https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/north-korea-summit-trump-kim.html?emc=edit_th_180607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=599149230607
June 6, 2018
Shock! Horror! President Trump is actually doing something right.
Sadly, Democrats in Congress are responding in a quite Trumpian way: They seem more concerned with undermining him than supporting a peace process with North Korea. They are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.
While international security is complicated, here’s a rule of thumb: When you find yourself on the same side as Bolton, go back and re-examine your position.
Sure, we all wish that Trump treated Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel with the respect that he now shows Kim Jong-un. Yes, it seems that Trump has been played by Kim. Yet another way of putting it is that Trump is finally investing in the kind of diplomatic engagement that he used to denounce, and that we should all applaud.
Trump’s newfound pragmatism is infinitely preferable to the threat of nuclear war that used to hang over all of us, so it’s mystifying to see Democrats carping about any possible North Korea deal.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” seven Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, warned in a letter to Trump this week.
The letter also insisted on “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites, as well as those linked to its chemical and biological warfare programs.
It’s almost unimaginable that North Korea will allow such intrusive inspections — any country would resist having an enemy poke around its military bases, underground bomb shelters and border fortifications. So these Democrats are essentially saying that no plausible deal will pass muster.
“The Democrats have gone overboard in the conditions they listed in the letter,” said Joel Wit, a North Korea watcher at the Stimson Center in Washington. “If they’re serious, it’s a prescription for failure because no one could achieve the conditions. It’s maybe payback for everything they were dealt in the Iran deal.”
“It’s like role reversal,” Wit added. “For years Democrats criticized Republicans for not wanting to engage North Korea. Now that Republicans want to engage North Korea, the Democrats are preparing to criticize them.”
Aside from Schumer, the Democratic senators who signed the letter are Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner.
I appreciate that it’s galling for Democrats to see Trump present himself as a great strategist who has forced North Korea to knuckle under. White House aide Larry Kudlow boasted on Fox News: “North Korea coming to the negotiating table has a lot do with President Trump’s very firm stand.”
Poppycock. North Korean leaders have been eager for decades to meet with an American president; it’s just that no previous president agreed for fear of legitimizing the regime. It’s actually Trump who has made stunning compromises — holding a get-acquainted summit with Kim without any prospect of near-term denuclearization.
The real hero here is South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who shrewdly used the Olympics to kick-start the peace process. Trump and Kim won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, but if the peace process survives, Moon will be a worthy recipient.
For decades, especially after Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, it was conservative Republicans who were the spoilers on nuclear deals with North Korea and Iran alike.
This G.O.P. petulance was bad for America. Bolton helped kill the Agreed Framework, so that North Korea hugely expanded its weapons program. Similar petulance led Trump and Bolton to try to destroy the Iran nuclear deal this spring; as a result, Iran this week announced that it was increasing its uranium enrichment capacity. Boy, that went well.
Now a similar partisan petulance seems to be turning some Democrats into spoilers. Trump’s engagement with North Korea has been chaotic and should have begun with working-level talks, but it’s still better for leaders to exchange handshakes than missiles.
Granted, there’s plenty of reason to be nervous about Trump’s deal making with North Korea, and plans can still collapse. How will Trump manage Kim when he can’t even manage a summit with the Philadelphia Eagles?
Still, even if North Korea won’t hand over nuclear weapons in the next few years, I can imagine it committing in coming months to a sustained moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests, on production of plutonium and uranium fuel, on transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, such as Syria. North Korea might also destroy an ICBM or two and accept inspectors at its nuclear sites in Yongbyon. Trump and Kim might agree to exchange liaison offices and to declare peace on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea might well cheat, and these are half-steps, not rapid denuclearization. But half-steps toward peace are better than full strides toward war.
Showing posts with label Donald Trump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Trump. Show all posts
The Republicans’ Fake Investigations - By GLENN R. SIMPSON and PETER FRITSCH
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html?emc=edit_ta_20180103&nl=top-stories&nlid=59914923&ref=cta
Jan. 2, 2018
Jan. 2, 2018
A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”
Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.
Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.
Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?
What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.
After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.
We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.
It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.
Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, both former journalists, are the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS.
Merry Christmas, Vladimir — Your Friend, Donald , Thomas L. Friedman
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/merry-christmas-vladimir-your-friend-donald.html?emc=edit_th_20171220&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
Merry Christmas, Vladimir — Your Friend, Donald
Thomas L. Friedman DEC. 19, 2017
At the end of this banner stock market year, you can bet that major business publications will be naming their investor of the year. You can stop now. I have the winner, and nobody is even close when it comes to his total return on investment: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
A recent report in The Washington Post, quoting intelligence sources, said Putin may have spent less than $500,000 to hack our last election and help (though Hillary helped much more) Donald Trump become president. And Putin’s payoff is Trump’s first year: a president who is simultaneously eroding some of our most basic norms, undermining some of our most cherished institutions and enacting a mammoth tax bill that will not make America great again.
If you assume, as I do, that Putin wants to see an America that is not an attractive model for his own people or others to emulate, and that he wants an America run by a chaos president who cannot lead the West, then Trump is his dream come true, whether or not there was any collusion between them.
So Vladimir Putin, come on up! You’re my Investor of the Year. You’re the Warren Buffett of geopolitics.
Just do the math:
On norms, we’ve grown numb to a president who misleads or outright lies every day. Different newspapers measure this differently. The Washington Post says Trump has averaged 5.5 false or misleading claims every day in office, putting him on pace for 1,999 in his first year. According to The Times, Barack Obama told 18 “distinct falsehoods” over his entire eight-year presidency, while Trump, in his first 10 months in office, “has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly.”
Given the power of the president to shape our public discourse, it’s chilling to imagine what four years and 8,000 lies or misleading statements from Trump will do to trust in government in America — and how deeply that will filter into society, giving permission to anyone and everyone to lie with impunity.
In terms of institutions, Trump has personally disparaged the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department. His head of the Environmental Protection Agency has turned the E.P.A. over to the fossil fuel industry. Ditto at Interior. His I.R.S. is being starved of funding to do its job. And his secretary of state is gutting the State Department, shedding our most experienced diplomats and replacing them with … no one.
The Treasury secretary’s economic “analysis” of the G.O.P. tax bill consisted of a one-page — fewer than 500 words — assessment, claiming that the $1.5 trillion plan would more than pay for itself, assuming a whole set of perfect circumstances come true. Your kid’s third-grade book report was longer than the Treasury’s analysis of our biggest tax overhaul in 30 years.
The Times reported that the actual experts in the Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had credited with running his models, said they were “largely shut out of the process” of analyzing the bill.
But this erosion of institutions is not all on the White House — the G.O.P. congressional leadership went along for the ride, spurning proper congressional oversight of the tax bill. There were no hearings with a range of economic and tax experts, and only nominal debate. It was just rammed through.
In short, the G.O.P. Congress treated this one-in-a-generation tax rewrite with as much rigorous analysis as naming a post office for Ronald Reagan! This is how democratic institutions get soiled.
And then there’s the future: Putin never could have dreamed up this deformed Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, but it is precisely how you don’t make America great again. We actually have a tried-and-true formula for that — one employed by every great American president since our founding. It has five parts, and this bill pretty much ignores all five.
First, we’ve always educated our citizens up to and beyond whatever the main technology of the day was — when it was the cotton gin, that meant universal primary education; when it was the factory, that meant universal high school; and now that it is the computer and artificial intelligence, it should be some form of postsecondary education for all — and then lifelong learning. If we were really doing tax reform intelligently, we’d make all postsecondary education tax deductible, to encourage everyone to become a lifelong learner.
Instead, this bill will spend money preserving unfair tax breaks for hedge fund billionaires and shrinking the inheritance tax on their heirs.
Second, we invested in the best infrastructure — roads, rail, ports, airports, telecom. This tax bill not only makes no provision for that, it actually erodes such investments in many states. With a limitation on the deduction for state and local taxes, and the deficit’s ballooning by $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, many cities and the federal government will have fewer resources for new schools and bridges.
Third, we had the best rules to incentivize risk-taking and to prevent recklessness. I am all for cutting corporate taxes — and payroll taxes — but I’d offset them with a carbon tax that would simultaneously combat climate change and stimulate renewable energy, the next great global industry, to make us more resilient and innovative. It never occurred to Trump.
Trump and his allies actually tried to get rid of all the regulatory subsidies to stimulate wind, solar and electric car production, and, I must say, it was fun to watch Republican senators get them all restored, because they are such important job creators in their states.
Iowa’s Chuck Grassley saved the wind credits, because of the vast number of wind turbines in his red state; Dean Heller of Nevada saved the electric vehicle credits, because of all the jobs that the Tesla battery factory has created in Reno; and Rob Portman helped save all these clean tech credits because of the thousands of new jobs they’ve stimulated in Ohio. It shows you just how ignorant Trump is about the benefits of clean tech.
On health care regulations, though, the whole G.O.P. bought into Trump’s nonsense, eliminating the Obamacare requirement that all individuals buy health insurance. It means we are returning to socialized medicine. Now lots of healthy young people, and others, will forgo health care, and when they get sick, they’ll go to hospital emergency wards to get treated — and those of us with health insurance will pay for their care through higher premiums or higher hospital bills. That’s called socialism. Marx would approve.
Fourth, we had, in the last century, the most open immigration policy to attract the most high-I.Q. risk-takers, the people who often start new business, as well as high-energy lower-skilled workers. I don’t have to tell you where Trump is on that.
Fifth, we had the most government-funded research to push out the boundaries of science so our companies could pluck the best ideas — witness the internet and GPS — to start new industries. The surge in the deficit created by this tax bill will curtail precisely such research.
So there you have it: a tax “reform” bill that defies all five principles that made us great for two and half centuries.
Rather than starting by asking the question: What world are we in, what are the biggest trends — like rapid technological change, the automation of an increasing number of middle-skill jobs, increasing climate disruptions, a world getting more interdependent than ever — and how we can use tax policy to enable more of our citizens to get the most out of these trends and cushion the worst, we have a bill driven by the need to reward big donors and to put “points on the board” for Trump before the midterms.
Even Putin surely could not have imagined that Trump would be this foolish and the G.O.P. this cynical. It’s just the extra dollop of caviar on Vladimir’s Christmas blini.
Trump, Israel and the Art of the Giveaway By Thomas L. Friedman,
Trump, Israel and the Art of the Giveaway By Thomas L. Friedman,
Dec. 6, 2017
I’m contemplating writing a book on the first year of President Trump’s foreign policy, and I already know the name: “The Art of the Giveaway.”
In nearly 30 years of covering United States foreign policy, I’ve never seen a president give up so much to so many for so little, starting with China and Israel. In both the Middle Kingdom and in the Land of Israel, Christmas came early this year. The Chinese and the Jews are both whispering to their kids: “There really is a Santa Claus.”
And his name is Donald Trump.
Who can blame them? Let’s start with Israel, every Israeli government since its founding has craved United States recognition of Jerusalem as its capital. And every United States government has refrained from doing that, arguing that such a recognition should come only in the wake of an agreed final status peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians — until now.
Today, Trump just gave it away — for free. Such a deal! Why in the world would you just give this away for free and not even use it as a lever to advance the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian deal?
Trump could have said two things to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. First, he could have said: “Bibi, you keep asking me to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. O.K., I will do that. But I want a deal. Here’s what I want from you in return: You will declare an end to all Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, outside of the existing settlement block that everyone expects to be part of Israel in any two-state solution.”
Such a trade-off is needed. It would produce a real advance for United States interests and for the peace process. As Dennis Ross, the veteran American Middle East peace negotiator and author of “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israeli Relationship From Truman to Obama,” explained: “When you stop building outside the settlement blocs, you preserve, at a maximum, the possibility of a two-state outcome and, at a minimum, the ability for Israelis to separate from Palestinians. Keep up the building in densely populated Palestinian areas and separation becomes impossible.”
Trump also could have said, as the former United States ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk suggested, that he’d decided “to begin the process of moving the embassy to western Jerusalem, but at the same time was declaring his willingness to make a parallel announcement that he would establish an embassy to the state of Palestine in East Jerusalem” — as part of any final status agreement. That would at least have insulated us from looking like making a one-sided gesture will only complicate peacemaking and kept the door open to Palestinians.
In either case, Trump could then have boasted to Israelis and Palestinians that he got them each something that Barack Obama never did — something that advanced the peace process and United States credibility and did not embarrass our Arab allies. But Trump is a chump. And he is a chump because he is ignorant and thinks the world started the day he was elected, and so he is easily gamed.
Just ask the Chinese. Basically, his first day in office, Trump tore up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal — clearly without having read it or asked China for any trade concession in return. Trump simply threw out the window the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geoeconomic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets to more United States goods.
Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — bilaterally — and getting basically nowhere. And yet he could have been negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation TPP trading bloc that was based on United States values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy. Think of the leverage we lost.
In a column from Hong Kong last June a senior Hong Kong official told me: “When Trump did away with TPP, all your allies’ confidence in the U.S. collapsed.” After America stopped TPP, “everyone is now looking to China,” added Jonathan Koon-shum Choi, chairman of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Hong Kong. “But China is very smart — just keeping its mouth shut.”
Just to remind: TPP was a free-trade agreement that the Obama team forged with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It was not only the largest free-trade agreement in history, it was the best ever for United States workers, closing loopholes Nafta had left open. Some 80 percent of the goods from our 11 TPP partners were coming into the United States duty-free already, while our goods and services were still being hit with thousands of tariffs in their countries — which TPP eliminated.
As I also noted last June, the other people we disappointed by scrapping TPP, explained James McGregor, author of “One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China,” were China’s economic reformers: They were hoping that the emergence of TPP “would force China to reform its trade practices more along American lines and to open its markets. … We failed the reformers in China.”
Trump is susceptible to such giveaways, not only because he is ignorant, but because he does not see himself as the president of the United States. He sees himself as the president of his base. And because that’s the only support he has left, he feels the need to keep feeding his base by fulfilling crude, ill-conceived promises he threw out to them during the campaign. Today, again, he put another one of those promises ahead of United States national interest.
Dec. 6, 2017
I’m contemplating writing a book on the first year of President Trump’s foreign policy, and I already know the name: “The Art of the Giveaway.”
In nearly 30 years of covering United States foreign policy, I’ve never seen a president give up so much to so many for so little, starting with China and Israel. In both the Middle Kingdom and in the Land of Israel, Christmas came early this year. The Chinese and the Jews are both whispering to their kids: “There really is a Santa Claus.”
And his name is Donald Trump.
Who can blame them? Let’s start with Israel, every Israeli government since its founding has craved United States recognition of Jerusalem as its capital. And every United States government has refrained from doing that, arguing that such a recognition should come only in the wake of an agreed final status peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians — until now.
Today, Trump just gave it away — for free. Such a deal! Why in the world would you just give this away for free and not even use it as a lever to advance the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian deal?
Trump could have said two things to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. First, he could have said: “Bibi, you keep asking me to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. O.K., I will do that. But I want a deal. Here’s what I want from you in return: You will declare an end to all Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, outside of the existing settlement block that everyone expects to be part of Israel in any two-state solution.”
Such a trade-off is needed. It would produce a real advance for United States interests and for the peace process. As Dennis Ross, the veteran American Middle East peace negotiator and author of “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israeli Relationship From Truman to Obama,” explained: “When you stop building outside the settlement blocs, you preserve, at a maximum, the possibility of a two-state outcome and, at a minimum, the ability for Israelis to separate from Palestinians. Keep up the building in densely populated Palestinian areas and separation becomes impossible.”
Trump also could have said, as the former United States ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk suggested, that he’d decided “to begin the process of moving the embassy to western Jerusalem, but at the same time was declaring his willingness to make a parallel announcement that he would establish an embassy to the state of Palestine in East Jerusalem” — as part of any final status agreement. That would at least have insulated us from looking like making a one-sided gesture will only complicate peacemaking and kept the door open to Palestinians.
In either case, Trump could then have boasted to Israelis and Palestinians that he got them each something that Barack Obama never did — something that advanced the peace process and United States credibility and did not embarrass our Arab allies. But Trump is a chump. And he is a chump because he is ignorant and thinks the world started the day he was elected, and so he is easily gamed.
Just ask the Chinese. Basically, his first day in office, Trump tore up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal — clearly without having read it or asked China for any trade concession in return. Trump simply threw out the window the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geoeconomic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets to more United States goods.
Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — bilaterally — and getting basically nowhere. And yet he could have been negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation TPP trading bloc that was based on United States values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy. Think of the leverage we lost.
In a column from Hong Kong last June a senior Hong Kong official told me: “When Trump did away with TPP, all your allies’ confidence in the U.S. collapsed.” After America stopped TPP, “everyone is now looking to China,” added Jonathan Koon-shum Choi, chairman of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Hong Kong. “But China is very smart — just keeping its mouth shut.”
Just to remind: TPP was a free-trade agreement that the Obama team forged with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It was not only the largest free-trade agreement in history, it was the best ever for United States workers, closing loopholes Nafta had left open. Some 80 percent of the goods from our 11 TPP partners were coming into the United States duty-free already, while our goods and services were still being hit with thousands of tariffs in their countries — which TPP eliminated.
As I also noted last June, the other people we disappointed by scrapping TPP, explained James McGregor, author of “One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China,” were China’s economic reformers: They were hoping that the emergence of TPP “would force China to reform its trade practices more along American lines and to open its markets. … We failed the reformers in China.”
Trump is susceptible to such giveaways, not only because he is ignorant, but because he does not see himself as the president of the United States. He sees himself as the president of his base. And because that’s the only support he has left, he feels the need to keep feeding his base by fulfilling crude, ill-conceived promises he threw out to them during the campaign. Today, again, he put another one of those promises ahead of United States national interest.
Don’t Prosecute Trump. Impeach Him. By John Yoo and Saikrishna Prakash
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/opinion/trump-impeach-constitution.html?emc=edit_th_20171205&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
Don’t Prosecute Trump. Impeach Him. By John Yoo and Saikrishna Prakash
Dec. 4, 2017
A wayward tweet on Saturday has set off renewed accusations that President Trump obstructed justice by impeding the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
The known facts are too weak to support any federal prosecution, not to mention one as momentous as indicting a sitting president. But even if Mr. Trump did illegally conspire to improve relations with Russia, his critics are pursuing their quarry down the wrong path. Impeachment — not criminal prosecution — is the tool for a corrupt sitting president.
The tweet in question contained a seemingly explosive claim that sent critics of Mr. Trump into a frenzy: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” If the president knew that Mr. Flynn had lied to Mike Pence and to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, then the president had knowingly obstructed justice when he asked the F.B.I. director James Comey on Feb. 14 to let “Flynn go” because he was a “good guy.” According to the president’s critics, Mr. Trump then escalated his obstruction by firing Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.
No responsible federal prosecutor would dream of stepping into a trial court with such a weak case. This is a tweet, hardly an admission of guilt. And on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, made the case even weaker when he said that he had ghost-written the tweet.
Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Comey (if true — the only source for them is a memo by Mr. Comey) do not qualify as corruption, a threat or coercion as required by federal obstruction law. A mother might make the same plea for her son, or a priest for a parishioner. Asking for leniency does not constitute obstruction, regardless of whether the crime being investigated is a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids private individuals from negotiating with foreign governments, or the False Statements Act. Mr. Trump most likely fired Mr. Comey not to thwart the investigation — Mr. Trump could have just ordered it ended, which he still has not done — but because Mr. Comey refused to affirm publicly that the president was not a target.
But even if the facts rose to the level of obstruction, most legal scholars agree that prosecutors cannot bring charges against a sitting president. The Constitution imposes on the president the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” which vests the authority to oversee all federal law enforcement. As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 70, “good government” requires “energy in the executive,” and a vigorous president is “essential to the protection of the community from foreign attacks” and “the steady administration of the laws.” Ever since the framing, presidents have enjoyed the right to drop prosecutions as a waste of resources. Indeed, this is the very theory that President Barack Obama raised when he unilaterally reduced the enforcement of the immigration laws under the Dreamers and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans programs.
Because of the original constitutional design, President Trump ultimately can order the end of any investigation, even one into his own White House. He even has the power to pardon its targets, including himself. Mr. Trump can decide tomorrow that pursuing Mr. Flynn and others for lying to the F.B.I. agents is a waste of time and money. Though he claimed that he fired Mr. Comey for not doing “a good job,” the president can fire any cabinet and high-ranking Justice Department official for any reason or no reason.
Unfortunately, the drama over the Flynn plea and White House tweeting continues to draw time and resources away from the Constitution’s one true answer for presidential corruption: impeachment and removal from office.
If Mr. Trump has truly impeded a valid investigation, Congress should turn to impeachment, which allows for the removal of a president for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment does not require the president to commit a crime, but instead, as Hamilton explained in Federalist 65, encompasses significant misdeeds, offenses that proceed from “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Such offenses, he said, “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
The House and Senate can make their own judgments — political as well as legal — about whether the Trump team’s involvement with the Russians or Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Comey fit this constitutional standard. Congress can begin this course of action by forming a special committee to investigate the Russia controversy and the Trump-Comey-Flynn affair, which could also find any predicate facts for a case of impeachment. If Congress believes that these events do not merit obstruction of justice or illegal conspiracy, it should go on the record with its judgment, too — a result Mr. Trump would welcome.
Congress should not wait on a special counsel to perform its most fundamental constitutional duty of investigating and, if necessary, removing a corrupt president.
Don’t Prosecute Trump. Impeach Him. By John Yoo and Saikrishna Prakash
Dec. 4, 2017
A wayward tweet on Saturday has set off renewed accusations that President Trump obstructed justice by impeding the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
The known facts are too weak to support any federal prosecution, not to mention one as momentous as indicting a sitting president. But even if Mr. Trump did illegally conspire to improve relations with Russia, his critics are pursuing their quarry down the wrong path. Impeachment — not criminal prosecution — is the tool for a corrupt sitting president.
The tweet in question contained a seemingly explosive claim that sent critics of Mr. Trump into a frenzy: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” If the president knew that Mr. Flynn had lied to Mike Pence and to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, then the president had knowingly obstructed justice when he asked the F.B.I. director James Comey on Feb. 14 to let “Flynn go” because he was a “good guy.” According to the president’s critics, Mr. Trump then escalated his obstruction by firing Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.
No responsible federal prosecutor would dream of stepping into a trial court with such a weak case. This is a tweet, hardly an admission of guilt. And on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, made the case even weaker when he said that he had ghost-written the tweet.
Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Comey (if true — the only source for them is a memo by Mr. Comey) do not qualify as corruption, a threat or coercion as required by federal obstruction law. A mother might make the same plea for her son, or a priest for a parishioner. Asking for leniency does not constitute obstruction, regardless of whether the crime being investigated is a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids private individuals from negotiating with foreign governments, or the False Statements Act. Mr. Trump most likely fired Mr. Comey not to thwart the investigation — Mr. Trump could have just ordered it ended, which he still has not done — but because Mr. Comey refused to affirm publicly that the president was not a target.
But even if the facts rose to the level of obstruction, most legal scholars agree that prosecutors cannot bring charges against a sitting president. The Constitution imposes on the president the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” which vests the authority to oversee all federal law enforcement. As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 70, “good government” requires “energy in the executive,” and a vigorous president is “essential to the protection of the community from foreign attacks” and “the steady administration of the laws.” Ever since the framing, presidents have enjoyed the right to drop prosecutions as a waste of resources. Indeed, this is the very theory that President Barack Obama raised when he unilaterally reduced the enforcement of the immigration laws under the Dreamers and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans programs.
Because of the original constitutional design, President Trump ultimately can order the end of any investigation, even one into his own White House. He even has the power to pardon its targets, including himself. Mr. Trump can decide tomorrow that pursuing Mr. Flynn and others for lying to the F.B.I. agents is a waste of time and money. Though he claimed that he fired Mr. Comey for not doing “a good job,” the president can fire any cabinet and high-ranking Justice Department official for any reason or no reason.
Unfortunately, the drama over the Flynn plea and White House tweeting continues to draw time and resources away from the Constitution’s one true answer for presidential corruption: impeachment and removal from office.
If Mr. Trump has truly impeded a valid investigation, Congress should turn to impeachment, which allows for the removal of a president for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment does not require the president to commit a crime, but instead, as Hamilton explained in Federalist 65, encompasses significant misdeeds, offenses that proceed from “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Such offenses, he said, “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
The House and Senate can make their own judgments — political as well as legal — about whether the Trump team’s involvement with the Russians or Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Comey fit this constitutional standard. Congress can begin this course of action by forming a special committee to investigate the Russia controversy and the Trump-Comey-Flynn affair, which could also find any predicate facts for a case of impeachment. If Congress believes that these events do not merit obstruction of justice or illegal conspiracy, it should go on the record with its judgment, too — a result Mr. Trump would welcome.
Congress should not wait on a special counsel to perform its most fundamental constitutional duty of investigating and, if necessary, removing a corrupt president.
While the U.S. Talks of War, South Korea Shudders - By HAN KANG
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/south-korea-trump-war.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20171009&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=12&nlid=68843307&ref=headline&te=1
While the U.S. Talks of War, South Korea Shudders
There is no war scenario that ends in victory.
By HAN KANG OCT. 7, 2017
SEOUL, South Korea — I cannot turn my thoughts from the news article I happened to see a few days ago. A man in his 70s accidentally dropped two thick wads of cash in the street. Two people who happened upon this bundle of money and shared it between them were caught by the police, made to give up the money and charged with theft.
Up until here, it is still an ordinary story. But there was a special reason this man was carrying so much cash on him. “I’m worried that a war might be coming,” he told the police, “so I’d just taken my savings out of the bank and was on my way home.” He said that it was money he had saved — a little bit each month — for four years, intended to send his grandchildren to college. Since the Korean War broke out in 1950, war would have been the enduring experience of this man’s adolescence. I imagine what he would have been feeling, a man who has lived an ordinary middle-class life ever since, on his way to the bank to take out his savings. The terror, the unease, the impotence, the nervousness.
Unlike that man, I belong to the generation that never experienced the Korean War. Crossing the border to the North was already impossible before I was born, and even now it is forbidden for Southerners to meet or have contact with Northerners. For those of us of the postwar generation, the country known as North Korea is at times felt as a kind of surreal entity. Of course, rationally, I and other Southerners are aware that Pyongyang is only two hours by car from Seoul and that the war is not over but still only at a cease-fire. I know it exists in reality, not as a delusion or mirage, though the only way to check up on this is through maps and the news.
But as a fellow writer who is of a similar age to me once said, the DMZ at times feels like the ocean. As though we live not on a peninsula but on an island. And as this peculiar situation has continued for 60 years, South Koreans have reluctantly become accustomed to a taut and contradictory sensation of indifference and tension.
Now and then, foreigners report that South Koreans have a mysterious attitude toward North Korea. Even as the rest of the world watches the North in fear, South Koreans appear unusually calm. Even as the North tests nuclear weapons, even amid reports of a possible pre-emptive strike on North Korea by the United States, the schools, hospitals, bookshops, florists, theaters and cafes in the South all open their doors at the usual time. Small children climb into yellow school buses and wave at their parents through the windows; older students step into the buses in their uniforms, their hair still wet from washing; and lovers head to cafes carrying flowers and cake.
And yet, does this calm prove that South Koreans really are as indifferent as we might seem? Has everyone really managed to transcend the fear of war? No, it is not so. Rather, the tension and terror that have accumulated for decades have burrowed deep inside us and show themselves in brief flashes even in humdrum conversation. Especially over the past few months, we have witnessed this tension gradually increasing, on the news day after day, and inside our own nervousness. People began to find out where the nearest air-raid shelter from their home and office is. Ahead of Chuseok, our harvest festival, some people even prepared gifts for their family — not the usual box of fruit, but “survival backpacks,” filled with a flashlight, a radio, medicine, biscuits. In train stations and airports, each time there is a news broadcast related to war, people gather in front of the television, watching the screen with tense faces. That’s how things are with us. We are worried. We are afraid of the direct possibility of North Korea, just over the border, testing a nuclear weapon again and of a radiation leak. We are afraid of a gradually escalating war of words becoming war in reality. Because there are days we still want to see arrive. Because there are loved ones beside us. Because there are 50 million people living in the south part of this peninsula, and the fact that there are 700,000 kindergartners among them is not a mere number to us.
One reason, even in these extreme circumstances, South Koreans are struggling to maintain a careful calm and equilibrium is that we feel more concretely than the rest of the world the existence of North Korea, too. Because we naturally distinguish between dictatorships and those who suffer under them, we try to respond to circumstances holistically, going beyond the dichotomy of good and evil. For whose sake is war waged? This type of longstanding question is staring us straight in the face right now, as a vividly felt actuality.
In researching my novel “Human Acts,” which deals with the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when the military dictatorship turned to the armed forces to suppress student protests against martial law, I had to widen the field to include documents related not only to Gwangju but also to World War II, the Spanish Civil War, Bosnia and the massacres of Native Americans. Because what I ultimately wanted to focus on was not one particular time and place but the face of universal humanity that is revealed in the history of this world. I wanted to ask what it is that makes human beings harm others so brutally, and how we ought to understand those who never lose hold of their humanity in the face of violence. I wanted to grope toward a bridge spanning the yawning chasm between savagery and dignity. One of the many things I realized during my research is that in all wars and massacres there is a critical point at which human beings perceive certain other human beings as “subhuman” — because they have a different nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology. This realization, too, came at the same time: The last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering, which wins out over all of these biases. And the fact that actual, practical volition and action, which goes beyond simple compassion for the suffering of others, is demanded of us at every moment.
The Korean War was a proxy war enacted on the Korean Peninsula by neighboring great powers. Millions of people were butchered over those three brutal years, and the former national territory was utterly destroyed. Only relatively recently has it come to light that in this tragic process were several instances of the American Army, officially our allies, massacring South Korean citizens. In the most well-known of these, the No Gun Ri Massacre, American soldiers drove hundreds of citizens, mainly women and children, under a stone bridge, then shot at them from both sides for several days, killing most of them. Why did it have to be like this? If they did not perceive the South Korean refugees as “subhuman,” if they had perceived the suffering of others completely and truly, as dignified human beings, would such a thing have been possible?
Now, nearly 70 years on, I am listening as hard as I can each day to what is being said on the news from America, and it sounds perilously familiar. “We have several scenarios.” “We will win.” “If war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, 20,000 South Koreans will be killed every day.” “Don’t worry, war won’t happen in America. Only on the Korean Peninsula.”
To the South Korean government, which speaks only of a solution of dialogue and peace in this situation of sharp confrontation, the president of the United States has said, “They only understand one thing.” It’s an accurate comment. Koreans really do understand only one thing. We understand that any solution that is not peace is meaningless and that “victory” is just an empty slogan, absurd and impossible. People who absolutely do not want another proxy war are living, here and now, on the Korean Peninsula.
When I think about the months to come, I remember the candlelight of last winter. Every Saturday, in cities across South Korea, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered and sang together in protest against the corrupt government, holding candles in paper cups, shouting that the president should step down. I, too, was in the streets, holding up a flame of my own. At the time, we called it the “candlelight rally” or “candlelight demonstration”; we now call it our “candlelight revolution.”
We only wanted to change society through the quiet and peaceful tool of candlelight, and those who eventually made that into a reality — no, the tens of millions of human beings who have dignity, simply through having been born into this world as lives, weak and unsullied — carry on opening the doors of cafes and teahouses and hospitals and schools every day, going forward together one step at a time for the sake of a future that surges up afresh every moment. Who will speak, to them, of any scenario other than peace?
Han Kang is the author, most recently, of the novel “Human Acts.”
This essay was translated by Deborah Smith from the Korean.
While the U.S. Talks of War, South Korea Shudders
There is no war scenario that ends in victory.
By HAN KANG OCT. 7, 2017
SEOUL, South Korea — I cannot turn my thoughts from the news article I happened to see a few days ago. A man in his 70s accidentally dropped two thick wads of cash in the street. Two people who happened upon this bundle of money and shared it between them were caught by the police, made to give up the money and charged with theft.
Up until here, it is still an ordinary story. But there was a special reason this man was carrying so much cash on him. “I’m worried that a war might be coming,” he told the police, “so I’d just taken my savings out of the bank and was on my way home.” He said that it was money he had saved — a little bit each month — for four years, intended to send his grandchildren to college. Since the Korean War broke out in 1950, war would have been the enduring experience of this man’s adolescence. I imagine what he would have been feeling, a man who has lived an ordinary middle-class life ever since, on his way to the bank to take out his savings. The terror, the unease, the impotence, the nervousness.
Unlike that man, I belong to the generation that never experienced the Korean War. Crossing the border to the North was already impossible before I was born, and even now it is forbidden for Southerners to meet or have contact with Northerners. For those of us of the postwar generation, the country known as North Korea is at times felt as a kind of surreal entity. Of course, rationally, I and other Southerners are aware that Pyongyang is only two hours by car from Seoul and that the war is not over but still only at a cease-fire. I know it exists in reality, not as a delusion or mirage, though the only way to check up on this is through maps and the news.
But as a fellow writer who is of a similar age to me once said, the DMZ at times feels like the ocean. As though we live not on a peninsula but on an island. And as this peculiar situation has continued for 60 years, South Koreans have reluctantly become accustomed to a taut and contradictory sensation of indifference and tension.
Now and then, foreigners report that South Koreans have a mysterious attitude toward North Korea. Even as the rest of the world watches the North in fear, South Koreans appear unusually calm. Even as the North tests nuclear weapons, even amid reports of a possible pre-emptive strike on North Korea by the United States, the schools, hospitals, bookshops, florists, theaters and cafes in the South all open their doors at the usual time. Small children climb into yellow school buses and wave at their parents through the windows; older students step into the buses in their uniforms, their hair still wet from washing; and lovers head to cafes carrying flowers and cake.
And yet, does this calm prove that South Koreans really are as indifferent as we might seem? Has everyone really managed to transcend the fear of war? No, it is not so. Rather, the tension and terror that have accumulated for decades have burrowed deep inside us and show themselves in brief flashes even in humdrum conversation. Especially over the past few months, we have witnessed this tension gradually increasing, on the news day after day, and inside our own nervousness. People began to find out where the nearest air-raid shelter from their home and office is. Ahead of Chuseok, our harvest festival, some people even prepared gifts for their family — not the usual box of fruit, but “survival backpacks,” filled with a flashlight, a radio, medicine, biscuits. In train stations and airports, each time there is a news broadcast related to war, people gather in front of the television, watching the screen with tense faces. That’s how things are with us. We are worried. We are afraid of the direct possibility of North Korea, just over the border, testing a nuclear weapon again and of a radiation leak. We are afraid of a gradually escalating war of words becoming war in reality. Because there are days we still want to see arrive. Because there are loved ones beside us. Because there are 50 million people living in the south part of this peninsula, and the fact that there are 700,000 kindergartners among them is not a mere number to us.
One reason, even in these extreme circumstances, South Koreans are struggling to maintain a careful calm and equilibrium is that we feel more concretely than the rest of the world the existence of North Korea, too. Because we naturally distinguish between dictatorships and those who suffer under them, we try to respond to circumstances holistically, going beyond the dichotomy of good and evil. For whose sake is war waged? This type of longstanding question is staring us straight in the face right now, as a vividly felt actuality.
In researching my novel “Human Acts,” which deals with the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when the military dictatorship turned to the armed forces to suppress student protests against martial law, I had to widen the field to include documents related not only to Gwangju but also to World War II, the Spanish Civil War, Bosnia and the massacres of Native Americans. Because what I ultimately wanted to focus on was not one particular time and place but the face of universal humanity that is revealed in the history of this world. I wanted to ask what it is that makes human beings harm others so brutally, and how we ought to understand those who never lose hold of their humanity in the face of violence. I wanted to grope toward a bridge spanning the yawning chasm between savagery and dignity. One of the many things I realized during my research is that in all wars and massacres there is a critical point at which human beings perceive certain other human beings as “subhuman” — because they have a different nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology. This realization, too, came at the same time: The last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering, which wins out over all of these biases. And the fact that actual, practical volition and action, which goes beyond simple compassion for the suffering of others, is demanded of us at every moment.
The Korean War was a proxy war enacted on the Korean Peninsula by neighboring great powers. Millions of people were butchered over those three brutal years, and the former national territory was utterly destroyed. Only relatively recently has it come to light that in this tragic process were several instances of the American Army, officially our allies, massacring South Korean citizens. In the most well-known of these, the No Gun Ri Massacre, American soldiers drove hundreds of citizens, mainly women and children, under a stone bridge, then shot at them from both sides for several days, killing most of them. Why did it have to be like this? If they did not perceive the South Korean refugees as “subhuman,” if they had perceived the suffering of others completely and truly, as dignified human beings, would such a thing have been possible?
Now, nearly 70 years on, I am listening as hard as I can each day to what is being said on the news from America, and it sounds perilously familiar. “We have several scenarios.” “We will win.” “If war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, 20,000 South Koreans will be killed every day.” “Don’t worry, war won’t happen in America. Only on the Korean Peninsula.”
To the South Korean government, which speaks only of a solution of dialogue and peace in this situation of sharp confrontation, the president of the United States has said, “They only understand one thing.” It’s an accurate comment. Koreans really do understand only one thing. We understand that any solution that is not peace is meaningless and that “victory” is just an empty slogan, absurd and impossible. People who absolutely do not want another proxy war are living, here and now, on the Korean Peninsula.
When I think about the months to come, I remember the candlelight of last winter. Every Saturday, in cities across South Korea, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered and sang together in protest against the corrupt government, holding candles in paper cups, shouting that the president should step down. I, too, was in the streets, holding up a flame of my own. At the time, we called it the “candlelight rally” or “candlelight demonstration”; we now call it our “candlelight revolution.”
We only wanted to change society through the quiet and peaceful tool of candlelight, and those who eventually made that into a reality — no, the tens of millions of human beings who have dignity, simply through having been born into this world as lives, weak and unsullied — carry on opening the doors of cafes and teahouses and hospitals and schools every day, going forward together one step at a time for the sake of a future that surges up afresh every moment. Who will speak, to them, of any scenario other than peace?
Han Kang is the author, most recently, of the novel “Human Acts.”
This essay was translated by Deborah Smith from the Korean.
How to Handle Donald Trump - Gail Collins
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/trump-divisive-charlottesville-racism-response.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur
How to Handle Donald Trump
Gail Collins
AUG. 17, 2017
Donald Trump is still president. Hard to know what to do with this, people.
In less than a week he’s managed to put on one of the most divisive, un-helpful, un-healing presidential performances in American history. It’s been a great stretch for fans of Richard Nixon and James Buchanan.
On Wednesday Trump had to dissolve his business advisory councils because the C.E.O.s were fleeing like panic-stricken geese from a jumbo jet. We now have a president who can’t get the head of Campbell Soup to the White House.
Trump also announced plans to hold a rally next week in Arizona, where he’s said he’s “seriously considering” a pardon for former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the loathsome racial profiler who never met a constitutional amendment he didn’t ignore. Arpaio’s treatment of Latinos won him a criminal contempt conviction, but of course that’s nothing to our leader.
We had no idea how bad this guy was going to be. Admit it — during the campaign you did not consider the possibility that if a terrible tragedy struck the country involving all of our worst political ghosts of the past plus neo-Nazism, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would know the appropriate thing to say but Donald Trump would have no idea.
George W. Bush would have been at the funeral for the slain civil rights demonstrator in a second. About the best Trump could do was to praise Heather Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, for writing “the nicest things” about him. Bro did indeed express appreciation for the president’s denunciation of “those who promote violence and hatred.” That was his written-by-someone-else statement, which preceded the despicable impromptu version.
We’re only safe when he’s using prepared remarks. The extemporaneous Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville wasn’t just tone-deaf and heartless; you had to wonder about the overall mental balance of a man who managed to both defend the alt-right demonstrators in Virginia and brag about his real estate in the neighborhood.
“Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?” Trump asked the stunned reporters. “I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States. It’s in Charlottesville.”
It was truly the kind of performance you expect from a deranged person, brought out to explain why he blew up a large government building and inquiring cheerfully: “Has anybody seen my car? It’s really nice. A Ford Pinto.”
Also, Trump does not own one of the largest wineries in the United States. Trump Winery is one of the largest wineries in Virginia, which is like bragging you own one of the largest ski resorts in Ohio.
(There’s something about catching these wild misstatements and lies of self-aggrandizement that can actually be soothing in the worst of times. It’s a diversion that gives you a little break from wondering what’s going to happen to the country.)
Meanwhile, business executives were concluding it was morally compromising to be on the White House manufacturing council. It’s hard to imagine what else could happen before autumn kicks in.
We are just beginning to fully understand how critical it is for a president to have at least a minimal understanding of American history. This one seems to have only recently discovered he belongs to the same party as Abraham Lincoln. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” Trump told a political gathering. “Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.”
His response to the biggest challenge of his presidency began by blaming “many sides” for the crisis. Then there was the reading of an appropriate, if way overdue, statement. Then came the disastrous press conference on Tuesday, when he was just supposed to read a brief description of the administration plan for infrastructure — something about giving road-builders a reprieve from having to consider the possibility of future flooding.
But he started to take questions and actually say things from his own mind. His staff looked worried, then nervous, then despairing.
Even when Trump is not historically wrong, or making things up to extol his own self-image, or failing to do even the least modicum of national healing at a time of crisis, he’s so incoherent that it’s possible to misunderstand what should be a simple thought.
“I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts,” he blathered at one point, then lapsed into that terrible tendency to refer to himself in the third person. “And the facts, as they started coming out, were very well stated. In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful. …”
This can’t go on. We don’t have time to wait for impeachment. Patriotic Republicans and administration officials have to get together and find a way to make sure that Donald Trump will never again say anything in public that is not written on a piece of paper. It’s their duty to the country.
How to Handle Donald Trump
Gail Collins
AUG. 17, 2017
Donald Trump is still president. Hard to know what to do with this, people.
In less than a week he’s managed to put on one of the most divisive, un-helpful, un-healing presidential performances in American history. It’s been a great stretch for fans of Richard Nixon and James Buchanan.
On Wednesday Trump had to dissolve his business advisory councils because the C.E.O.s were fleeing like panic-stricken geese from a jumbo jet. We now have a president who can’t get the head of Campbell Soup to the White House.
Trump also announced plans to hold a rally next week in Arizona, where he’s said he’s “seriously considering” a pardon for former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the loathsome racial profiler who never met a constitutional amendment he didn’t ignore. Arpaio’s treatment of Latinos won him a criminal contempt conviction, but of course that’s nothing to our leader.
We had no idea how bad this guy was going to be. Admit it — during the campaign you did not consider the possibility that if a terrible tragedy struck the country involving all of our worst political ghosts of the past plus neo-Nazism, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would know the appropriate thing to say but Donald Trump would have no idea.
George W. Bush would have been at the funeral for the slain civil rights demonstrator in a second. About the best Trump could do was to praise Heather Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, for writing “the nicest things” about him. Bro did indeed express appreciation for the president’s denunciation of “those who promote violence and hatred.” That was his written-by-someone-else statement, which preceded the despicable impromptu version.
We’re only safe when he’s using prepared remarks. The extemporaneous Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville wasn’t just tone-deaf and heartless; you had to wonder about the overall mental balance of a man who managed to both defend the alt-right demonstrators in Virginia and brag about his real estate in the neighborhood.
“Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?” Trump asked the stunned reporters. “I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States. It’s in Charlottesville.”
It was truly the kind of performance you expect from a deranged person, brought out to explain why he blew up a large government building and inquiring cheerfully: “Has anybody seen my car? It’s really nice. A Ford Pinto.”
Also, Trump does not own one of the largest wineries in the United States. Trump Winery is one of the largest wineries in Virginia, which is like bragging you own one of the largest ski resorts in Ohio.
(There’s something about catching these wild misstatements and lies of self-aggrandizement that can actually be soothing in the worst of times. It’s a diversion that gives you a little break from wondering what’s going to happen to the country.)
Meanwhile, business executives were concluding it was morally compromising to be on the White House manufacturing council. It’s hard to imagine what else could happen before autumn kicks in.
We are just beginning to fully understand how critical it is for a president to have at least a minimal understanding of American history. This one seems to have only recently discovered he belongs to the same party as Abraham Lincoln. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” Trump told a political gathering. “Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.”
His response to the biggest challenge of his presidency began by blaming “many sides” for the crisis. Then there was the reading of an appropriate, if way overdue, statement. Then came the disastrous press conference on Tuesday, when he was just supposed to read a brief description of the administration plan for infrastructure — something about giving road-builders a reprieve from having to consider the possibility of future flooding.
But he started to take questions and actually say things from his own mind. His staff looked worried, then nervous, then despairing.
Even when Trump is not historically wrong, or making things up to extol his own self-image, or failing to do even the least modicum of national healing at a time of crisis, he’s so incoherent that it’s possible to misunderstand what should be a simple thought.
“I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts,” he blathered at one point, then lapsed into that terrible tendency to refer to himself in the third person. “And the facts, as they started coming out, were very well stated. In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful. …”
This can’t go on. We don’t have time to wait for impeachment. Patriotic Republicans and administration officials have to get together and find a way to make sure that Donald Trump will never again say anything in public that is not written on a piece of paper. It’s their duty to the country.
Discovering the Limitations of Statues - Gail Collins
Discovering the Limitations of Statues
Gail Collins
AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/statues-trump-confederates-charlottesville.html?emc=edit_th_20170819&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
I believe I have an answer to our statue problem.
There are two ways to look at what happened this week in Charlottesville, Va. One is as a crisis over racism, anti-Semitism and violence. The other is as a crisis over the removal of Robert E. Lee on a horse. We know where our president went. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” wrote Donald Trump.
Sure, a different president — oh God, for a different president — would have had a larger vision. But for the moment let’s think small and focus on the statue. The nation has around 700 public memorials to the Confederacy, and most people would say that’s more than plenty. But getting rid of statues, any statues, has become very difficult. “They become sacrosanct once they’re erected,” said Kirk Savage, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who’s an expert on the subject. “It’s as if the monuments had been dropped from the sky.”
Pittsburgh, for instance, has a truly awful 100-year-old statue of Stephen Foster, the composer of “My Old Kentucky Home,” looking down in white benevolence on what was commissioned to be “an old darkey reclining at his feet strumming negro airs upon an old banjo.” But city officials haven’t been able to make it go away.
Here in New York we have the problem of Dr. J. Marion Sims in Central Park. Sims is known as the father of American gynecological medicine, and he pioneered a surgical procedure to repair tears that some women suffer during childbirth.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that people living around the statue learned that the way he had perfected his technique was by experimenting without anesthesia on slave women. The city is wrestling with that one, aware that it’s managed to get rid of only one statue in modern history — Civic Virtue, a fountain depicting a large naked man standing (virtue) astride vanquished female figures representing vice and corruption. (A politician named — yes! — Anthony Weiner held a press conference demanding that it be evicted.)
There have always been ways of getting around the problem of unwanted statuary. Erika Doss, a professor in the American studies department at Notre Dame, pointed out that when the American revolution began New Yorkers pulled down a memorial to King George III in Bowling Green. It shouldn’t be all that difficult, she said. “Memorials and monuments have a life span, not unlike the human body. They’re symbols at certain moments. Values change, histories change.”
But these are sensitive times, and we could use a more efficient way to cycle out the pieces that have overstayed their welcome. Suppose they just had expiration dates? Every 20 years, a statue would come up for renewal. A commission could hold hearings, take public comment and then issue a decision. Evictees could go off to a new life at museums or private collections.
It would be a good way to get rid of the huge overrepresentation of military men. When I walk my dog in the morning, I almost always run into the Civil War general Franz Sigel, sitting on a horse looking out over Riverside Park. Actually, the neighborhood only knows about the horse, since our view is mainly equine derrière.
And we could whittle down the politicians. A little later I pass Samuel Tilden, who was governor of New York in the 1870s and an unsuccessful candidate for president. The statue was built from the estate of, um, Samuel Tilden.
Both men were fine Americans, and you wouldn’t want to disrespect them. But if they had due dates it might be possible to give somebody new a turn. We’ve never, for instance, had a statue of Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a black city teacher whose refusal to get off a white-only trolley car in 1854 led to the legal integration of New York City mass transit a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
Didn’t even know about Graham, did you? But maybe you would if she had a statue.
Trump, of course, just likes white guys on horses. “The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced,” he moaned in a Robert E. Lee tweet.
Future generations are never going to see a bronze version of Trump astride his mount. Besides the detail of being perhaps the worst occupant of the White House in American history, our president doesn’t ride. He did once buy a racehorse named Alibi. One of Trump’s former executives has claimed that the colt had to have part of his hooves amputated when his owner forced him to be exercised over the trainer’s objections.
Trump denies this. But if we had more room for new statues, concerned citizens might want to put up some money to erect one of Alibi, limping.
Gail Collins
AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/statues-trump-confederates-charlottesville.html?emc=edit_th_20170819&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
I believe I have an answer to our statue problem.
There are two ways to look at what happened this week in Charlottesville, Va. One is as a crisis over racism, anti-Semitism and violence. The other is as a crisis over the removal of Robert E. Lee on a horse. We know where our president went. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” wrote Donald Trump.
Sure, a different president — oh God, for a different president — would have had a larger vision. But for the moment let’s think small and focus on the statue. The nation has around 700 public memorials to the Confederacy, and most people would say that’s more than plenty. But getting rid of statues, any statues, has become very difficult. “They become sacrosanct once they’re erected,” said Kirk Savage, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who’s an expert on the subject. “It’s as if the monuments had been dropped from the sky.”
Pittsburgh, for instance, has a truly awful 100-year-old statue of Stephen Foster, the composer of “My Old Kentucky Home,” looking down in white benevolence on what was commissioned to be “an old darkey reclining at his feet strumming negro airs upon an old banjo.” But city officials haven’t been able to make it go away.
Here in New York we have the problem of Dr. J. Marion Sims in Central Park. Sims is known as the father of American gynecological medicine, and he pioneered a surgical procedure to repair tears that some women suffer during childbirth.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that people living around the statue learned that the way he had perfected his technique was by experimenting without anesthesia on slave women. The city is wrestling with that one, aware that it’s managed to get rid of only one statue in modern history — Civic Virtue, a fountain depicting a large naked man standing (virtue) astride vanquished female figures representing vice and corruption. (A politician named — yes! — Anthony Weiner held a press conference demanding that it be evicted.)
There have always been ways of getting around the problem of unwanted statuary. Erika Doss, a professor in the American studies department at Notre Dame, pointed out that when the American revolution began New Yorkers pulled down a memorial to King George III in Bowling Green. It shouldn’t be all that difficult, she said. “Memorials and monuments have a life span, not unlike the human body. They’re symbols at certain moments. Values change, histories change.”
But these are sensitive times, and we could use a more efficient way to cycle out the pieces that have overstayed their welcome. Suppose they just had expiration dates? Every 20 years, a statue would come up for renewal. A commission could hold hearings, take public comment and then issue a decision. Evictees could go off to a new life at museums or private collections.
It would be a good way to get rid of the huge overrepresentation of military men. When I walk my dog in the morning, I almost always run into the Civil War general Franz Sigel, sitting on a horse looking out over Riverside Park. Actually, the neighborhood only knows about the horse, since our view is mainly equine derrière.
And we could whittle down the politicians. A little later I pass Samuel Tilden, who was governor of New York in the 1870s and an unsuccessful candidate for president. The statue was built from the estate of, um, Samuel Tilden.
Both men were fine Americans, and you wouldn’t want to disrespect them. But if they had due dates it might be possible to give somebody new a turn. We’ve never, for instance, had a statue of Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a black city teacher whose refusal to get off a white-only trolley car in 1854 led to the legal integration of New York City mass transit a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
Didn’t even know about Graham, did you? But maybe you would if she had a statue.
Trump, of course, just likes white guys on horses. “The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced,” he moaned in a Robert E. Lee tweet.
Future generations are never going to see a bronze version of Trump astride his mount. Besides the detail of being perhaps the worst occupant of the White House in American history, our president doesn’t ride. He did once buy a racehorse named Alibi. One of Trump’s former executives has claimed that the colt had to have part of his hooves amputated when his owner forced him to be exercised over the trainer’s objections.
Trump denies this. But if we had more room for new statues, concerned citizens might want to put up some money to erect one of Alibi, limping.
Couldn’t We Just Trade Presidents? Gail Collins JULY 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/couldnt-we-just-trade-presidents.html?emc=edit_th_20170715&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
Couldn’t We Just Trade Presidents?
Gail Collins JULY 14, 2017
Why can’t Emmanuel Macron be our president?
American citizens watching Donald Trump’s visit to Paris must have wondered how we got the wrong guy. Macron seemed so smart, so charming. The fact that he didn’t father any children would not normally be a big selling point, but right now we are yearning for a president with no offspring.
Speaking of which, the Paris journey was dogged by questions about that meeting Donald Trump Jr. took during the presidential campaign. The one at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who was advertised as the bearer of “information that would incriminate Hillary.”
Every day the meeting guest list grows larger. First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner was there. Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager, was there. Rob Goldstone, the British P.R. guy who likes to post pictures of himself in funny hats was there — representing a Russian pop singer whose dad is besties with Vladimir Putin.
Latest addition: Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military officer who’s currently a lobbyist in Washington. Akhmetshin is rather well known in our nation’s capital, where he was recently mentioned by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter complaining about people who register as lobbyists when they really ought to be registering as foreign agents.
And Akhmetshin might have brought somebody else along. Possibly an interpreter. Or something. This information came from Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, who is not to be confused with Jared Kushner’s lawyer or President Trump’s lawyer.
Pop Quiz: Who else do you think might have been present for that Trump Tower meeting?
A) Ivanka
B) Tiffany
C) Ryan Seacrest
D) Boris and Natasha
Donald Trump was not at the meeting. Didn’t even know about it. Until later. Even then only barely. Lately, when he’s defending his son, Trump has taken to using terms that suggest Junior was accused of cheating on a Boy Scout swim test. Talking with reporters on his flight to Paris, Trump called his eldest “a good boy. He’s a good kid.” This was, as many people observed, while he was on his way to a meeting with the president of France, who is, at 39, exactly the same age as Donald Trump Jr.
On that plane ride, the president also took a question about whether he was really serious about building a Mexican wall with solar panels on top. The answer is, totally. Also, the wall is going to be transparent.
You heard me. This administration is very committed to transparency in everything from releasing Junior’s emails 10 minutes before The New York Times was going to publish them to the border barrier.
“You have to be able to see through it,” the president of the United States explained, because otherwise “when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff. It’s over.”
Once he was back on the ground, Trump had a great time in Paris. Macron pulled out all the stops. Dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Big parade with lots of guns and airplanes. Although the French were celebrating Bastille Day, they added in the 100th anniversary of American troops’ entry into World War I. So you got the impression everything was really all about Trump, which is the best way to our president’s heart.
Trump was so touched he grabbed Macron in a handshake that evolved through so many expressions of affection it could have been featured on a dating site. He also attempted to compliment Macron’s glamorous 64-year-old wife by saying, “You’re in such good shape.”
We should note here that Melania Trump did fine. The Parisian press praised her wardrobe. Unlike her husband, she didn’t say anything weird. Nobody accused her of having sinister meetings with Russians. Give the woman some credit.
Macron was such a successful host that Trump seemed to develop second thoughts on the global warming thing. “And yeah, I mean, something could happen with respect to the Paris Accord. … And if it happens, that’ll be wonderful. …” Trump also took back his previous blasts at Paris, a city he’d claimed wasn’t safe because of the terrorists they’d let come in.
“You know what, it’s going to be just fine, because you have a great president,” he said. The sun rises and sets, and then a new reality is born.
The matter of Junior and the Russian meeting did come up during a brief press conference Trump and Macron held. (Trump, who was supposed to call on two American journalists, called on one American and one Chinese TV reporter.) “I will not interfere in U.S. domestic policy,” said Macron. Trump, who liked that answer a lot, said his son was “a great young man” who did something “a lot of people would do.”
It’s beginning to sound like a lot of people did do it. Of course, they were all either Russians and their associates or top members of the Trump inner circle. If only they’d met in a transparent room.
Couldn’t We Just Trade Presidents?
Gail Collins JULY 14, 2017
Why can’t Emmanuel Macron be our president?
American citizens watching Donald Trump’s visit to Paris must have wondered how we got the wrong guy. Macron seemed so smart, so charming. The fact that he didn’t father any children would not normally be a big selling point, but right now we are yearning for a president with no offspring.
Speaking of which, the Paris journey was dogged by questions about that meeting Donald Trump Jr. took during the presidential campaign. The one at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who was advertised as the bearer of “information that would incriminate Hillary.”
Every day the meeting guest list grows larger. First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner was there. Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager, was there. Rob Goldstone, the British P.R. guy who likes to post pictures of himself in funny hats was there — representing a Russian pop singer whose dad is besties with Vladimir Putin.
Latest addition: Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military officer who’s currently a lobbyist in Washington. Akhmetshin is rather well known in our nation’s capital, where he was recently mentioned by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter complaining about people who register as lobbyists when they really ought to be registering as foreign agents.
And Akhmetshin might have brought somebody else along. Possibly an interpreter. Or something. This information came from Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, who is not to be confused with Jared Kushner’s lawyer or President Trump’s lawyer.
Pop Quiz: Who else do you think might have been present for that Trump Tower meeting?
A) Ivanka
B) Tiffany
C) Ryan Seacrest
D) Boris and Natasha
Donald Trump was not at the meeting. Didn’t even know about it. Until later. Even then only barely. Lately, when he’s defending his son, Trump has taken to using terms that suggest Junior was accused of cheating on a Boy Scout swim test. Talking with reporters on his flight to Paris, Trump called his eldest “a good boy. He’s a good kid.” This was, as many people observed, while he was on his way to a meeting with the president of France, who is, at 39, exactly the same age as Donald Trump Jr.
On that plane ride, the president also took a question about whether he was really serious about building a Mexican wall with solar panels on top. The answer is, totally. Also, the wall is going to be transparent.
You heard me. This administration is very committed to transparency in everything from releasing Junior’s emails 10 minutes before The New York Times was going to publish them to the border barrier.
“You have to be able to see through it,” the president of the United States explained, because otherwise “when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff. It’s over.”
Once he was back on the ground, Trump had a great time in Paris. Macron pulled out all the stops. Dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Big parade with lots of guns and airplanes. Although the French were celebrating Bastille Day, they added in the 100th anniversary of American troops’ entry into World War I. So you got the impression everything was really all about Trump, which is the best way to our president’s heart.
Trump was so touched he grabbed Macron in a handshake that evolved through so many expressions of affection it could have been featured on a dating site. He also attempted to compliment Macron’s glamorous 64-year-old wife by saying, “You’re in such good shape.”
We should note here that Melania Trump did fine. The Parisian press praised her wardrobe. Unlike her husband, she didn’t say anything weird. Nobody accused her of having sinister meetings with Russians. Give the woman some credit.
Macron was such a successful host that Trump seemed to develop second thoughts on the global warming thing. “And yeah, I mean, something could happen with respect to the Paris Accord. … And if it happens, that’ll be wonderful. …” Trump also took back his previous blasts at Paris, a city he’d claimed wasn’t safe because of the terrorists they’d let come in.
“You know what, it’s going to be just fine, because you have a great president,” he said. The sun rises and sets, and then a new reality is born.
The matter of Junior and the Russian meeting did come up during a brief press conference Trump and Macron held. (Trump, who was supposed to call on two American journalists, called on one American and one Chinese TV reporter.) “I will not interfere in U.S. domestic policy,” said Macron. Trump, who liked that answer a lot, said his son was “a great young man” who did something “a lot of people would do.”
It’s beginning to sound like a lot of people did do it. Of course, they were all either Russians and their associates or top members of the Trump inner circle. If only they’d met in a transparent room.
Putin Meets Tons of Trumps - Gail Collins, JULY 7, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/opinion/putin-meets-tons-of-trumps.html?emc=edit_th_20170708&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
Putin Meets Tons of Trumps
Gail Collins JULY 7, 2017
Say what? Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin. American officials claim he pressed Putin on Russia’s messing in our presidential election. Putin’s people insist Trump accepted Russia’s assurances that nothing happened.
We will now explain how this outcome was inevitable.
Our president, as you know, has ever-changing personas, ranging from statesmanlike Reader-of-Speeches to Nearly Unhinged Trump, a version frequently seen on Twitter.
And Diplomacy Don, who seemed to fall head over heels for Putin.
“President Putin and I have been discussing various things and I think it’s going very well. We’ve had some very, very good talks,” Trump said. This was before the meeting even began. What do you think he was referring to? A late night pajama party? The two had never met in person before, even though, as a candidate, Trump seemed to nurse memories of an imaginary encounter.
Then off they went, for a meeting that went on for more than two hours. Halfway through, Melania came in to remind Trump they had other things to do. Naturally, he ignored her.
The two presidents agreed to a prearranged limited Syrian cease-fire. And they did talk about Russian meddling in the American election. But which Trump do you think brought the subject up? The day before, a version who took a few questions from reporters in Poland seemed to regard the whole matter as the sort of moral equivalent of jaywalking. (“A lot of people interfere. I think it’s been happening for a long time.”)
That was Ad Lib Trump, who is always … interesting. Then Nearly Unhinged emerged overnight and took to Twitter, blaming the election hacking scandal on the Democrats: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!”
Several questions arose, the chief one being why the leaders of the most important nations in the world would be talking about Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, whose current occupation was taking a cross-country drive with his wife.
Nearly Unhinged disappeared before the big sit-down and was replaced by a Trump version we’ll call Good At Meetings. GAM sits there nodding a lot, leading the other side to think he’s in agreement when in fact he’s just wondering what he’s going to have for dinner. Across from him was Putin, the guy who assumes that he’s won every debate unless the other side makes resistance so clear that they have to be arrested.
Perfect match! No wonder Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said there was “a very clear positive chemistry between the two.”
Previously, Europe had gotten a look at a number of other variations of our president. Speechreading Trump, who usually makes a good impression, went on a Crusader kick in Poland, calling for a defense of Western civilization from “radical Islamic terrorism” and “the steady creep of government bureaucracy.”
At around the same time, Japan and the European Union announced a big trade deal, which will be great news for Japanese automakers and European farmers. People, would you rather have a big speech or a big trade deal? Or a tweet about John Podesta? The various Trumps have already given you two out of three. What are you complaining about?
In Poland, people also got quality time with Ad Lib Trump, who popped up at a gathering of Eastern European countries. After complimenting his hosts (“Beautiful nations, by the way”) the president then went on to brag about the American economy (“Our stock market just hit an all-time high …”), and to complain that he isn’t personally making any money off it. (“Everyone else is getting rich. That’s O.K. I’m very happy.”)
This is presumably because he has to spend all his time being president. But his business empire is being run by his sons. Did they manage to lose money in this stock market? If so, it’s time to have a very serious talk with Eric.
Then Trump bragged in general about the United States. (“We make the best technology and we make the best, best technology for fighter jets and ships and equipment, military weapons. There’s nobody even close.”) At this point, he had begun to resemble a dinner guest who does nothing but talk about his superior tennis skills, better car and more interesting vacations.
Later in the day, Trump took part in a very, very short press conference during which he bragged that Polish-Americans “came out in droves. They voted in the last election and I was very happy with that result.”
By Trumpian standards, this barely even counted as boasting. However, it’s getting embarrassing when the rest of the world watches him go on like that. Maybe on future foreign trips they could arrange for him to be introduced as “the president of the United States who won the election and got better ratings than Arnold Schwarzenegger on ‘The Apprentice.’ ” That would at least get it over with at the beginning.
So Europe, we sent you an entire fleet of Trumps. I hope you’re grateful. And feel free to keep a few.
Putin Meets Tons of Trumps
Gail Collins JULY 7, 2017
Say what? Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin. American officials claim he pressed Putin on Russia’s messing in our presidential election. Putin’s people insist Trump accepted Russia’s assurances that nothing happened.
We will now explain how this outcome was inevitable.
Our president, as you know, has ever-changing personas, ranging from statesmanlike Reader-of-Speeches to Nearly Unhinged Trump, a version frequently seen on Twitter.
And Diplomacy Don, who seemed to fall head over heels for Putin.
“President Putin and I have been discussing various things and I think it’s going very well. We’ve had some very, very good talks,” Trump said. This was before the meeting even began. What do you think he was referring to? A late night pajama party? The two had never met in person before, even though, as a candidate, Trump seemed to nurse memories of an imaginary encounter.
Then off they went, for a meeting that went on for more than two hours. Halfway through, Melania came in to remind Trump they had other things to do. Naturally, he ignored her.
The two presidents agreed to a prearranged limited Syrian cease-fire. And they did talk about Russian meddling in the American election. But which Trump do you think brought the subject up? The day before, a version who took a few questions from reporters in Poland seemed to regard the whole matter as the sort of moral equivalent of jaywalking. (“A lot of people interfere. I think it’s been happening for a long time.”)
That was Ad Lib Trump, who is always … interesting. Then Nearly Unhinged emerged overnight and took to Twitter, blaming the election hacking scandal on the Democrats: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!”
Several questions arose, the chief one being why the leaders of the most important nations in the world would be talking about Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, whose current occupation was taking a cross-country drive with his wife.
Nearly Unhinged disappeared before the big sit-down and was replaced by a Trump version we’ll call Good At Meetings. GAM sits there nodding a lot, leading the other side to think he’s in agreement when in fact he’s just wondering what he’s going to have for dinner. Across from him was Putin, the guy who assumes that he’s won every debate unless the other side makes resistance so clear that they have to be arrested.
Perfect match! No wonder Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said there was “a very clear positive chemistry between the two.”
Previously, Europe had gotten a look at a number of other variations of our president. Speechreading Trump, who usually makes a good impression, went on a Crusader kick in Poland, calling for a defense of Western civilization from “radical Islamic terrorism” and “the steady creep of government bureaucracy.”
At around the same time, Japan and the European Union announced a big trade deal, which will be great news for Japanese automakers and European farmers. People, would you rather have a big speech or a big trade deal? Or a tweet about John Podesta? The various Trumps have already given you two out of three. What are you complaining about?
In Poland, people also got quality time with Ad Lib Trump, who popped up at a gathering of Eastern European countries. After complimenting his hosts (“Beautiful nations, by the way”) the president then went on to brag about the American economy (“Our stock market just hit an all-time high …”), and to complain that he isn’t personally making any money off it. (“Everyone else is getting rich. That’s O.K. I’m very happy.”)
This is presumably because he has to spend all his time being president. But his business empire is being run by his sons. Did they manage to lose money in this stock market? If so, it’s time to have a very serious talk with Eric.
Then Trump bragged in general about the United States. (“We make the best technology and we make the best, best technology for fighter jets and ships and equipment, military weapons. There’s nobody even close.”) At this point, he had begun to resemble a dinner guest who does nothing but talk about his superior tennis skills, better car and more interesting vacations.
Later in the day, Trump took part in a very, very short press conference during which he bragged that Polish-Americans “came out in droves. They voted in the last election and I was very happy with that result.”
By Trumpian standards, this barely even counted as boasting. However, it’s getting embarrassing when the rest of the world watches him go on like that. Maybe on future foreign trips they could arrange for him to be introduced as “the president of the United States who won the election and got better ratings than Arnold Schwarzenegger on ‘The Apprentice.’ ” That would at least get it over with at the beginning.
So Europe, we sent you an entire fleet of Trumps. I hope you’re grateful. And feel free to keep a few.
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