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Want to Stop America's Slide Toward Authoritarianism? Give All Immigrants the Right to Vote |
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Saturday, 10 February 2018 13:55 |
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Berlatsky writes: "Since the rise of Donald Trump, many pundits have argued that immigration undermines American democracy and American unity. In a recent controversial column at the New York Times, for example, Ross Douthat suggested that restricting immigration is reasonable given the fact that 'increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.'"
Activists rallying to defend DACA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
Want to Stop America's Slide Toward Authoritarianism? Give All Immigrants the Right to Vote
By Noah Berlatsky, NBC News
10 February 18
Immigrants don't threaten democracy unless we choose to exclude them from democracy.
 ince the rise of Donald Trump, many pundits have argued that immigration undermines American democracy and American unity. In a recent controversial column at the New York Times, for example, Ross Douthat suggested that restricting immigration is reasonable given the fact that "increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics."
Along the same lines, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, during Trump's campaign in 2016, declared that "those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order." Immigrants, Haidt and Douthat argue, are heterogenous, troubling and, from the perspective of plenty of white Americans, destabilizing. As such they must be controlled, excluded, or rejected.
It's true that immigration as an issue has poisoned political discussion in the last several years, and that it also helped fueled Trump's rise to power. Currently, the question of what to do with the undocumented immigrants first brought to the United States as children and now known as Dreamers remains a painful pressure point in Congress. But the debate raging over immigration isn’t really about the immigrants themselves. Disempowered and marginalized, even high achieving immigrants are unable to defend themselves in the face of authoritarian demagoguery. Foreign-born people are more than 13% of the US population; a little more than half of those are non-citizens. That means that there are many millions of non-citizens living in the US without a voice in government.
Disempowering millions of people undermines democracy, and creates an opening for hate-mongers and authoritarians. The solution is not to deport immigrants, or close the borders. The solution is to give all immigrants — including non-citizens — the right to vote.
Giving immigrants the vote sounds radical and implausible. But in fact, though, there is a long tradition of immigrant voting rights in the United States, according to Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at San Francisco State and the author of "Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States." Between 1776 and 1926, Hayduk's research shows, up to 40 states permitted immigrants to vote in local, state and federal elections. The practice was discontinued because of growing prejudice and anti-immigrant sentiment in the early 20th century — a time that historian Rayford Logan has referred to as the nadir of race relations in the United States.
New York City restored immigrants' right to vote in school board elections in 1968, though that practice ended in 2002. Maryland is the state in which immigrant voting is most widely allowed; a number of small cities and towns allow non-citizen residents, including undocumented immigrants, to vote in local elections.
The argument for allowing immigrants to vote is based in the earliest American arguments for democracy, Hayduk told me. "The revolutionary cry was 'no taxation without representation.' And even if you're undocumented, you can't get away without paying taxes. The basic idea of democracy is that governments should be accountable to the people and the way you make it accountable to the people is that you give them the capacity to vote."
Hayduk notes that immigrant voting provides other benefits as well. When immigrants can vote in school board elections, for example, they are more involved in the school. Children are more successful when parents participate in their education, and successful children provide both a short and long-term benefit to communities.
But perhaps even more importantly, democracies in which large numbers of people are disenfranchised can quickly cease to be democracies. The American South during the Antebellum period was not a democracy, but a vast gulag, in which millions of people were enslaved and tortured at will. In order to enforce this, Southern legislators passed sweeping laws to restrict the publication or dissemination of abolitionist literature, while abolitionist leaders were subjected to mob attacks. African America slaves, of course, were regarded as property and not granted any right to representation or enfranchisement.
The link between President Donald Trump's hatred of immigrants and his authoritarianism is anything but subtle. One of his central campaign promises was to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — promoting a vision of the U.S. as a walled fortress. Under Trump's administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has become an arbitrary, totalitarian police force. ICE has staked out hospitals and schools in order to incarcerate and deport people seeking medical care, or trying to provide their children with an education.
A police force with no accountability to the people it targets is a danger not just to the people who are arrested, but to the notion of democracy itself. Similarly, Trump has repeatedly used stigma against immigrants to undermine the rule of law, insulated from repercussions by the knowledge that many of those he insulted have little to no political recourse. Every Latino living in America is more easily stigmatized when the vote is denied to Latino immigrants, just as democracy is threatened for everyone in the U.S. when large numbers of people are prevented from using the ballot box.
The clearest example of how immigrant disempowerment is leveraged against all voters is the current political argument surrounding alleged voter fraud. Trump brazenly lied about his popular vote loss in 2016, claiming that Hillary Clinton's margin was the result of undocumented immigrants voting in large numbers. This specter of immigrants voting illegally is used to justify voter ID laws, which disproportionately disenfranchise minorities and the poor. Taking the vote from some people thus becomes a justification for taking it from others. The disenfranchisement of immigrants justifies a system in which voting is seen as a restricted right.
On a national level, immigrant enfranchisement is not on the table now, nor is it likely to be for some time. After decades of post 9/11 race-baiting and nativism, too many Americans see immigrants as enemies rather than neighbors. Even Democratic politicians like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, fearing for their own electoral coalitions, have taken stands against immigrants voting in local elections. For that matter, anti-immigrant sentiment is such that undocumented immigrants, and even documented immigrants, would today justifiably fear showing up at polling places.
But it's still important to see immigrant voting as a goal, even if it's a distant one. Otherwise, people like Douthat, Haidt and Trump will continue to blame immigrants for the erosion of American democracy.
The truth of course is that immigrants have been coming to the United States as long as there has been a United States. They don't threaten democracy unless we choose to exclude them from democracy. It's true that hatred and disenfranchisement breed authoritarianism. But it isn't immigrants’ fault that the United States is drifting towards fascism. It's our fault for not empowering them to vote out the politicians who hate them.
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FOCUS: US Secretly Negotiated With Russians to Buy Stolen NSA Documents and Trump-Related Material |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 February 2018 12:13 |
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Risen writes: "The US intelligence community has been conducting a top-secret operation to recover stolen classified U.S. government documents from Russian operatives, according to sources familiar with the matter. The operation has also inadvertently yielded a cache of documents purporting to relate to Donald Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election."
Red Square in Moscow, Russia. (photo: AfricaPatagonia)
US Secretly Negotiated With Russians to Buy Stolen NSA Documents and Trump-Related Material
By James Risen, The Intercept
10 February 18
 he United States intelligence community has been conducting a top-secret operation to recover stolen classified U.S. government documents from Russian operatives, according to sources familiar with the matter. The operation has also inadvertently yielded a cache of documents purporting to relate to Donald Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Over the past year, American intelligence officials have opened a secret communications channel with the Russian operatives, who have been seeking to sell both Trump-related materials and documents stolen from the National Security Agency and obtained by Russian intelligence, according to people involved with the matter and other documentary evidence. The channel started developing in early 2017, when American and Russian intermediaries began meeting in Germany. Eventually, a Russian intermediary, apparently representing some elements of the Russian intelligence community, agreed to a deal to sell stolen NSA documents back to the U.S. while also seeking to include Trump-related materials in the package.
The CIA declined to comment on the operation. The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The secret U.S. intelligence channel with the Russians is separate from efforts by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to obtain information about Trump and his ties with Russia. Steele worked with Fusion GPS, an American private investigations firm that was first hired by Republican and later Democratic opponents of Trump to dig up information on him during the 2016 campaign.
By contrast, the more recent secret negotiations began after Trump’s election and have been conducted by U.S. intelligence officials working with intermediaries who mainly operate in Europe. When American intelligence officials initiated efforts to broker a communications channel in 2017, however, their primary objective was to recover stolen NSA documents, not to obtain material about Trump.
At the time, the NSA was desperate to recover documents that intelligence officials believed Russia had obtained through a mysterious group known as the Shadow Brokers. The group stole highly secret NSA hacking tools and began releasing them on the internet in the summer of 2016. The Shadow Brokers theft of the hacking tools devastated morale at the NSA, putting its custom-built offensive cyber weapons out in the open. It was as if a bioweapons laboratory had lost some of its most deadly and dangerous viruses. U.S. officials wanted to identify which NSA documents the Shadow Brokers had stolen, so they could determine how badly the agency had been damaged by the theft.
But once the communications channel opened, the Russians on the other side offered to sell documents related to Trump along with the stolen NSA documents.
A Russian who has been acting as a go-between for other Russians with access to Russian government materials has sought payment for the materials he is offering. In an extensive interview with The Intercept in Germany, the Russian intermediary provided detailed information about the channel. When contacted by The Intercept for this story, the American intermediary declined to comment.
Even many involved in the secret communications channel between U.S. intelligence and the Russians are said to be uncertain about what is really going on with the operation. Recently, the Russians have been seeking to provide documents said to be related to Trump officials and Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign, including some purloined FBI reports and banking records. It is not clear whether those documents are in possession of American officials. It is also unclear whether the secret channel has helped the U.S. recover significant amounts of data from the NSA documents believed to have been stolen by the Shadow Brokers.
Further, it is not known whether the Russians involved in the channel are acting on their own or have been authorized by the Russian government to try to sell the materials to the United States. As a result, the Americans are uncertain whether the Russians involved are part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Moscow, either to discredit Trump or to discredit efforts by American officials investigating Trump’s possible ties to Russia, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The existence of the off-the-books communications channel, which has been a closely guarded secret within the U.S. intelligence community, has been highly controversial among those officials who know about it, and has begun to cause rifts between officials at the CIA and the NSA who have been involved with it at various times over the past year.
The CIA, which is now headed by a Trump loyalist, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, has at times been reluctant to stay involved in the operation, apparently for fear of obtaining the Trump-related material offered by the Russians, according to sources close to the negotiations. In the period in which the communications channel has been open, CIA officials are said to have repeatedly changed their views about it. They have sometimes expressed interest, only to later back away from any involvement with the channel and the intermediaries. At some points, the CIA has been serious enough about buying materials through the channel that agency officials said they had transported cash to the CIA’s station in Berlin to complete the transaction. But at other points, agency officials backed off and shut down their communications. Some people involved with the channel believe that the CIA has grown so heavily politicized under Pompeo that officials there have become fearful of taking possession of any materials that might be considered damaging to Trump.
The CIA’s wariness shows that the reality within the U.S. intelligence community is a far cry from the right-wing conspiracy theory that a “deep state” is working against Trump. Instead, the agency’s behavior seems to indicate that U.S. intelligence officials are torn about whether to conduct any operations at all that might aid Mueller’s ongoing investigation into whether Trump or his aides colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
Many intelligence officials are reluctant to get involved with anything related to the Trump-Russia case for fear of blowback from Trump himself, who might seek revenge by firing senior officials and wreaking havoc on their agencies. For example, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence and thus the man supposedly in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community, has said he does not see it as his role to push for an aggressive Trump-Russia investigation, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Because of the CIA’s reluctance to take an aggressive role, officials at the NSA have taken the lead on the communications channel, with a primary focus on recovering their own stolen documents. They have viewed the Trump-related material as an annoying sidelight, even as they understand that it is potentially the most explosive material to have come through the channel.
The channel has been operating in the shadows even as Mueller’s investigation has been basking in the spotlight. Last year, three former Trump campaign officials faced charges as part of Mueller’s investigation, and the special counsel continues to investigate both possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and evidence of efforts by Trump or others close to him to obstruct justice in the Mueller probe.
Over the past year, those involved with the secret communications channel have experienced a series of dramatic highs and lows. Until recently, it wasn’t clear whether the conversations would produce any materials about Trump or lead to the recovery of any NSA documents.
It took months of meetings and negotiations between American and Russian intermediaries to try to determine what documents might be available from the Russians – and at what price. Inconsistent interest in the channel by U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the CIA, complicated the negotiations.
According to documents obtained by The Intercept that summarize much of the channel’s history, a key American intermediary with the Russians was first approached by U.S. intelligence officials in late December 2016. The officials asked him to help them recover NSA documents believed to have been stolen by the Shadow Brokers.
The American was able to identify a hacker in Germany who claimed to have access to some of the stolen data believed to be held by the Shadow Brokers, and who accurately provided advance notice of several Shadow Broker data releases. The hacker’s cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community broke down over his demands for full immunity from U.S. prosecution for his hacking activities — negotiations that failed largely because the hacker refused to provide his full personal identification to the Americans.
Eventually, the relationship with the hacker in Germany led the Americans to begin talks with a Russian who became a key intermediary in the channel. The Russian is believed to have ties to officials in Russian intelligence.
In March 2017, the Russian met with the American intermediary and a U.S. official in Berlin and agreed to provide the stolen NSA data from the Shadow Brokers in exchange for payment. The U.S. government used “certain messaging techniques” that the Russian accepted as proof that the U.S. government was behind the negotiations and the proposed deal, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept.
Officials gave the Russians advance knowledge that on June 20, 2017, at 12:30 p.m., the official NSA Twitter account would tweet: “Samuel Morse patented the telegraph 177 years ago. Did you know you can still send telegrams? Faster than post & pay only if it’s delivered.”
That tweet, in exactly those words, was issued at that time.
The NSA used that messaging technique repeatedly over the following months, each time officials wanted to communicate with the Russians or reassure them that the U.S. was still supporting the channel. Each time, the Russians were told the text of the tweets in advance and the exact time they would be released. Each tweet looked completely benign but was in fact a message to the Russians.
On August 17, 2017, officials communicated with the Russians by having the NSA account issue a tweet saying:“The 1st telegraph communications exchange occurred between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858.”
In October, 2017, officials communicated again with the Russians when the NSA tweeted:“This week in history, Robert Lamphere began working on the Verona program in 1948.”
That same month, officials gave the Russians early notice that the NSA account would tweet:“Can you help Kandice the Kangaroo save her baby Jory in this month’s #PuzzlePeriodical?”
In early November, three NSA tweets were part of the communications channel. One said:“#NSA inducts 5 #CryptologicPioneers into the Cryptologic Hall of Honor. Learn more about their distinguished service.” Another stated: “People are our greatest assets. The #NSA workforce makes 65 years of service possible #NSA65.” And a third:“23,725 days, 31,164,000 min. 2,049,840,000 sec and counting…At #NSA the mission never sleeps. #NSA65.”
Later that month, a message was sent to the Russians when the NSA account tweeted:“The ADONIS cipher machine replaced WWI-era SIGABA machine. It was one of the first machines to print on-the-fly.”
And in December, the NSA gave advance warning to the Russians that its official account would tweet:“Section 702 is a law that can also be a lifesaver. Take a look at how #Section 702 protects troops and helps the nation.”
But the channel broke down several times, often over disagreements between the U.S. and the Russians about how money would be exchanged and what data was to be received. In May 2017, U.S. officials were upset that the first tranche of data they received contained files already known to have been stolen because they had already been released by the Shadow Brokers. But the Russian intermediary continued to insist that he could provide data held by the Shadow Brokers, as well as materials related to Trump officials and Russian activity in the 2016 campaign. Throughout 2017, the U.S. officials sought to limit the scope of their investigation to data stolen by the Shadow Brokers, leaving aside the materials related to Trump. U.S. officials also began to wonder whether the Russian intermediary was part of a so-called dangle operation involving Russian disinformation.
But by last fall, the Russian began passing information to the American intermediary that was unrelated to the Shadow Brokers, including the names of specific individuals and corporate entities allegedly tied to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The American intermediary turned the information over to U.S. intelligence for the purpose of determining the Russian’s credibility. U.S. intelligence officials continued to stress that they were only interested in recovering stolen U.S. data. Still, it was understood that if the Russian provided material related to Trump, the American intermediary would debrief U.S. officials on its content.
In December 2017, the Russian turned over documents and files, some of them in Russian. The documents appeared to include FBI investigative reports, financial records, and other materials related to Trump officials and the 2016 campaign.
“The information was vetted and ultimately determined that while a significant part of it was accurate and verifiable, other parts of the data were impossible to verify and could be controversial,” the documents obtained by The Intercept state. It is not clear who vetted the material.
At a meeting last month in Spain, the Russian told the American intermediary of his desire to move forward with the delivery of the Shadow Brokers data, as well as material related to the 2016 election. The American questioned him on the credibility of his data and told him the data he was providing on Trump officials and election activities was “unsolicited.” The Russian also expressed interest in giving the material to media outlets, which the American told the Russian he found “disconcerting.”
The Russian told the American that he had first become aware of Russian efforts targeting U.S. political activities in late 2014 or early 2015, according to the documents reviewed by The Intercept. The Russian stated that he had no knowledge of a “master plan” to cause major disruption to U.S. election activities, but the effort was generally understood as a “green light” from Russian security officials to enlist cyber-related groups in probing and harassing activities directed at U.S. targets.
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FOCUS: "Bastille" Is Not French for Bullshit |
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Saturday, 10 February 2018 11:43 |
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Rosenblum writes: "The old saw, monkey-see-monkey-do, is hard to avoid as Donald Trump plans to ape France's Bastille Day parade. He misconstrues that Gallic clash of cymbals, showing a worried world what sort of chest-thumping primate now occupies the White House."
Tanks rumble down the Champs Elysee avenue during the traditional Bastille Day military parade in Paris. (photo: Reuters)
“Bastille” Is Not French for Bullshit
By Mort Rosenblum, Mort Report
10 February 18
he old saw, monkey-see-monkey-do, is hard to avoid as Donald Trump plans to ape France’s Bastille Day parade. He misconstrues that Gallic clash of cymbals, showing a worried world what sort of chest-thumping primate now occupies the White House.
July 14, 1789, was when peasants with pitchforks -- the 99 percent -- stuck it to a greedy ruling class. The modern parade celebrates 1945 when allies helped France drive off a despot who thought not cheering at his speeches was treason.
“We have to try and do better,” Trump told aides, seeking a personal not-cheap thrill and totally missing the point. America hardly needs to flaunt armed forces that cost $642.9 billion in 2017, equal to the next 13 countries’ budgets, and will increase by $54 billion.
Spines tingle each year in Paris at the opening flourish: Three jets swoop low and close over the Champs-Elysées trailing blue, white and red smoke. Tanks chew up pavement, and missiles roll by. But hardware is not the point.
Crowds love gendarmes in red-plumed gleaming silver helmets on spirited horses in syncopated step: a Republican Guard that protects democrats. They cheer as Foreign Legion Pioneers, in beards and buffalo leather aprons, stride past armed only with polished axes.
Trump is no Hitler, but his laughably transparent Big Lie convinces a substantial hardcore. Few who profit from his exclusionary policies are fooled, just silent. He is not about Fatherland über alles, only his gargantuan ego. Think Mussolini. And imagine if Il Duce had had that big red button on his desk.
With three million dead over the last century, the French don’t use the word war unless they mean it. Having seen what can happen when deluded demagogues crave power, they take their freedoms, and elections, seriously.
France learned its Vietnam lesson in 1954: old cultures reject colonizers and saviors with shopping lists. During the Soviet Evil Empire days, it was allied with NATO but refused to have its political decisions made in Washington.
After Mikhail Gorbachev gave the crumbling Iron Curtain a final push, France resisted Europe’s trend to leave defense to America. It spent what it had to, without costly overkill or needless bases that got legislators elected.
Today, France has enough nukes to ruin anyone’s day. Lumbering Transalls that fly past on Bastille Day are no match for the U.S. C-5M Super Galaxy (or Russia’s larger Russian Antonov Condor), but they get the job done.
No one will win a world war involving China or Russia. The immediate risk is North Korea, but the only military deaths so far have been aboard U.S. Navy ships colliding with each other, signaling incompetence to Kim Jong-un.
And the stunning North-South Korea opening to the Winter Olympics suggest that Kim might emerge as the bigger man.
Wars, these days, are “unconventional,” with few front lines. Bombing usually makes them worse. They need well-trained highly mobile commandos backed at home by statesmen and seasoned diplomats to defuse casus belli.
I’ve covered France in action since my West African days in the 1960s. In 2003, I found a squad of French troops in Cote d’Ivoire in soft berets and no flak vests, calmly smoking in full view of rebel snipers in the hills above.
“What are you, nuts?” I asked one. He laughed. “They know what we’ve got for them if they piss us off.” True enough. For decades, a few well-placed bases cut short coups and protected civilians across much of Africa.
When Islamist zealots fled Libya south into Mali in 2013, several hundred elite troops ran them out of Timbuktu, chased them into Niger, and scattered them into the desert. Der Spiegel Online wrote:
“In a single stroke, it transformed the international community's image of French President François Hollande from that of a president perceived by many to be a ditherer to one who has become a decisive military leader.”
Hollande dithered but not about defense. When Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama’s red line, using chemical weapons on civilians, he had jets revving up on the runway. But the United States and Britain wimped out, and NATO stood down.
Since the 1980s, Americans have become obsessed with the doctrine of overwhelming force. And troops are trained, above all, to protect their own. All else, such as the people they are meant to protect, is secondary.
In theory, that’s fine. Of course, armies should avoid casualties. In practice, it gets tricky. One example among many makes the point.
After reporting in Kosovo in 1999, I asked a French officer for a ride to Marseille from the NATO base in Tirana, Albania. “No problem,” he said, adding with a laugh, “if you can get past the Americans guarding the gate.”
Sure enough, I showed a puffed-up U.S. corporal my Pentagon press credentials and pointed to the French plane barely 100 meters away. “Not possible, sir,” he said. The American flag on that tiny strip meant it was his turf. I tried some friendly GI banter. He gave me that 1,000-mile stare of a man who holds the Free World’s fate in his hands. I cajoled. He stared.
After half an hour, the Transall’s props began to turn. I made a run for it, hoping not to get shot in the back by a bullet bought with my taxes.
I thought of this dichotomy watching the Super Bowl. After the teary extravaganza of national hymns, gladiators in heavy gear tried to send each other off the field in stretchers. It is the reverse of football elsewhere, soccer, which avoids contact, played in shorts and jersey with no need for armor.
It was a great game, with a thrilling finish. But it was a game, with few lasting consequences beyond hangovers in Philadelphia. If more Americans spent a tenth of the time learning global realities as we do sports minutia, we could elect leaders worthy of us. In our democracy, whoever wins is everyone’s president, even if he, or she, doesn’t act like it.
Rather than the parade, Trump might have reflected on the Paris accords, essential to the survival of a planet, which he imperils by encouraging more fossil-fuel pollution. He could have noticed desperate refugee hordes, who if ignored risk turning to the terrorism he sees as his greatest challenge.
Consider: A president sworn to protect America attempts to squelch inquiry into Russian election meddling. With hypocritical reference to national security, he stonewalls the Democrats’ response to a Republican whitewash.
The real Donald Trump should be a surprise to no one. Take, for example, his demand in 2012 to see Obama’s passport records and college transcripts. Bill Maher then offered $5 million to charity if anyone could show proof that Trump was not “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.”
Trump sued Maher for breach of contract. He wanted the $5 million because his lawyers provided a birth certificate saying his father was, in fact, a bona fide human. He eventually dropped the suit.
It is safe to assume that Trump is not an orangutan. But with his thin skin, his failure to grasp basic democratic principles or his responsibility to a wider world he puts in peril, neither is he a president.
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The Demagogue as President: Speech, Action and the Big Parade |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45295"><span class="small">Bob Bauer, Lawfare</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 February 2018 09:41 |
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Bauer writes: "We are constantly confronted with the question of how seriously to take the president's words. By one interpretation, not so much: His verbal excesses and outrages should not be confused with action."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
The Demagogue as President: Speech, Action and the Big Parade
By Bob Bauer, Lawfare
10 February 18
 e are constantly confronted with the question of how seriously to take the president’s words. By one interpretation, not so much: His verbal excesses and outrages should not be confused with action. This is the variant of the old counsel “watch what we do, not what we say.” President Trump said he would revisit the libel laws but didn’t; he did not file the threatened lawsuit to stop publication of “Fire and Fury.” He has attacked the courts, but his administration has complied with their orders. In a sober-minded warning against overreaction, Eric Posner suggests that to distinguish “bark” from “bite.” Likewise, in their recently published book, “,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn strongly about the dangers of Donald Trump’s style of leadership but also fall back on the distinction between words and actions, and between impulse and deed, in concluding that he has not yet “crossed the line” into authoritarianism.
These and other commentators agree that the president’s words could be intended to prepare the way for bad actions to follow. He weakens norms and undermines institutions and, over time, he may take action made by possible by the damage he caused with his words. But until then, he has only barked, and the occasion to respond will arise only when he has bitten. This is the basis for that Trump, as demagogue, has been “contained” by a Republican Party—at least in the Senate—unwilling to help execute on his demagogic claims. Worries about the president’s words, Douthat writes, are “based on things that haven’t happened yet.”
This word/action distinction holds up to a point, but it is overstated and may serve to confuse rather clarify the deep problems with the Trump presidency. Recent events have brought a key example: The New York Times that the president’s lawyers are advising him to decline an interview with the special counsel, while Trump keeps up his attacks on the Russia “hoax” and “witch hunt.” The president’s words on this subject have accumulated a force that transcends mere bluster; they constitute the first of a series of actions potentially leading to the denial of a president’s testimony in a major law-enforcement investigation. Separating word from action in this context is difficult—in part because what Trump is saying and what he is doing are not easily distinguishable.
The reason Trump and his lawyers would truthfully give for refusing an interview is one that he will not rely on: his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He has resorted to this protection in private legal battles . In public matters, he has taken a sharply different position. Commenting on witnesses who invoked this right in the Clinton email investigation, “The mob takes the Fifth.” He then took the next rhetorical step in asking: “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” He is now securely in a trap partly of his own making. It is not uncommon, if unfair, that witnesses who take the Fifth invariably face suspicion that it is a virtual admission of guilt. Trump’s emphatic remarks on the subject leave him especially defenseless on this score.
Trump seems to have been previewing for months an alternative explanation for denying an interview. He would have the public understand that the Department of Justice and the FBI are corrupt and, politicized to the core, plotting against him. He intimates in this fashion thatthe Mueller investigation is illegitimate. Why then, he would ask, should a president agree to cooperate with, much dignify, an illegitimate inquiry? Senior aides appear to be , chiming in with references to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “conflicts.”
These are not merely words. They are the official position that this president has developed systematically over a year to preserve the option of limiting his cooperation with law enforcement. , White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stood firmly behind this story line. The memo prepared by House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes, she told the press corps, vindicated the president’s judgment that the Mueller investigation was a politically motivated “witch hunt.” This is not a case of the president speaking off the cuff. It is the position of the White House.
Professor Posner that, while troubling, this kind of verbal posturing is not action, only preparing the way for it:
Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for an attack on our institutions at a politically opportune moment. He might think that if he damages the prestige of the courts, he can defy the Supreme Court if it ultimately rules against the travel ban. Or that if he gets everyone to hate the media, he will be able to prosecute journalists.
But in “laying the groundwork for an attack on our institutions at a politically opportune moment,” Trump is doing something more than simply tossing words into thin air. He is actively fashioning that “moment” and making it possible. Whether purposely or by instinct,he is acting now to reap the benefits later.
Trump has somewhat varied this message about the special counsel investigation, sometimes seeming to with Mueller while, at other times, it would be necessary and leaving his intent to cooperate in question. But his public comments and tweets have been most consistently marked by hostility toward what as the “.”
Granted, a president is entitled to make his case about the Russia investigation, or the unfairness of the media, or the leftward tilt he sees in the courts. There is indeed a difference between attacking a court and defying it. Faced with an investigation into his conduct, a typical president might reasonably resort to standard constitutional or legal arguments and seek to persuade the public that, in refusing cooperation, he is responsibly protecting the constitutional prerogatives of his office. He might well add his complaints about his opposition’s political motives—without the demagogic resort to gross exaggerations or lies. In the end, however, he would be directing the conflict into the normal channels for resolution. For example, courts would eventually decide whatever claim of Article II authority Trump may rely on to defend his firing of James Comey.
But this is the crucial point: How Donald Trump constructs his attacks makes all the difference. The , which defines the president’s leadership style, changes the rules of the democratic game. It savages any and all constitutional, institutional and as necessary legal limits the leader deems inconsistent with the pursuit of personal interests and self-aggrandizement. It works to make the abandonment of these limits plausible now to the audience he is trying to reach. In the service of its goals, demagoguery features extreme appeals and—critically—a reckless indifference to the facts, even outright lies.
The “moment” Trump seems to be striving for cannot arrive and serve his purposes unless he builds toward it with his speech. He is creating conditions now to support further action later; but the creation of those conditions, though by words, is itself an activity. If later Trump refuses Mueller an interview, supported by the groundwork previously laid, it will be correct to say that the move depended on what he did to set the stage. In other words, Trump is seeking to accomplish something with his demagoguery.
The Founders understood that demagoguery was not an idle matter of mere words. As the political scientist Jeffrey Tulis , their concern with demagoguery was one of the “core issues behind the practical structural decisions for the national government and the place of the presidency in it.” Those structures have, of course, undergone radical change and the safeguards originally erected against the demagogue have withered. But it does not follow that because the protections have begun to fail, we should be less troubled by the pathology they were intended to defend against. The word/action distinction operates to make it less likely that we will take the pathology seriously—until “things have happened.”
Demagoguery as the defining feature of political leadership is very much happening. As Tulis has stressed, “rhetorical power is a very special case of executive power … it is a power itself.” So it is a mistake to dismiss demagogic practice on the grounds that it is pure speech that, even if regrettable, can be otherwise disregarded until the occurrence of some related “action.”
Demagoguery’s dangers include the routine conflation of what best serves the public with what personally suits the leader. This can be seen in Trump’s efforts to stymie the Mueller investigation. If Trump were to simply deny an interview to Mueller on a Fifth Amendment claim, it would be clear that he was acting in his own best interests. But he is not admitting to that. Instead he is preparing to contend that he is taking the actions necessary to uphold constitutional limits and refuse to play the patsy for a “deep state” that is out to take him down. He is defending the legitimacy of his election and the rights of his voters against a “hoax” fabricated by his political opponents. He has set himself up to claim that he is not saving himself; he is saving the Republic.
Trump has not only turned his words against Mueller and law enforcement. At the same Tuesday press conference, Sarah Huckabee Sanders stood squarely behind another of the president’s demagogic attacks—the “treason” exhibited by Democrats who did not applaud the accomplishments touted in the president’s State of the Union address. In an apparently prepared bit, she challenged Democrats to decide whether they “hated the president more than they love their country.” Far from being mere words, these are efforts to rob the president’s critics of legitimacy, but, this time, his target is the opposition party, not the special counsel. Is Trump looking ahead to a fight over the firing of Mueller and fortifying his defense by attempting to disqualify dissident congressional Democrats as traitors? Perhaps, too, he is building those same defenses against an impeachment inquiry in a House that the Democrats may control next year.
It is hard, then, in this demagogic presidency, to distinguish words from actions, somehow making allowances for the former and worrying only about the latter. It will also happen that the demagogue who, in , is an “opportunistic showman” will vary his forms of expression. Consider the president’s reported desire to arrange for a of tanks and troops through downtown Washington. The president would not be ordering military action. He would be putting on a show. The troops file by and salute him; he returns the salute. Is this spectacle a presidential action, or a mode of communication, or both?
In the immediate future, responsible institutions and individuals must make decisions about taking a stand. If the president cites corrupt law enforcement in declining an interview or in firing Mueller outright, Congress and the individuals in senior executive-branch positions will have to decide whether and how to respond—to enable and support the president, or to speak out or act in opposition. For political appointees within government, resignation is an option. For Congress, the choices include the initiation of impeachment inquiries. The time will also have come to hear from organized bar and other civil society institutions.
It would be wrong to think that elected and other officials, and civil society leadership, have plenty of time to think about their choices, until the time when Trump is not “just talking” but finally “does something.” He is already in the middle of doing something.
Bob Bauer served as White House Counsel to President Obama, and returned to private practice as a partner at Perkins Coie in June 2011. In 2013, the President named Bob to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, as well as the Co-Director of the university's Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic.
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n comments to reporters at the White House on Friday, Donald J. Trump stirred controversy by lavishing an alleged wife beater with praise that he historically has reserved for child molesters and Nazis.
