it was understood to be a showdown between one governing agenda and another. In the intervening years, though, the deed itself became the point, an act of pure negation. By 2013, when the Tea Party and Ted Cruz shut down the government, the purpose was simply to sabotage the Affordable Care Act—not to produce any alternative policy but to try to use control of a single house of Congress to nullify what had already been made law.
Some might have gullibly taken the Tea Party for a group with identifiable policy priorities. But the Tea Party yelled about fiscal restraint because it wanted to restrain a Democratic president from being able to spend money. When a Republican got back into the White House, the budgetary restraint went away.
Opposition was the only principle. Eventually, inexorably, this led to the moment that Mitch McConnell simply refused to consider any Supreme Court nominee Barack Obama might nominate—followed by John McCain, the mascot of old-fashioned statesmanship and civility, declaring his intention to block any nomination that might be made by a President Hillary Clinton, as well. The alternative to a Republican justice would be no justice at all.
And a broken government is better than a shared one. In Trump, the party has found a figure who frees it from even pretending to care about running the country. Where the George W. Bush administration boasted that “when we act, we create our own reality,” the Trump administration dispenses with action and reality alike. Every decision or announcement or tweet is pure antagonism, a boast of a win built on taunting the losers. By the time anyone tries to figure out what happened—whether the wording of the executive order makes legal sense, or the draft memo ever came to be, or where anybody put the detained babies—the president has gotten bored and moved on. The insight of Donald Trump and the people around him, then, is that the spirit of negation is not just for obstructing what your opponents want to do, but can extend to the entire project of being in charge of the government.
If you’re weak enough to care, by the way, the Federal Election Commission just joined the list of disabled institutions, with one of its four existing commissioners—out of a body that’s supposed to have six—resigning at the end of August. That leaves it without a quorum and therefore unable to enforce election law. The vacancies are there because the Trump administration abandoned the traditional practice of filling the seats two at a time, by naming one Republican and one Democratic nominee. Instead it submitted a single name, a former Trump campaign lawyer. The libs have been owned.
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