The Republican Plan for Trump Impunity by Brian Beutler
It is hard to fathom a near-term future in which special counsel Robert Mueller refers a finding to the Republican Congress that President Donald Trump broke the law, and the Republican Congress takes credible action in response.
To the contrary, nearly every other possible resolution to Mueller’s investigation is more plausible than one in which his work continues unimpeded, and Republicans in Congress take their constitutional obligations seriously when his findings are complete.
The question of whether those Republicans are greasing the skids for Trump to fire Mueller, or trying to hobble his efforts, or merely helping to discredit his investigation, is a matter of intense speculation. But it seems much more likely that what they are really doing is creating latitude in each of these directions simultaneously so that, one way or another, Trump never faces accountability for any crimes he has committed.
It’s been lost to the ages of the past several months, but amid the tremendous backlash to Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey last year, Republicans were relieved to learn that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had selected Mueller as a special counsel, and claimed to be committed to protecting the integrity of his investigation. If their praise for the Mueller appointment had been sincere, it would have prefigured a pattern of behavior wildly at odds from the one we’ve witnessed since last June. As Trump’s exposure has grown, Republicans have carved out a berth of impunity around him large enough to steer him through the biggest scandal in American political history.
Permission to Fire Mueller
Because the fallout from the Comey firing was so extensive, it stands to reason that the Republicans who continue to urge Trump not to fire Mueller or tamper with his investigation genuinely believe firing him would be a mistake. Their concerns may stem from the fact that the consequences of Trump’s lawlessness would first and foremost be borne by members of Congress, but whatever their motives, the fact that they’ve spoken out at all reveals genuine dissension in the GOP ranks over the question of what Trump should do.
On the question of what Trump should be allowed to do, by contrast, there is no meaningful dissent at all. Trump’s initial frustration with the special counsel investigation, which surfaced almost immediately after Mueller’s appointment, created a brief, bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that Congress should take special steps to insulate the probe from White House meddling. Just as quickly, though, Republican enthusiasm for checking the president in service to the rule of law melted away, and bipartisan bills to protect Mueller have stalled.
For months, Republicans insisted that they stalled because they were unnecessary. “The only people that talk about that are the Democrats,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told NPR at the end of last year. “I don’t hear anybody at the White House or any Republicans—or certainly not in the Senate—calling for Mueller to be fired. It strikes me that’s sort of a Democratic effort to protect him from something he doesn’t need to be protected from.”
The truth was practically the reverse. Multiple House Republicans have been agitating for Mueller’s dismissal, or for his hands to be tied, for months. On Thursday, we learned Trump actually ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller last summer, with the recriminations from the Comey firing still fresh on his mind. Multiple reports now suggest that Trump has Rosenstein in his sights, raising the possibility that Trump would like a loyalist acting-DAG to cut Mueller’s legs out from under him.
Contra-McConnell, Mueller’s investigation needs statutory reinforcements more urgently than any federal investigation since Watergate; Republicans won’t provide them, because they don’t want to limit Trump’s options, including the option of ending an investigation of himself.
Permission to Obstruct Justice
Outside of Congress, influential conservative commentators are building the intellectual edifice Republicans will need to simply ignore Mueller if Mueller finds that Trump and others obstructed justice, but brings no charges directly related to the conspiracy to subvert the election.
In laying the predicate, they will surely note that Bill Clinton served out his second term in full after Ken Starr referred him to Congress for obstruction of justice and related procedural crimes, despite the fact that the underlying matter (Clinton’s affair with a White House intern) was fully substantiated.
The foundations of this argument are incredibly weak.
First, whether it can be shown that anyone in the Trump organization did anything illegal in colluding with Russian intelligence agents to subvert the election, the fact that actual crimes were committed in the course of the subversion is uncontested. For instance: Stealing emails is a crime.
Second, many members of Congress who supported the impeachment and removal of Bill Clinton still hold elected office. Of the 11 sitting GOP senators who served during Clinton’s impeachment trial, 10 of them, including McConnell, voted to remove him. The current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was a senator at the time, and voted for Clinton’s conviction. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was a House impeachment manager for the Republican Party.
Third, Trump’s conduct—in the matters under investigation, and in the steps he has taken to cover them up—has been far more corrosive to the health of the republic than Clinton’s was two-decades ago. Clinton was discovered, at the end of a meandering, multi-year, investigation, to have had an extramarital affair with an intern, and the steps he took to avoid getting caught resulted in his impeachment and disbarment. Trump, on the other hand, actively abetted, and continues to abet, an intelligence operation that helped him win the presidency, as part of a larger Russian goal of destabilizing American democracy. In covering up that crime he has fired an FBI director, ordered the firing of a special counsel, purged members of the FBI’s leadership team who are witnesses in the special counsel investigation, spread conspiracy theories about a coup, ordered counter investigations of his political enemies, and is now reportedly conspiring to oust Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller—all with Republican acquiescence.
If Starr’s case against Clinton’s procedural crimes merited impeachment and disbarment, an obstruction case against Trump should merit meaningfully greater punishment. Not less.
Permission for Everything
The worst case scenario for Trump and Congressional Republicans is one in which Mueller charges members of the Trump organization with crimes committed in the course of colluding with Russian intelligence, perhaps naming Trump as an unindicted coconspirator. Trump only skates in this scenario if Republicans help him characterize the whole thing—Mueller, the investigation, its findings—as the product of a corrupt plot against Trump. That would be the ultimate abdication of the GOP’s constitutional obligations, leaving Trump unaccountable for any level of criminality and corruption, and destroying public confidence in the rule of law.
And yet, Republicans spent much of last week raving about a “secret society” of DOJ officials conspiring against Trump, and stand poised to release a partisan memo that will characterize the Mueller investigation as the discredited endpoint of an Obama-era conspiracy to sabotage Trump.
Trump is too erratic to stick to a game plan, and Republicans in Congress are too scattered to guide Trump in any single direction. The plan, such as it is, is to keep all avenues of escape open, so long as none of them end with Republicans taking an appropriate but uncomfortable stand for justice.
...
End of article
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Re-up: ST reader feedback for 180119 KENNEL感想
Forbidden City、アメリカでこの名の中華料理店に行ったことがありましたが、
北京のこととは、初めてしりました。なるほど、纏足とかの時代の話ですね。
（長野県、迷多坊）
Ted Holstさんのご冥福を心からお祈りいたします。編集長さんのお子さまのご誕生を心からお慶び申し上げます。プラスマイナス0にはならない複雑な感情もありますね。
（神奈川県、善野清子、主婦）
私は76歳もうすぐ77歳になります。私だけなのかわかりませんが、外国の俳優さん、外国の本というともう引いてしまっています。何とか私でも参加できるようなものを時には入れてほしいのです。一緒にやっていたお友達もやめてしまったので、私ひとりで考えても答えが出ないものですから
（長野県、畑山早苗）
「Point Counter Point」は、毎号読んでいる記事のひとつでした。英語の勉強になるのははもちろんですが、自分の意見をしっかり持つこと、それを堂々と言葉にすることの大切さを感じつつ、読ませていただいておりました。Ted Hoist さんのご冥福を心よりお祈り申し上げます。
（神奈川県、相澤憲子、主婦）
Ted Holst さんのご冥福を心からお祈り申し上げます。
（茨城県、高下浩文、団体職員）
インフルエンザが流行中とのこと。今週は寒波も強そう。お互い養生、対策の上でお仕事が続きますように。
（三重県、宮地伸也、会社員）
ナオミとデビットの会話はいつもタイムリーで楽しみにしていました。Ted Holstさんのご冥福をお祈り申し上げます。
（北海道、奥山智恵子、学校職員）
この数日トランプ大統領が使ったとか使わなかったとか騒がしいニュースの単語“shithole”日本語訳では「屋外便所」となっていますが、何れにしてもあまりいい言葉ではないようですね。英語に慣れていない私は、近づかないことにします。でも、タブーワードをタイミングよく使うと生き生きとスパイスの効いた会話になりそうですがいかがでしょう。
（愛媛県、寺尾勝恵、主婦）
北京のこととは、初めてしりました。なるほど、纏足とかの時代の話ですね。
（長野県、迷多坊）
Ted Holstさんのご冥福を心からお祈りいたします。編集長さんのお子さまのご誕生を心からお慶び申し上げます。プラスマイナス0にはならない複雑な感情もありますね。
（神奈川県、善野清子、主婦）
私は76歳もうすぐ77歳になります。私だけなのかわかりませんが、外国の俳優さん、外国の本というともう引いてしまっています。何とか私でも参加できるようなものを時には入れてほしいのです。一緒にやっていたお友達もやめてしまったので、私ひとりで考えても答えが出ないものですから
（長野県、畑山早苗）
「Point Counter Point」は、毎号読んでいる記事のひとつでした。英語の勉強になるのははもちろんですが、自分の意見をしっかり持つこと、それを堂々と言葉にすることの大切さを感じつつ、読ませていただいておりました。Ted Hoist さんのご冥福を心よりお祈り申し上げます。
（神奈川県、相澤憲子、主婦）
Ted Holst さんのご冥福を心からお祈り申し上げます。
（茨城県、高下浩文、団体職員）
インフルエンザが流行中とのこと。今週は寒波も強そう。お互い養生、対策の上でお仕事が続きますように。
（三重県、宮地伸也、会社員）
ナオミとデビットの会話はいつもタイムリーで楽しみにしていました。Ted Holstさんのご冥福をお祈り申し上げます。
（北海道、奥山智恵子、学校職員）
この数日トランプ大統領が使ったとか使わなかったとか騒がしいニュースの単語“shithole”日本語訳では「屋外便所」となっていますが、何れにしてもあまりいい言葉ではないようですね。英語に慣れていない私は、近づかないことにします。でも、タブーワードをタイミングよく使うと生き生きとスパイスの効いた会話になりそうですがいかがでしょう。
（愛媛県、寺尾勝恵、主婦）
ST reader feedback: 180119 KENNEL感想
Forbidden City、アメリカでこの名の中華料理店に行ったことがありましたが、
北京のこととは、初めてしりました。なるほど、纏足とかの時代の話ですね。
（長野県、迷多坊）
Ted Holstさんのご冥福を心からお祈りいたします。編集長さんのお子さまのご誕生を心からお慶び申し上げます。プラスマイナス0にはならない複雑な感情もありますね。
（神奈川県、善野清子、主婦）
私は76歳もうすぐ77歳になります。私だけなのかわかりませんが、外国の俳優さん、外国の本というともう引いてしまっています。何とか私でも参加できるようなものを時には入れてほしいのです。一緒にやっていたお友達もやめてしまったので、私ひとりで考えても答えが出ないものですから
（長野県、畑山早苗）
「Point Counter Point」は、毎号読んでいる記事のひとつでした。英語の勉強になるのははもちろんですが、自分の意見をしっかり持つこと、それを堂々と言葉にすることの大切さを感じつつ、読ませていただいておりました。Ted Hoist さんのご冥福を心よりお祈り申し上げます。
（神奈川県、相澤憲子、主婦）
Ted Holst さんのご冥福を心からお祈り申し上げます。
（茨城県、高下浩文、団体職員）
インフルエンザが流行中とのこと。今週は寒波も強そう。お互い養生、対策の上でお仕事が続きますように。
（三重県、宮地伸也、会社員）
ナオミとデビットの会話はいつもタイムリーで楽しみにしていました。Ted Holstさんのご冥福をお祈り申し上げます。
（北海道、奥山智恵子、学校職員）
この数日トランプ大統領が使ったとか使わなかったとか騒がしいニュースの単語“shithole”日本語訳では「屋外便所」となっていますが、何れにしてもあまりいい言葉ではないようですね。英語に慣れていない私は、近づかないことにします。でも、タブーワードをタイミングよく使うと生き生きとスパイスの効いた会話になりそうですがいかがでしょう。
（愛媛県、寺尾勝恵、主婦）
北京のこととは、初めてしりました。なるほど、纏足とかの時代の話ですね。
（長野県、迷多坊）
Ted Holstさんのご冥福を心からお祈りいたします。編集長さんのお子さまのご誕生を心からお慶び申し上げます。プラスマイナス0にはならない複雑な感情もありますね。
（神奈川県、善野清子、主婦）
私は76歳もうすぐ77歳になります。私だけなのかわかりませんが、外国の俳優さん、外国の本というともう引いてしまっています。何とか私でも参加できるようなものを時には入れてほしいのです。一緒にやっていたお友達もやめてしまったので、私ひとりで考えても答えが出ないものですから
（長野県、畑山早苗）
「Point Counter Point」は、毎号読んでいる記事のひとつでした。英語の勉強になるのははもちろんですが、自分の意見をしっかり持つこと、それを堂々と言葉にすることの大切さを感じつつ、読ませていただいておりました。Ted Hoist さんのご冥福を心よりお祈り申し上げます。
（神奈川県、相澤憲子、主婦）
Ted Holst さんのご冥福を心からお祈り申し上げます。
（茨城県、高下浩文、団体職員）
インフルエンザが流行中とのこと。今週は寒波も強そう。お互い養生、対策の上でお仕事が続きますように。
（三重県、宮地伸也、会社員）
ナオミとデビットの会話はいつもタイムリーで楽しみにしていました。Ted Holstさんのご冥福をお祈り申し上げます。
（北海道、奥山智恵子、学校職員）
この数日トランプ大統領が使ったとか使わなかったとか騒がしいニュースの単語“shithole”日本語訳では「屋外便所」となっていますが、何れにしてもあまりいい言葉ではないようですね。英語に慣れていない私は、近づかないことにします。でも、タブーワードをタイミングよく使うと生き生きとスパイスの効いた会話になりそうですがいかがでしょう。
（愛媛県、寺尾勝恵、主婦）
Martin Wolf on Davos 2018: The liberal international order is sick
Opinion Davos
Davos 2018: The liberal international order is sick
Delegates need to consider what is to be done to save the model from wreckage
By Martin Wolf
January 23, 2018
Last year, Donald Trump was a spectre haunting the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, in Davos. This year, he may be there in the flesh. If so, it will be an uncomfortable encounter. He rejects the tenets of the liberal international order promoted by his country over seven decades. These values also animate the WEF. They are what make it something more than just a forum for world’s rich and powerful.
As Princeton’s John Ikenberry argues in a recent article, the “US and its partners built a multi-faceted and sprawling international order, organised around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security co-operation and democratic solidarity”. This system won the cold war. That victory, in turn, promoted a global shift towards democratic politics and free-market economics.
Today, however, the liberal international order is sick. As Freedom in the World 2018, published by Freedom House, a US state-funded non-profit organisation, states, “Democracy is in crisis”. For the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains. States that a decade ago seemed promising success stories — such as Turkey and Hungary — are sliding into authoritarian rule.
Yet now, when potent authoritarian regimes challenge democracy, the US has withdrawn its moral support. Mr Trump even shows sympathy for autocrats abroad. Worse, argues Freedom House, he violates norms of democratic governance.
Under Mr Trump, the US also questions the fabric of international co-operation — security treaties, open markets, multilateral institutions and attempts to address such global challenges as climate change. It has, instead, proclaimed its intention to look after its own interests, even at the direct expense of longstanding allies. Relations are now to be transactional.
Nor is the underpinning of the world economy in better shape. The economy may be recovering, but no significant trade liberalisation has occurred since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Brexit will also prove to be an act of deglobalisation. Trade and capital flows have been growing no faster than world output. Hostility to immigration is rampant. China, a new superpower, even tightly controls the flow of ideas.
Those who believe in the symbiosis of democracy, a liberal world economy and global co-operation simply have to find all this more than a little scary.
So why has this happened? The answer consists of changes in the world and in the domestic condition of countries, especially that of the high-income democracies. Among global changes, the most important are the declining relevance of the west as a security community after the end of the cold war, together with its diminishing economic weight, especially in relation to China.
Many Americans feel they have both less reason and less ability to be generous to erstwhile partners. Among domestic changes, many in high-income countries feel that the liberal global order to which their countries have been committed has done little for them. It is generating, instead, the sense of lost opportunities, incomes and respect. It may have brought vast gains to the sorts of people who frequent Davos, but far less to everybody else. Especially, after the shock of the financial crisis, the tide does not seem to be rising and, if it is, it is certainly not lifting all boats.
IMF downbeat about global economic forecast
As Mr Ikenberry summarises: “The crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of legitimacy and social purpose.” Mr Trump’s programme, which I label “pluto-populism”, is a recognisable result of all this. It tells its supporters that their interests will no longer be sacrificed: they will come first. The fact that the policies of the administration are unlikely to deliver any such benefits may be irrelevant. Not enough people are listening to those who argue this.
For those who believe a liberal international order rooted in democratic politics is ethically right and the best way to reconcile global co-operation with domestic legitimacy, this is depressing. Davos men and women have to consider what is to be done to save the global order from wreckage.
It would be possible merely to hope for the best. As the economy recovers, optimism may return. This should, in turn, assuage at least some of the discontent. But this is facile. The forces leading to divergent outcomes within our economies are powerful. It is far from evident that even financial fragility has been eliminated.
Instead of complacency, we need to confront two fundamental questions.
The first is which is the more important if it comes to a hard choice: domestic political cohesion or international economic integration? At the margin, it has to be the first. Economic life demands political stability. The range of policies — fiscal, monetary and financial — must make the bulk of the population feel their interests count. Otherwise, democratic stability is in peril.
Recommended
China and the west head for a clash of systems
Protection and demography in emerging markets threaten growth engine
US ‘fire and fury’ faces nuclear conundrums
The second is where to focus efforts at global co-operation. The answer must be that managing the global commons and maintaining global stability comes first. While I would like to see further liberalisation of trade, it has to be done in the right way and is no longer a high priority. Still less pressing is opening borders further to free movement of people or even maintaining free flow of global capital. Politics are overwhelmingly national. The results of political choices must satisfy the people of each country.
Mr Trump is not the cure. But he is evidently a symptom. The liberal international order is crumbling, in part because it does not satisfy the people of our societies. Those who attend Davos need to recognise that. If they do not like Mr Trump’s answers — they should not — they need to advance better ones.
martin.wolf@ft.com
Davos 2018: The liberal international order is sick
Delegates need to consider what is to be done to save the model from wreckage
By Martin Wolf
January 23, 2018
Last year, Donald Trump was a spectre haunting the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, in Davos. This year, he may be there in the flesh. If so, it will be an uncomfortable encounter. He rejects the tenets of the liberal international order promoted by his country over seven decades. These values also animate the WEF. They are what make it something more than just a forum for world’s rich and powerful.
As Princeton’s John Ikenberry argues in a recent article, the “US and its partners built a multi-faceted and sprawling international order, organised around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security co-operation and democratic solidarity”. This system won the cold war. That victory, in turn, promoted a global shift towards democratic politics and free-market economics.
Today, however, the liberal international order is sick. As Freedom in the World 2018, published by Freedom House, a US state-funded non-profit organisation, states, “Democracy is in crisis”. For the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains. States that a decade ago seemed promising success stories — such as Turkey and Hungary — are sliding into authoritarian rule.
Yet now, when potent authoritarian regimes challenge democracy, the US has withdrawn its moral support. Mr Trump even shows sympathy for autocrats abroad. Worse, argues Freedom House, he violates norms of democratic governance.
Under Mr Trump, the US also questions the fabric of international co-operation — security treaties, open markets, multilateral institutions and attempts to address such global challenges as climate change. It has, instead, proclaimed its intention to look after its own interests, even at the direct expense of longstanding allies. Relations are now to be transactional.
Nor is the underpinning of the world economy in better shape. The economy may be recovering, but no significant trade liberalisation has occurred since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Brexit will also prove to be an act of deglobalisation. Trade and capital flows have been growing no faster than world output. Hostility to immigration is rampant. China, a new superpower, even tightly controls the flow of ideas.
Those who believe in the symbiosis of democracy, a liberal world economy and global co-operation simply have to find all this more than a little scary.
So why has this happened? The answer consists of changes in the world and in the domestic condition of countries, especially that of the high-income democracies. Among global changes, the most important are the declining relevance of the west as a security community after the end of the cold war, together with its diminishing economic weight, especially in relation to China.
Many Americans feel they have both less reason and less ability to be generous to erstwhile partners. Among domestic changes, many in high-income countries feel that the liberal global order to which their countries have been committed has done little for them. It is generating, instead, the sense of lost opportunities, incomes and respect. It may have brought vast gains to the sorts of people who frequent Davos, but far less to everybody else. Especially, after the shock of the financial crisis, the tide does not seem to be rising and, if it is, it is certainly not lifting all boats.
IMF downbeat about global economic forecast
As Mr Ikenberry summarises: “The crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of legitimacy and social purpose.” Mr Trump’s programme, which I label “pluto-populism”, is a recognisable result of all this. It tells its supporters that their interests will no longer be sacrificed: they will come first. The fact that the policies of the administration are unlikely to deliver any such benefits may be irrelevant. Not enough people are listening to those who argue this.
For those who believe a liberal international order rooted in democratic politics is ethically right and the best way to reconcile global co-operation with domestic legitimacy, this is depressing. Davos men and women have to consider what is to be done to save the global order from wreckage.
It would be possible merely to hope for the best. As the economy recovers, optimism may return. This should, in turn, assuage at least some of the discontent. But this is facile. The forces leading to divergent outcomes within our economies are powerful. It is far from evident that even financial fragility has been eliminated.
Instead of complacency, we need to confront two fundamental questions.
The first is which is the more important if it comes to a hard choice: domestic political cohesion or international economic integration? At the margin, it has to be the first. Economic life demands political stability. The range of policies — fiscal, monetary and financial — must make the bulk of the population feel their interests count. Otherwise, democratic stability is in peril.
Recommended
China and the west head for a clash of systems
Protection and demography in emerging markets threaten growth engine
US ‘fire and fury’ faces nuclear conundrums
The second is where to focus efforts at global co-operation. The answer must be that managing the global commons and maintaining global stability comes first. While I would like to see further liberalisation of trade, it has to be done in the right way and is no longer a high priority. Still less pressing is opening borders further to free movement of people or even maintaining free flow of global capital. Politics are overwhelmingly national. The results of political choices must satisfy the people of each country.
Mr Trump is not the cure. But he is evidently a symptom. The liberal international order is crumbling, in part because it does not satisfy the people of our societies. Those who attend Davos need to recognise that. If they do not like Mr Trump’s answers — they should not — they need to advance better ones.
martin.wolf@ft.com
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
There's nothing more to learn about Trump by Katy Waldman at Slate.com
There’s Nothing More to Learn About Trump
Please enjoy this essay about him.
By Katy Waldman
Jan 22, 20183:48 PM
Over the past year, I developed a stock answer for when new acquaintances asked what I wrote about. “It used to be language, books, and culture,” I’d say. “Now it’s language, books, culture, and Trump.”
While the rise of the former Apprentice star changed my beat explicitly—after the election, I was tasked with critiquing his political performance as theater—this general turn Trumpward is an experience most journalists share. A single person has become omnipresent in the news, and in all of our lives, to a degree that hardly seemed possible prior to November 2016. Writing in the New York Times about his quixotic quest to avoid the 45th president, Farhad Manjoo suggested in February 2017 that Trump “is no longer just the message” but also “the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.” Reading ostensibly non-Trump journalism, Manjoo wrote, was “like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.”
With Trump’s sun dominating our mental sky, the media ecosystem now evokes some darkest-timeline version of an energy pyramid from freshman biology: POTUS feeds the grass that feeds the herbivores that feed the carnivores that feed the decomposers. The specifics of the analogy hardly matter. Line up grass with reporting, herbivores with first-day analysis, carnivores with second-day analysis, and decomposers with social media. Or maybe political writing is the plant life, and arts, culture, business, and tech writing are the animals. At any rate, if you looked at a screen or leafed through newsprint in 2017, what you saw couldn’t have existed absent an overfamiliar ball of glowing orange gas.
There’s something fantastical about Trump’s dominion, a sense that we’ve been cursed. All the paragraphs we’ve read in the past year have transformed into a pinwheel of red-hatted presidents, a sick whirligig that doesn’t fade even when we close our eyes. Most of the time our mind isn’t playing tricks on us—there’s an unspoken imperative, it seems, that every story contrive to incorporate the head of state. “My Angle for This Piece Is That We Live in Trump’s America Now” ran a satire on the Awl, a compendium of pitches about, for instance, what “ ‘gourmet’ mean[s] in America in an era when our president dines almost exclusively on well-done steaks and chicken fingers.”
Trump has turned glut and scarcity into a snake eating its own tail.
I remember how I felt when Trump got elected last November—the dismay but also the energy, how fascinating it all seemed.* Yes, the country was screwed, but our reality TV president gave us so much to unpack and question and observe and uncover. Was he a canny strategist channeling the resentment of America’s forgotten workers? (Who exactly were the forgotten workers? Were we covering them correctly at all?) Or was he a supremely inept guy making the right angry noises at the right time? Did he have dementia? Could we ask that? What were Trump’s formative experiences? Where did his loneliness come from? His bigotry?
And how about that amazing supporting cast? Ghost-in-the-shell Melania, Carmilla-lite Ivanka, Kush, the idiot sons, neglected Tiffany. Lieutenants came in both the “craven opportunist” and “true believer” flavors, and you could go hoarse debating which was worse. You could throw a roll of paper towels from the stoop of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and hit a novelistic type: grossly underqualified cabinet pick (check), granite-faced general (check), slippery communications people (check, check), blustery turncoat (check).
There was so much to say, and we said it all. We really did. But after a certain point, one’s hunger to cover the White House morphs into nihilism about White House coverage. What’s left to discuss when you’ve discussed everything, and nothing has changed?
Trump possesses a radical power to remake reality—to alter not only the world but also the rules governing it. When he sends a tweet taunting Kim Jong-un about the size of his nuclear button, phallic military grandstanding on Twitter becomes a thing that presidents do. Political experts weigh in; historians take note. We argued that firing James Comey was wrong, imagining our judgments would enter the warp and weft of things, would create consequences. Perhaps our stories offered momentary clarification, illumination, or entertainment. Perhaps they even spurred some change. But they were no match for someone with a near-supernatural command over the country’s ontology. They couldn’t reverse the topsy-turviness Trump wrought. In 2017, we learned just how wide the gulf separating our words from the president really was.
Cut to the present day, after 12 straight months of wall-to-wall 45. We’re worried we’ve lost all sense of perspective. Either we’re overreacting, ready to declare the death of democracy with each asinine tweet, or underreacting, because we can’t possibly process all of Trump’s crimes against humanity. We were driven to chronicle a presidency that broke every paradigm; now, satiety wrestles addiction in an endless downhill somersault. Trump is the leftover holiday pie we wish we weren’t eating, but we just keep cutting more slices.
Why? Why are you still reading 10 articles about Trump a day and why am I writing them? I think your voraciousness and my compulsion stem from a misunderstanding of what it is we really crave. Trump is a question to which we don’t have an answer, a dissonance we can’t resolve. We’re galant-style harpsichordists pounding on a dominant seventh chord that refuses to melt to tonic. The more we cover him, the more we excite the desire to explain away, account for, and tame his outrageous behavior. But we can’t. All we can do is stoke the fever with fresh data points, new revelations.
It didn’t take long for us to get a handle on Trump’s character. He feels no need to disguise who he is, and who he is turns out to be pretty simple to discern. But the portraits of entitlement, racism, and rage that continue to roll off the presses fail to address how it is that we wake up every morning to any number of astonishing facts—for instance, that the grifting U.S. president may not have even wanted to win the election. Explaining Trump, in other words, doesn’t make the world Trump has created (or that’s created him) any more legible. It also does not throw light on the relational space between Trump and us—how a single man wields such profound power to shape our inner lives as well as our outer ones, or how we found ourselves in a present defined by the ludicrous, the ridiculous, and the unbelievable. I’d bet this existential bewilderment—and our misplaced belief that more data might assuage it—is why everyone got so mad about the New York Times’ “softball” interview in December, though people said it was because Michael Schmidt didn’t press the president on his lies and errors. That piece, which revealed Trump in his uninformed, rambling state of nature, could only ever be a broken promise. It would never expose anything we didn’t already know.
Welcome to the condition of having, as Alanis Morissette put it, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Trump is a lot, but he’s a lot of a particular quality called nothing. No qualifications, no ideology, no substance. He’s turned glut and scarcity into a snake eating its own tail. Of course we want a blade to cut to the heart of that empty commotion. We’re like Macbeth grasping for the phantom dagger that might finally put an end to all this sound and fury. And you’ve probably already figured out the grand diabolical twist: that meditating on the Trump experience for 1,300 words only feeds the unslayable beast. Then again, what else am I going to do with all these spoons?
*Correction, Jan. 23, 2018: This piece originally misstated that Trump was elected in January. He was inaugurated in January and elected in November.
Please enjoy this essay about him.
By Katy Waldman
Jan 22, 20183:48 PM
Over the past year, I developed a stock answer for when new acquaintances asked what I wrote about. “It used to be language, books, and culture,” I’d say. “Now it’s language, books, culture, and Trump.”
While the rise of the former Apprentice star changed my beat explicitly—after the election, I was tasked with critiquing his political performance as theater—this general turn Trumpward is an experience most journalists share. A single person has become omnipresent in the news, and in all of our lives, to a degree that hardly seemed possible prior to November 2016. Writing in the New York Times about his quixotic quest to avoid the 45th president, Farhad Manjoo suggested in February 2017 that Trump “is no longer just the message” but also “the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.” Reading ostensibly non-Trump journalism, Manjoo wrote, was “like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.”
With Trump’s sun dominating our mental sky, the media ecosystem now evokes some darkest-timeline version of an energy pyramid from freshman biology: POTUS feeds the grass that feeds the herbivores that feed the carnivores that feed the decomposers. The specifics of the analogy hardly matter. Line up grass with reporting, herbivores with first-day analysis, carnivores with second-day analysis, and decomposers with social media. Or maybe political writing is the plant life, and arts, culture, business, and tech writing are the animals. At any rate, if you looked at a screen or leafed through newsprint in 2017, what you saw couldn’t have existed absent an overfamiliar ball of glowing orange gas.
There’s something fantastical about Trump’s dominion, a sense that we’ve been cursed. All the paragraphs we’ve read in the past year have transformed into a pinwheel of red-hatted presidents, a sick whirligig that doesn’t fade even when we close our eyes. Most of the time our mind isn’t playing tricks on us—there’s an unspoken imperative, it seems, that every story contrive to incorporate the head of state. “My Angle for This Piece Is That We Live in Trump’s America Now” ran a satire on the Awl, a compendium of pitches about, for instance, what “ ‘gourmet’ mean[s] in America in an era when our president dines almost exclusively on well-done steaks and chicken fingers.”
Trump has turned glut and scarcity into a snake eating its own tail.
I remember how I felt when Trump got elected last November—the dismay but also the energy, how fascinating it all seemed.* Yes, the country was screwed, but our reality TV president gave us so much to unpack and question and observe and uncover. Was he a canny strategist channeling the resentment of America’s forgotten workers? (Who exactly were the forgotten workers? Were we covering them correctly at all?) Or was he a supremely inept guy making the right angry noises at the right time? Did he have dementia? Could we ask that? What were Trump’s formative experiences? Where did his loneliness come from? His bigotry?
And how about that amazing supporting cast? Ghost-in-the-shell Melania, Carmilla-lite Ivanka, Kush, the idiot sons, neglected Tiffany. Lieutenants came in both the “craven opportunist” and “true believer” flavors, and you could go hoarse debating which was worse. You could throw a roll of paper towels from the stoop of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and hit a novelistic type: grossly underqualified cabinet pick (check), granite-faced general (check), slippery communications people (check, check), blustery turncoat (check).
There was so much to say, and we said it all. We really did. But after a certain point, one’s hunger to cover the White House morphs into nihilism about White House coverage. What’s left to discuss when you’ve discussed everything, and nothing has changed?
Trump possesses a radical power to remake reality—to alter not only the world but also the rules governing it. When he sends a tweet taunting Kim Jong-un about the size of his nuclear button, phallic military grandstanding on Twitter becomes a thing that presidents do. Political experts weigh in; historians take note. We argued that firing James Comey was wrong, imagining our judgments would enter the warp and weft of things, would create consequences. Perhaps our stories offered momentary clarification, illumination, or entertainment. Perhaps they even spurred some change. But they were no match for someone with a near-supernatural command over the country’s ontology. They couldn’t reverse the topsy-turviness Trump wrought. In 2017, we learned just how wide the gulf separating our words from the president really was.
Cut to the present day, after 12 straight months of wall-to-wall 45. We’re worried we’ve lost all sense of perspective. Either we’re overreacting, ready to declare the death of democracy with each asinine tweet, or underreacting, because we can’t possibly process all of Trump’s crimes against humanity. We were driven to chronicle a presidency that broke every paradigm; now, satiety wrestles addiction in an endless downhill somersault. Trump is the leftover holiday pie we wish we weren’t eating, but we just keep cutting more slices.
Why? Why are you still reading 10 articles about Trump a day and why am I writing them? I think your voraciousness and my compulsion stem from a misunderstanding of what it is we really crave. Trump is a question to which we don’t have an answer, a dissonance we can’t resolve. We’re galant-style harpsichordists pounding on a dominant seventh chord that refuses to melt to tonic. The more we cover him, the more we excite the desire to explain away, account for, and tame his outrageous behavior. But we can’t. All we can do is stoke the fever with fresh data points, new revelations.
It didn’t take long for us to get a handle on Trump’s character. He feels no need to disguise who he is, and who he is turns out to be pretty simple to discern. But the portraits of entitlement, racism, and rage that continue to roll off the presses fail to address how it is that we wake up every morning to any number of astonishing facts—for instance, that the grifting U.S. president may not have even wanted to win the election. Explaining Trump, in other words, doesn’t make the world Trump has created (or that’s created him) any more legible. It also does not throw light on the relational space between Trump and us—how a single man wields such profound power to shape our inner lives as well as our outer ones, or how we found ourselves in a present defined by the ludicrous, the ridiculous, and the unbelievable. I’d bet this existential bewilderment—and our misplaced belief that more data might assuage it—is why everyone got so mad about the New York Times’ “softball” interview in December, though people said it was because Michael Schmidt didn’t press the president on his lies and errors. That piece, which revealed Trump in his uninformed, rambling state of nature, could only ever be a broken promise. It would never expose anything we didn’t already know.
Welcome to the condition of having, as Alanis Morissette put it, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Trump is a lot, but he’s a lot of a particular quality called nothing. No qualifications, no ideology, no substance. He’s turned glut and scarcity into a snake eating its own tail. Of course we want a blade to cut to the heart of that empty commotion. We’re like Macbeth grasping for the phantom dagger that might finally put an end to all this sound and fury. And you’ve probably already figured out the grand diabolical twist: that meditating on the Trump experience for 1,300 words only feeds the unslayable beast. Then again, what else am I going to do with all these spoons?
*Correction, Jan. 23, 2018: This piece originally misstated that Trump was elected in January. He was inaugurated in January and elected in November.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
The “Shithole” Cover-up by William Saletan
The “Shithole” Cover-up
Republicans are contorting President Trump’s comments to fit the party line on immigration.
By William Saletan
Jan 19, 201812:56 PM
Senator Minority Whip Dick Durbin and President Donald Trump speak during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC Jan. 9, 2018.
Senator Minority Whip Dick Durbin and President Donald Trump speak during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington on Jan. 9.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Last week, during an Oval Office meeting, Donald Trump disparaged African and Haitian immigrants. Since then, he and his allies have tried to revise or cover up his remarks. To understand what Trump said and why his friends are trying to doctor the record, you have to understand how the immigration debate echoes the debate over another racially charged issue: affirmative action.
If you’re arguing against race-conscious, pro-minority hiring or college admissions in the United States today, your main rhetorical weapons are quotas, set-asides, and merit. Your goal, politically, is to be perceived as advocating nondiscrimination. Your pitch is that we should treat people as individuals, not as members of racial or ethnic groups. The worst thing you can say is that, behind all the talk about quotas, set-asides, and merit, what you’re really interested in is helping white people.
Trump made the mistake of saying that part out loud in the Oval Office on Jan. 11. Republicans have spent years transplanting the careful language of quotas, set-asides, and merit to immigration. They said their goal was to get more productive immigrants, not whiter ones. In a flash, Trump blew up all of that. He blurted out an ethnic calculus behind the rhetoric. And his party is still trying to clean up the damage by obfuscating what he said and twisting his words to conform to the party’s race-neutral rhetoric.
The first full account of Trump’s comments came from the lone Democrat in the room, Sen. Dick Durbin. Speaking to reporters on Jan. 12, Durbin said that during the meeting, Trump had repeatedly complained that the countries from which Africans migrated to the United States were “shitholes.” Durbin said Trump had also objected to generous treatment of Haitians, asking: “Haitians? Do we need more Haitians?” Conversely, Durbin recalled, Trump had told the attendees: “Put me down for wanting more Europeans to come to this country. Why don’t we get more people from Norway?’”
The quotes were loose—in statements and interviews, Durbin has recalled them in various forms—but media reports backed them up. A Washington Post article published on Monday, citing “interviews with more than a dozen White House officials, Capitol Hill aides and lawmakers,” said that during the meeting, Trump had “called nations from Africa ‘shithole countries’ ” and had complained that Democratic immigration proposals would “drive more people from countries he deemed undesirable into the United States instead of attracting immigrants from places like Norway and Asia.” Reuters, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, also citing multiple sources, published similar accounts.
Trump and two allies who were present at the meeting, Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue, attacked Durbin’s story. Trump called the story “made up.” In TV interviews on Sunday, Perdue and Cotton dismissed Durbin as a serial fabricator. But Durbin’s story checks out. Perdue’s and Cotton’s rebuttals don’t.
On ABC’s This Week, Perdue ridiculed press reports that cited “multiple sources” familiar with the meeting. He suggested such claims were impossible, because there were only “six of us in the room.” But there weren’t six of anything in the room. The participants were Trump, his chief of staff John Kelly, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, four senators, three congressmen, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Nielsen’s acting chief of staff, Chad Wolf. That’s 12 people. Nielsen, in a hearing on Tuesday, confirmed the number.
There are also witnesses to Cotton’s and Perdue’s attempts to scrub the record afterward. In disclosures reported by the Post, “Three White House officials said Perdue and Cotton told the White House that they heard ‘shithouse’ rather than ‘shithole,’ allowing them to deny the president’s comments on television.”
Cotton has been particularly deceptive. On Face the Nation, John Dickerson asked him whether Trump, in the meeting, was in any way “grouping people based on the countries they came from.” “No, John,” Cotton replied. “The president reacted strongly against” such thinking, the senator insisted. “[W]hat the president said he supports is treat people for who they are. … It shouldn’t matter whether you come from Nigeria or Norway or any other country.” But while Cotton was denying that Trump had spoken of ethnic or geographic groups, another attendee was telling the Post—also in Trump’s defense—that the president had spoken highly of groups beyond Europe. “A White House official said Trump also suggested that he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries,” the paper reported, “because he felt that they help the United States economically.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a central player in the meeting, has refused to disclose exactly what Trump said, “because I want to make sure that I can keep talking to the president.” But Graham told the Times that during the exchange, Trump said he wanted more immigrants from Norway. Graham said he reminded the president “that diversity is our strength not our weakness.” In an interview with the Charleston Post and Courier, Graham recounted his reply to Trump. When people become American, he explained, “It doesn’t mean that they’re black or white … When I say merit-based, I don’t mean just Europe.” These remarks match what three sources told the Times: During the meeting, Graham warned Trump that “America is an idea, not a race.” It’s hard to imagine why Graham, a conservative Republican, would have said these things to Trump if Trump hadn’t jarred him with comments that applied explicitly, or at least clearly, to blacks, whites, and Europe.
Nielsen, the DHS secretary, has defended Trump. But at Tuesday’s hearing, she conceded that in the Oval Office meeting, he had extolled Norwegians, noting “that they are industrious, that they are a hardworking country. They don’t have much crime.” She also confirmed that Trump had fretted about not getting enough immigrants from Europe:
Durbin: Do you remember the president saying expressly, “I want more Europeans. Why can’t we have more immigrants from Norway?”
Nielsen: I do remember him asking about the concept of underrepresented countries, as a fix. This was in the conversation about removing the Diversity [Visa] Lottery and how we could reallocate that … I think he did ask, “Would that cover European countries? Or by its nature, would that mean that we are further establishing immigration to purposefully exclude Europeans?”
These acknowledgments match oblique remarks by Trump, Cotton, and Perdue. In a joint statement on Jan. 12, the two senators said of Trump: “[W]hat he did call out was the imbalance in our current immigration system.” Trump, in tweets that day, said his concern was that the U.S. “would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime countries which are doing badly.” This idea—that the immigration system should be redesigned to bring in more people from places like Norway and fewer people from places like Africa and Haiti—is the essence of Trump’s pitch. It’s ethnic generalization cloaked in the rhetoric of merit.
That’s why Trump’s allies are trying to distract us with quarrels about which expletive he used. It’s also why they’re recasting his outburst in the familiar tactical language of the affirmative action debate. The Democratic approach to immigration, Cotton told Dickerson, is “to create more quotas, more set-asides for other countries.” Nielsen, when asked what Trump had said in the Jan. 12 meeting about immigration from Africa, offered the same spin: “What I heard him saying was that he’d like to move away from a country-based quota system to a merit-based system.” Trump’s concern isn’t really about Africa or Europe, the argument goes. It’s about fairness.
There are two problems with this argument. One is that the immigration system isn’t unfair to Europeans. Every month, the Diversity Visa Lottery allocates more visas to Europeans, on a per capita basis, than to Africans. When you factor in the discrepancy in applications—Africans are more likely to apply than Europeans—a European applicant is much more likely to get in. More broadly, among the entire population of foreign-born U.S. residents, those accepted from sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to have or obtain some college education, and almost as likely to have or obtain a four-year degree, as those accepted from Europe or Canada. Immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are substantially more likely to participate in the U.S. labor force than immigrants from Europe or native-born Americans—perhaps in part because, on average, they’re younger.
The second problem is that behind the rhetoric of merit, there’s a cesspool of prejudice. What irks many whites about immigration and affirmative action isn’t quotas or set-asides, which were widely accepted when they favored whites. It’s suspicion that quotas and set-asides now favor nonwhites. That’s what Trump expressed last summer, when he complained in an Oval Office meeting that Haitians coming to the United States “all have AIDS” and that people coming from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts.” Last week, he exposed it again. The hole full of filth isn’t in Africa or Haiti. It’s in the president’s head. And his friends are trying to cover it up.
end of article
The shithead shutdown by Brian Beutler
MENU
RIGHT-WING MEDIA
THE SHITHEAD SHUTDOWN
BRIAN BEUTLER/ JAN.20.18
Written By:
Brian Beutler
No modern federal government shutdown has ever lasted more than a few weeks, and they typically end without much fanfare on the terms of one partisan faction or another. In the interim, those factions do battle for narrative control over who’s to blame for political dysfunction, on the theory that the losers of public opinion will see their leverage in the underlying policy dispute disappear, and perhaps suffer longer-term consequences for their misconduct.
That battle rages tediously this weekend, amid the most recent shutdown, on cable television and social media—the only two places in the physical universe where more heat makes darkness deeper.
Because a bill to temporarily fund the government passed the Republican-controlled House on a party-line basis Thursday, but failed to clear the Senate Friday, this unenlightening debate about who’s to blame tends to turn on different manipulations of vote tallies. Late Friday night, 45 Republicans and five Democrats voted to advance the House bill, well short of the 60 votes supermajority required to end debate on legislation in the Senate.
Thus, two things are true. First, Republicans can’t fund the government on their own—they need Democratic votes, which means negotiating in good faith with Democrats on funding legislation that both parties can support.
Second, this funding bill would have passed but for the filibuster, which, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has become routine.
Together, these facts make it impossible look at votes totals and find empirical truth about which party’s machinations lead to the outcome before us. The real source of the conflict long precedes the legislative angling that actually triggered the shutdown, and it began when President Trump terminated DACA, the deferred action program for Dreamers, brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Here and there, Trump has claimed to harbor real empathy for Dreamers. But everything that happened before and since he rescinded their protections gives the lie to the idea that he is deeply conflicted. Trump is at best too big a dupe to make decisions he believes to be in the public interest. More likely, he wants immigration authorities to deport Dreamers and is too chickenshit to say so publicly. Either way, the shutdown stems from the ambiguity his failures have created.
As I laid out recently, before Trump terminated DACA, Republican state attorneys general sued to block it in court. Before that, House Republicans—with the full support of the Senate Republican leadership—blocked a bipartisan 2013 bill that would have legalized Dreamers as part of a broader plan to reform the immigration system. Before that, Senate Republicans filibustered a 2010 version of the DREAM Act, which would have obviated the need for DACA in the first place.
After Trump terminated DACA, he promised to revisit the issue if Congress did not reach a solution for Dreamers. At a televised meeting with congressional leaders of both parties last week, he promised to sign any immigration deal that combined protection for Dreamers with specific border security and immigration-flow reforms. When a bipartisan group of senators presented him with a blueprint that did just that, a white nationalist cadre on the right of the Republican Party convinced him that the deal would allow too many black people from what he called “shithole countries” into the U.S., and Trump rejected it.
On Friday, Trump reached a similar agreement in principle with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which held for less than 12 hours, before White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is also an immigration restrictionist, pulled the rug out from under it.
All of this evidence points to a deep hostility to Dreamers among Trump and his supporters in Congress, who have been allowed, by the congressional leadership, to define the Republican Party’s immigration agenda.
But even if Trump and Republican leaders earnestly feel for the Dreamers, they are too incompetent or cynical to act upon their beliefs.
Trump in particular is out at sea. He is not meaningfully in charge of his own administration. If he were, the shutdown could have been avoided in one of two ways: Trump, being president, could have overruled his ethnonationalist advisers and kept his word, at which point a government funding bill that included protection for Dreamers would have passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities; or Trump, being president, could have been honest about his substantive view that Dreamers, despite knowing no other country but this one, should be removed from the United States.
I don’t think it would be a great outcome. But if Trump and Republican leaders stepped forward and confessed “we don’t support legalizing Dreamers, and as long as we control the government, we won’t let that happen,” the Democrats would be powerless to stop them. The impasse would probably end, Dreamers would be driven into the shadows for a time, but at least the truth would drive proper accountability.
Trump refuses to do, or is incapable of doing, either of these things—and as long as that’s true, the lack of consensus that precipitated the shutdown and is driving the blame game on cable news will persist.
How will that blame game shake out? I think it remains likely that the public will default to holding Republicans responsible, if not for the specific reasons laid out here. Republicans control every branch of government; the Republican brand is shutdown. These are powerful heuristics, and I believe they are what’s driving early poll data, which suggests most people pin this on Trump, the Republican Congress, or both.
But the longer the shutdown persists, the more clouded that perception might grow. In the Trump era, Republicans have overwhelmingly run public relations through right wing outlets. Trump’s prime directive is to keep his supporters consolidated. As his shambling presidency has hardened opposition to him, Republicans have generally sought to prevent the damage from bleeding into their base by peddling and celebrating propaganda.
That is emphatically not how Republicans are running their shutdown spin campaign. Republican operatives aren’t even bothering to spin conservative media, which is parroting tendentious nonsense without needing to be spun. They are spinning mainstream outlets, and with some success. The reach of their talking points will thus be greater now than in other Trump-era controversies, and that might move the needle of public opinion in a perilous direction for Democrats and Dreamers alike.
end of article
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Facebook's Motivations
Facebook's Motivations – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
17-22 minutes
The trepidation — and inevitable outrage — with which much of the media has greeted Facebook's latest change to the News Feed algorithm seems rather anticlimactic. Nearly three years ago I wrote in The Facebook Reckoning that any publisher that was not a "destination site" — that is, a site that had a direct connection with readers — had no choice but to go along with Facebook's Instant Article initiative, even though Facebook could change their mind at any time. A few months later, in Popping the Publishing Bubble, I explained why advertising would coalesce with Google and Facebook; that is indeed what has happened, which is the real problem for publishers. Facebook's algorithm change simply hastens the inevitable.
The story for media is for all intents and purposes unchanged: success depends on building a direct relationship with readers; monetizing that relationship (likely through subscriptions, but not necessarily); and leveraging Facebook as an acquisition channel for those long-term relationships, not short-term page views. If anything this change will help reader-focused publications: users will be more likely to see links shared by their friends, enhancing the word-of-mouth marketing that is the foundation of reader-centric publications.
What I find far more compelling is the question of Facebook's motivation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook:
One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That's why we've always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.
We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being. So we've studied this trend carefully by looking at the academic research and doing our own research with leading experts at universities. The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they're entertaining or informative — may not be as good.
Based on this, we're making a major change to how we build Facebook. I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions. We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you'll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. As we roll this out, you'll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people…
Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.
Forgive the longer-than-usual excerpt, but there is a lot here. Zuckerberg:
Implicitly admits that time spent on Facebook may not "well-spent", and cites research suggesting that many common activities on Facebook may not be good for you
Introduces the change as a shift in goals from delivering relevant content (a "perfect personalized newspaper", as Zuckerberg called it in 2014)
Suggests that the time spent on Facebook may decrease due to these changes (sending Facebook's stock down)
In an interview for the Daily Update, Vice-President of News Feed Adam Mosseri argued that this would benefit Facebook in the long run:
This change is primarily focused on doing right by our community, because we actually believe that by doing right by the community in the long run will be good for the business and so we just try to take a long term approach to any question like this.
I absolutely believe the last part of that quote: Facebook is taking a long-term view, and it would only make this change were it right for the business. I'm just not entirely convinced that Zuckerberg and Mosseri are telling us the entire story.
Facebook's Believability
Start with Zuckerberg's claim that this change will reduce "the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement." Mosseri said that would be mostly due to less time spent watching video, given that video content would likely be hurt by this algorithmic change.
That in and of itself is certainly interesting; Zuckerberg has been pushing the importance of video on earnings calls for some time now, and no wonder: TV advertising money remains the proverbial gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow for all advertising-based tech companies. Is Facebook giving up on its leprechaun dreams?
I don't think so, and not just because forgoing all of that potential revenue would be quite unbelievable. Instead, I think the answer was laid out by Zuckerberg during Facebook's Q1 2017 earnings call while answering a question about Facebook's new video tab:
For the video tab, the goal that we have for the product experience is to make it so that when people want to watch videos or they want to keep up to date on what's going on with their favorite show or what's going on with the public figure that they want to follow, that they can come to Facebook and go to a place knowing that that's going to show them all the content that they're interested in.
So that's a pretty different intent than how people come to Facebook today. Today, for the most part, people pull Facebook out when they have a few minutes, when they want to catch up and see what's going on in the world with their friends and in the news and everything that's going on. That's very different from saying, hey, I want to watch video content now. And that's what I think we're going to unlock with this tab.
My takeaway at the time was that Facebook was effectively building two video products: one for content people wanted to watch (the video tab), and the other for content people watched because it was stuck in front of them (News Feed video).
I think that was right, but it also follows that the former would be easier to monetize: after all, people are more likely to put up with an advertisement for a video they want to watch, as opposed to one they are watching because it happened to be presented to them. Indeed, the latter could be actively harmful, reminding people to simply close the app. To that end, reducing the time users spend watching videos that Facebook would never monetize effectively doesn't seem like a particularly large loss.
That's not the only reason why it is hard to take Facebook seriously when it comes to proclamations of doom-and-gloom. Back in 2016, on the 3Q 2016 earnings call, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said that Facebook would soon stop growing the ad load on News Feed and that advertising growth would "come down meaningfully."
I wondered at the time if this meant Facebook's ads were less differentiated — and thus had less pricing power in the face of increasing scarcity — than I expected. In fact, my initial analysis was spot-on: as I have been documenting in the Daily Update over the last year, Facebook's price-per-ad has been increasing as ad impression growth has declined over the last year, strongly suggesting that Facebook has pricing power:
So excuse me if I take Facebook's pronunciations about the harm its business will soon befall with a rather large grain of salt. The company has already demonstrated it has pricing power such that its advertising revenue can continue to grow strongly even as the number of ads-per-user plateaus; moreover, that power further complicates any attempt to understand Facebook's motivation.
Facebook's Imperviousness
The key thing to remember about Facebook — and Google's — dominance in digital ads is that their advantages are multi-faceted. First and foremost are the attractiveness of their products to users; that attractiveness is rooted not only in technology but also in both data and people-based network effects. Second is the depth of information both companies have on their users, allowing advertisers to spend more efficiently on their platforms — particularly on mobile — than elsewhere. The third advantage, though, is perhaps the least appreciated: buying ads on Google and Facebook is just so much easier. They are one-stop shops for reaching anyone, which means competitors need to not have similar targeting capabilities and user engagement, but in fact need to be significantly better to justify the effort.
These structural advantages lend credibility to Facebook's contention that it is making these changes with its users' best interests in mind. After all, it ultimately won't matter to the bottom line. Indeed, note that Zuckerberg made no mention of these changes impacting revenue, as he surely should have were this change to have a negative impact; in contrast, Zuckerberg warned that hiring new content moderators would impact profitability on the last earnings call.
Of course one hesitates to give Facebook too much credit if this were the case: it would be a clear example of a Strategy Credit, where doing the right thing is easy because it doesn't actually hurt the underlying business. That, though, may be reassuring in the short term, but it points to still more possible Facebook motivations.
Facebook's Threats
For about as long as Facebook has been a going concern, the conventional wisdom about their downfall has remained largely the same: some other social network is going to come along, probably amongst young people, and take all of the attention away from Facebook. In fact, as I argued last year in Facebook, Phones, and Phonebooks, the social sphere has room for many players — including networks that garner huge amounts of attention — but that Facebook's position was secure.
It is increasingly clear that there are two types of social apps: one is the phone book, and one is the phone. The phone book is incredibly valuable: it connects you to anyone, whether they be a personal friend, an acquaintance, or a business. The social phone book, though, goes much further: it allows the creation of ad hoc groups for an event or network, it is continually updated with the status of anyone you may know or wish to know, and it even provides an unlimited supply of entertaining professionally produced content whenever you feel the slightest bit bored.
The phone, on the other hand, is personal: it is about communication between you and someone you purposely reach out to. True, telemarketing calls can happen, but they are annoying and often dismissed. The phone is simply about the conversation that is happening right now, one that will be gone the moment you hang up.
In the U.S. the phone book is Facebook and the phone is Snapchat; in Taiwan, where I live, the phone book is Facebook and the phone is LINE. Japan and Thailand are the same, with a dash of Twitter in the former. In China WeChat handles it all, while Kakao is the phone in South Korea. For much of the rest of the world the phone is WhatsApp, but for everywhere but China the phone book is Facebook.
This isn't a bad thing; indeed, it is an incredibly valuable thing: Facebook's status as a utility is exactly what makes the company so valuable. It has the data to target advertising and the feed in which to place it, and it is difficult to imagine any of the phone companies overtaking it in value.
Make no mistake, in this analogy the phone book is where the money is at: Snapchat and Twitter are all struggling to monetize in large part because phones simply aren't conducive to advertising. That, though, makes Facebook's new focus even more interesting: if advertising struggles to find a place when users are more actively engaged (versus passively consuming content), why is Facebook seemingly going in the opposite direction?
One possible answer is that conventional wisdom is right: Facebook may still have a hold on identity, but the amount of time users — particularly the most valuable users — are spending on the network is steadily decreasing. That may not be a problem for the business today, but it certainly could be in the long run.
Another possible answer is that Facebook fears regulation, and by demonstrating the ability to self-correct and focus on what makes Facebook unique the company can avoid regulatory issues completely. The question, though, is how exactly would Facebook be regulated? There certainly is no crime in providing a free service that lets people connect with those they know. I suggested last year that perhaps Facebook's monopoly power could be seen in its seeming inability to help publishers monetize or especially in digital ads, but those cases are far more theoretical (or in the case of publishers, fantastical) for now.
Perhaps there is a third motivation though: call it "enlightened self-interest." Keep in mind from whence Facebook's power flows: controlling demand. Facebook is a super-aggregator, which means it leverages its direct relationship with users, zero marginal costs to serve those users, and network effects, to steadily decrease acquisition costs and scale infinitely in a virtuous cycle that gives the company power over both supply (publishers) and advertisers.
It follows that Facebook's ultimate threat can never come from publishers or advertisers, but rather demand — that is, users. The real danger, though, is not from users also using competing social networks (although Facebook has always been paranoid about exactly that); that is not enough to break the virtuous cycle. Rather, the only thing that could undo Facebook's power is users actively rejecting the app. And, I suspect, the only way users would do that en masse would be if it became accepted fact that Facebook is actively bad for you — the online equivalent of smoking.
This is why I find Facebook's focus on what is good for users to be so fascinating. On one level, maybe the company is, as they can afford to be, simply altruistic. On another, perhaps they are diverting attention from problematic trends in user engagement. Or perhaps they are seeking to neutralize their biggest threat by addressing it head-on.
I don't know which of these motivations are correct — probably there is truth in all of them — which is precisely why I find this announcement so fascinating. This change could have been made and justified without even broaching the idea that Facebook might be bad for you; why did Facebook rest everything on that reasoning?
It certainly is hard to escape the election of President Trump. I have argued regularly that I don't believe that fake news was a causal factor in Trump's election, and I think that Facebook has been a convenient scapegoat for many.
On the other hand, I made the case back in the primaries that Facebook's decimation of the media led to a correlated decimation of the parties ability to control the presidential candidate selection process, creating the conditions for a candidate like Trump to arise. In other words, I do blame Facebook for Trump, but for structural reasons, not causal ones. And even then, Facebook is a stand-in for the Internet's effect broadly: were it not Facebook ruining media's business model, it would have been some other company.
Zuckerberg, though, has always seemed to tilt towards the more utopian side of the spectrum when it comes to the Silicon Valley cliche of "changing the world." The ardent belief that sharing and connecting will fix everything has been a fixture in Zuckerberg's public comments ever since he emerged into the public sphere, and the CEO effectively declared at the 2016 F8 conference that Trump was in opposition to that.
In that light dismissing Facebook's change as a mere strategy credit is perhaps to give short shrift to Zuckerberg's genuine desire to leverage Facebook's power to make the world a better place. Zuckerberg argued in his 2017 manifesto Building Global Community:
Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community. This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.
Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously.
That, though, leaves the question I raised in response to that manifesto:
Even if Zuckerberg is right, is there anyone who believes that a private company run by an unaccountable all-powerful person that tracks your every move for the purpose of selling advertising is the best possible form said global governance should take?
My deep-rooted suspicion of Zuckerberg's manifesto has nothing to do with Facebook or Zuckerberg; I suspect that we agree on more political goals than not. Rather, my discomfort arises from my strong belief that centralized power is both inefficient and dangerous: no one person, or company, can figure out optimal solutions for everyone on their own, and history is riddled with examples of central planners ostensibly acting with the best of intentions — at least in their own minds — resulting in the most horrific of consequences; those consequences sometimes take the form of overt costs, both economic and humanitarian, and sometimes those costs are foregone opportunities and innovations. Usually it's both.
Facebook's stated reasoning for this change only heightens these contradictions: if indeed Facebook as-is harms some users, fixing that is a good thing. And yet the same criticism becomes even more urgent: should the personal welfare of 2 billion people be Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility?
17-22 minutes
The trepidation — and inevitable outrage — with which much of the media has greeted Facebook's latest change to the News Feed algorithm seems rather anticlimactic. Nearly three years ago I wrote in The Facebook Reckoning that any publisher that was not a "destination site" — that is, a site that had a direct connection with readers — had no choice but to go along with Facebook's Instant Article initiative, even though Facebook could change their mind at any time. A few months later, in Popping the Publishing Bubble, I explained why advertising would coalesce with Google and Facebook; that is indeed what has happened, which is the real problem for publishers. Facebook's algorithm change simply hastens the inevitable.
The story for media is for all intents and purposes unchanged: success depends on building a direct relationship with readers; monetizing that relationship (likely through subscriptions, but not necessarily); and leveraging Facebook as an acquisition channel for those long-term relationships, not short-term page views. If anything this change will help reader-focused publications: users will be more likely to see links shared by their friends, enhancing the word-of-mouth marketing that is the foundation of reader-centric publications.
What I find far more compelling is the question of Facebook's motivation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook:
One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That's why we've always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.
We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being. So we've studied this trend carefully by looking at the academic research and doing our own research with leading experts at universities. The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they're entertaining or informative — may not be as good.
Based on this, we're making a major change to how we build Facebook. I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions. We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you'll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. As we roll this out, you'll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people…
Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.
Forgive the longer-than-usual excerpt, but there is a lot here. Zuckerberg:
Implicitly admits that time spent on Facebook may not "well-spent", and cites research suggesting that many common activities on Facebook may not be good for you
Introduces the change as a shift in goals from delivering relevant content (a "perfect personalized newspaper", as Zuckerberg called it in 2014)
Suggests that the time spent on Facebook may decrease due to these changes (sending Facebook's stock down)
In an interview for the Daily Update, Vice-President of News Feed Adam Mosseri argued that this would benefit Facebook in the long run:
This change is primarily focused on doing right by our community, because we actually believe that by doing right by the community in the long run will be good for the business and so we just try to take a long term approach to any question like this.
I absolutely believe the last part of that quote: Facebook is taking a long-term view, and it would only make this change were it right for the business. I'm just not entirely convinced that Zuckerberg and Mosseri are telling us the entire story.
Facebook's Believability
Start with Zuckerberg's claim that this change will reduce "the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement." Mosseri said that would be mostly due to less time spent watching video, given that video content would likely be hurt by this algorithmic change.
That in and of itself is certainly interesting; Zuckerberg has been pushing the importance of video on earnings calls for some time now, and no wonder: TV advertising money remains the proverbial gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow for all advertising-based tech companies. Is Facebook giving up on its leprechaun dreams?
I don't think so, and not just because forgoing all of that potential revenue would be quite unbelievable. Instead, I think the answer was laid out by Zuckerberg during Facebook's Q1 2017 earnings call while answering a question about Facebook's new video tab:
For the video tab, the goal that we have for the product experience is to make it so that when people want to watch videos or they want to keep up to date on what's going on with their favorite show or what's going on with the public figure that they want to follow, that they can come to Facebook and go to a place knowing that that's going to show them all the content that they're interested in.
So that's a pretty different intent than how people come to Facebook today. Today, for the most part, people pull Facebook out when they have a few minutes, when they want to catch up and see what's going on in the world with their friends and in the news and everything that's going on. That's very different from saying, hey, I want to watch video content now. And that's what I think we're going to unlock with this tab.
My takeaway at the time was that Facebook was effectively building two video products: one for content people wanted to watch (the video tab), and the other for content people watched because it was stuck in front of them (News Feed video).
I think that was right, but it also follows that the former would be easier to monetize: after all, people are more likely to put up with an advertisement for a video they want to watch, as opposed to one they are watching because it happened to be presented to them. Indeed, the latter could be actively harmful, reminding people to simply close the app. To that end, reducing the time users spend watching videos that Facebook would never monetize effectively doesn't seem like a particularly large loss.
That's not the only reason why it is hard to take Facebook seriously when it comes to proclamations of doom-and-gloom. Back in 2016, on the 3Q 2016 earnings call, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said that Facebook would soon stop growing the ad load on News Feed and that advertising growth would "come down meaningfully."
I wondered at the time if this meant Facebook's ads were less differentiated — and thus had less pricing power in the face of increasing scarcity — than I expected. In fact, my initial analysis was spot-on: as I have been documenting in the Daily Update over the last year, Facebook's price-per-ad has been increasing as ad impression growth has declined over the last year, strongly suggesting that Facebook has pricing power:
So excuse me if I take Facebook's pronunciations about the harm its business will soon befall with a rather large grain of salt. The company has already demonstrated it has pricing power such that its advertising revenue can continue to grow strongly even as the number of ads-per-user plateaus; moreover, that power further complicates any attempt to understand Facebook's motivation.
Facebook's Imperviousness
The key thing to remember about Facebook — and Google's — dominance in digital ads is that their advantages are multi-faceted. First and foremost are the attractiveness of their products to users; that attractiveness is rooted not only in technology but also in both data and people-based network effects. Second is the depth of information both companies have on their users, allowing advertisers to spend more efficiently on their platforms — particularly on mobile — than elsewhere. The third advantage, though, is perhaps the least appreciated: buying ads on Google and Facebook is just so much easier. They are one-stop shops for reaching anyone, which means competitors need to not have similar targeting capabilities and user engagement, but in fact need to be significantly better to justify the effort.
These structural advantages lend credibility to Facebook's contention that it is making these changes with its users' best interests in mind. After all, it ultimately won't matter to the bottom line. Indeed, note that Zuckerberg made no mention of these changes impacting revenue, as he surely should have were this change to have a negative impact; in contrast, Zuckerberg warned that hiring new content moderators would impact profitability on the last earnings call.
Of course one hesitates to give Facebook too much credit if this were the case: it would be a clear example of a Strategy Credit, where doing the right thing is easy because it doesn't actually hurt the underlying business. That, though, may be reassuring in the short term, but it points to still more possible Facebook motivations.
Facebook's Threats
For about as long as Facebook has been a going concern, the conventional wisdom about their downfall has remained largely the same: some other social network is going to come along, probably amongst young people, and take all of the attention away from Facebook. In fact, as I argued last year in Facebook, Phones, and Phonebooks, the social sphere has room for many players — including networks that garner huge amounts of attention — but that Facebook's position was secure.
It is increasingly clear that there are two types of social apps: one is the phone book, and one is the phone. The phone book is incredibly valuable: it connects you to anyone, whether they be a personal friend, an acquaintance, or a business. The social phone book, though, goes much further: it allows the creation of ad hoc groups for an event or network, it is continually updated with the status of anyone you may know or wish to know, and it even provides an unlimited supply of entertaining professionally produced content whenever you feel the slightest bit bored.
The phone, on the other hand, is personal: it is about communication between you and someone you purposely reach out to. True, telemarketing calls can happen, but they are annoying and often dismissed. The phone is simply about the conversation that is happening right now, one that will be gone the moment you hang up.
In the U.S. the phone book is Facebook and the phone is Snapchat; in Taiwan, where I live, the phone book is Facebook and the phone is LINE. Japan and Thailand are the same, with a dash of Twitter in the former. In China WeChat handles it all, while Kakao is the phone in South Korea. For much of the rest of the world the phone is WhatsApp, but for everywhere but China the phone book is Facebook.
This isn't a bad thing; indeed, it is an incredibly valuable thing: Facebook's status as a utility is exactly what makes the company so valuable. It has the data to target advertising and the feed in which to place it, and it is difficult to imagine any of the phone companies overtaking it in value.
Make no mistake, in this analogy the phone book is where the money is at: Snapchat and Twitter are all struggling to monetize in large part because phones simply aren't conducive to advertising. That, though, makes Facebook's new focus even more interesting: if advertising struggles to find a place when users are more actively engaged (versus passively consuming content), why is Facebook seemingly going in the opposite direction?
One possible answer is that conventional wisdom is right: Facebook may still have a hold on identity, but the amount of time users — particularly the most valuable users — are spending on the network is steadily decreasing. That may not be a problem for the business today, but it certainly could be in the long run.
Another possible answer is that Facebook fears regulation, and by demonstrating the ability to self-correct and focus on what makes Facebook unique the company can avoid regulatory issues completely. The question, though, is how exactly would Facebook be regulated? There certainly is no crime in providing a free service that lets people connect with those they know. I suggested last year that perhaps Facebook's monopoly power could be seen in its seeming inability to help publishers monetize or especially in digital ads, but those cases are far more theoretical (or in the case of publishers, fantastical) for now.
Perhaps there is a third motivation though: call it "enlightened self-interest." Keep in mind from whence Facebook's power flows: controlling demand. Facebook is a super-aggregator, which means it leverages its direct relationship with users, zero marginal costs to serve those users, and network effects, to steadily decrease acquisition costs and scale infinitely in a virtuous cycle that gives the company power over both supply (publishers) and advertisers.
It follows that Facebook's ultimate threat can never come from publishers or advertisers, but rather demand — that is, users. The real danger, though, is not from users also using competing social networks (although Facebook has always been paranoid about exactly that); that is not enough to break the virtuous cycle. Rather, the only thing that could undo Facebook's power is users actively rejecting the app. And, I suspect, the only way users would do that en masse would be if it became accepted fact that Facebook is actively bad for you — the online equivalent of smoking.
This is why I find Facebook's focus on what is good for users to be so fascinating. On one level, maybe the company is, as they can afford to be, simply altruistic. On another, perhaps they are diverting attention from problematic trends in user engagement. Or perhaps they are seeking to neutralize their biggest threat by addressing it head-on.
I don't know which of these motivations are correct — probably there is truth in all of them — which is precisely why I find this announcement so fascinating. This change could have been made and justified without even broaching the idea that Facebook might be bad for you; why did Facebook rest everything on that reasoning?
It certainly is hard to escape the election of President Trump. I have argued regularly that I don't believe that fake news was a causal factor in Trump's election, and I think that Facebook has been a convenient scapegoat for many.
On the other hand, I made the case back in the primaries that Facebook's decimation of the media led to a correlated decimation of the parties ability to control the presidential candidate selection process, creating the conditions for a candidate like Trump to arise. In other words, I do blame Facebook for Trump, but for structural reasons, not causal ones. And even then, Facebook is a stand-in for the Internet's effect broadly: were it not Facebook ruining media's business model, it would have been some other company.
Zuckerberg, though, has always seemed to tilt towards the more utopian side of the spectrum when it comes to the Silicon Valley cliche of "changing the world." The ardent belief that sharing and connecting will fix everything has been a fixture in Zuckerberg's public comments ever since he emerged into the public sphere, and the CEO effectively declared at the 2016 F8 conference that Trump was in opposition to that.
In that light dismissing Facebook's change as a mere strategy credit is perhaps to give short shrift to Zuckerberg's genuine desire to leverage Facebook's power to make the world a better place. Zuckerberg argued in his 2017 manifesto Building Global Community:
Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community. This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.
Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously.
That, though, leaves the question I raised in response to that manifesto:
Even if Zuckerberg is right, is there anyone who believes that a private company run by an unaccountable all-powerful person that tracks your every move for the purpose of selling advertising is the best possible form said global governance should take?
My deep-rooted suspicion of Zuckerberg's manifesto has nothing to do with Facebook or Zuckerberg; I suspect that we agree on more political goals than not. Rather, my discomfort arises from my strong belief that centralized power is both inefficient and dangerous: no one person, or company, can figure out optimal solutions for everyone on their own, and history is riddled with examples of central planners ostensibly acting with the best of intentions — at least in their own minds — resulting in the most horrific of consequences; those consequences sometimes take the form of overt costs, both economic and humanitarian, and sometimes those costs are foregone opportunities and innovations. Usually it's both.
Facebook's stated reasoning for this change only heightens these contradictions: if indeed Facebook as-is harms some users, fixing that is a good thing. And yet the same criticism becomes even more urgent: should the personal welfare of 2 billion people be Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility?
A new theory for why Americans can't get a raise.
slate.com
A new theory for why Americans can't get a raise.
By Jordan Weissmann
11-14 minutes
Moneybox
If you were a delivery van driver searching for a new job any time between the years of 2010 and 2013, chances are, you wouldn't have found many businesses competing for your services. In Selma, Alabama, there was, on average, just one company posting help wanted ads for those drivers on the nation's biggest job board. In all of Orlando, Florida, there were about nine. Nationwide the average was about two.
The situation for telemarketers wasn't great either. In any given city or town, approximately three companies were trying to hire for their services. Accountants only had it a little better: Roughly four businesses were posting jobs for them.
A lack of competition among employers gives businesses outsize power over workers, including the ability to tamp down on pay.
Those numbers are based on the findings of a new research paper that may help unlock the mystery of why Americans can't seem to get a decent raise. Economists have struggled over that question for years now, as wage growth has stagnated and more of the nation's income has shifted from the pockets of workers into the bank accounts of business owners. Since 1979, inflation-adjusted hourly pay is up just 3.41 percent for the middle 20 percent of Americans while labor's overall share of national income has declined sharply since the early 2000s. There are lots of possible explanations for why this is, from long-term factors like the rise of automation and decline of organized labor, to short-term ones, such as the lingering weakness in the job market left over from the great recession. But a recent study by a group of labor economists introduces an interesting theory into the mix: Workers' pay may be lagging because the U.S. is suffering from a shortage of employers.
The paper—written by José Azar of IESE Business School at the University of Navarra, Ioana Marinescu of the University of Pennsylvania, and Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute—argues that, across different cities and different fields, hiring is concentrated among a relatively small number of businesses, which may have given managers the ability to keep wages lower than if there were more companies vying for talent. This is not the same as saying there are simply too many job hunters chasing too few openings—the paper, which is still in an early draft form, is designed to rule out that possibility. Instead, its authors argue that the labor market may be plagued by what economists call a monopsony problem, where a lack of competition among employers gives businesses outsize power over workers, including the ability to tamp down on pay. If the researchers are right, it could have important implications for how we think about antitrust, unions, and the minimum wage.
Monopsony is essentially monopoly's quieter, less appreciated twin sibling. A monopolist can fix prices because it's the only seller in the market. The one hospital in a sprawling rural county can charge insurers whatever it likes for emergency room services, for instance, because patients can't go elsewhere. A monopsonist, on the other hand, can pay whatever it likes for labor or supplies, because it's the only company buying or hiring. That remote hospital I just mentioned? It can probably get away with lowballing its nurses on salary, because nobody is out there trying to poach them.
You don't have to look hard to tell that we live in a world where many employers have extraordinary leverage over their workers—just read about the grueling, erratic, computer-generated schedules low-wage workers are forced to navigate, or the widespread proliferation of noncompete agreements. And it's clear that American industry has consolidated enormously over the decades. Years of mergers and the rise of exceedingly profitable superstars like Google and Facebook have concentrated economic power in fewer corporate boardrooms, and research suggests that America's transformation into a life-size Monopoly board may be cutting into labor's share of the economy.
But studying monopsony has traditionally been tricky for economists, because they lacked good data that would let them analyze broad trends specifically in labor market concentration. The new paper hops over that hurdle by using a trove of data from CareerBuilder.com, which publishes about one-third of all online job ads in the country. (Even for economists who are paid to worry about it, industry consolidation sometimes has its upsides.) The team looked at the number of companies advertising jobs in more than two dozen different occupations, from nurses to accountants to telemarketers, in each of the country's different metro and nonmetro areas between 2010 and 2013. They then calculated local labor market concentration using the awkwardly named Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI, which antitrust regulators use to analyze the effects of mergers on competition.
What they found was a bit startling. The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission consider a market with an HHI score of 2,500 or more to be highly concentrated—if a merger between two wireless companies left that little competition for cell services, for instance, there's a good chance the government's lawyers would challenge it. In their paper, the authors find that America's local labor markets had a whopping average HHI score of 3,157. Employers also tended to advertise lower pay in cities and towns where fewer businesses were posting jobs—suggesting that the lack of competition among companies was letting them suppress pay. According to one of their calculations, moving from the 25th percentile of labor market concentration to the 75th percentile would lower pay in a metro area by 17 percent.
The degree of concentration, and the effect on wages, tended to be worse in smaller towns than major cities. Places like Alpena, Michigan, and Butte, Montana, had the least competition among employers, while New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had the most. It also varied by occupation. Equipment mechanics, legal secretaries, telemarketers, and those delivery drivers faced some of the most highly concentrated job markets; registered nurses, corporate salesmen, and customer service representatives had some of the least. But overall, the problem looks pervasive.
If the U.S. really does have the sort of widespread monopsony problem this paper documents, it would be one more important point on the constellation of reasons workers have fallen so far behind this century. It would also change the way we need to think about certain public policy issues.
Take the minimum wage. The classic argument against increasing the pay floor is that it will kill jobs by making hiring more costly than it's worth. But in a monopsony-afflicted world where companies can artificially depress wages, a higher minimum shouldn't hurt employment, because it will just force employers to pay workers more in line with the value they produce.
The same goes for collective bargaining. In the perfectly competitive labor markets of economics textbooks, labor unions are basically dead weight that make companies less efficient. In a world where a small clutch of businesses do most of the hiring, unions may actually fix a broken market by giving workers more sway.
Then there's antitrust. Today, when regulators are evaluating a large merger, they tend to think about how it will affect the prices consumers pay. If two health insurers merge, will Americans end up paying higher premiums? If a wireless company eats its rival, will our cellphone bills shoot up? In principle, the government's lawyers can also consider what corporate consolidation will do to workers, but that tends to be a backburner issue. This paper's findings suggest that Washington needs to think more carefully about how mergers can impact the job market, not just on the national level, but in specific cities and towns, where the marriage of two, smaller companies could have a big local impact.
Of course, this is just one, early study, and like most economics research, there are questions to raise about its technique. It's possible, for instance, that nurses or accountants are offered lower pay in cities where few companies are hiring because the economy isn't very good there. That's an especially big concern, since the paper draws its data from the early years of the post-recession recovery, when unemployment was still quite high. Its authors take various approaches to try to account for this, but they may not be fool-proof. Harvard University labor economist Lawrence Katz told me that he suspected the findings about market concentration and wages were directionally correct but that they may be a bit "overstated," because it's simply hard to control for the health of the labor market.
"They are getting at what is an important and underexplored topic … using a creative approach of using really rich data," he said. "I don't know if I would take perfectly seriously the exact quantitative estimates."
Still, even if the study is only gesturing in the direction of a real problem, it's a deeply worrisome one. We're living in an era of industry consolidation. That's not going away in the foreseeable future. And workers can't ask for fair pay if there aren't enough businesses out there competing to hire.
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Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent.
Trump's Enablers Destroy Their Reputations For Nothing
crooked.com
Trump's Enablers Destroy Their Reputations For Nothing
7-8 minutes
By Brian Beutler
For several weeks now, the political class has made a parlor game of guessing why Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) so obsequiously reversed his long-held misgivings about President Trump.
Graham’s about face began pretty early in the Trump presidency, but gained widespread attention at the end of November, shortly after he told CNN, “what concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label [Trump] some kind of kook not fit to be president.” Enterprising reporters quickly dug up this Graham quote from February 2016—“I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office”—and the jokes wrote themselves.
Even before then, though, Graham had become one of the most innovative participants in the Republican Party’s efforts to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian election meddling investigation, and to help Trump cover up his campaign’s complicity in that influence operation. He has made baseless calls for multiple, diversionary special counsel investigations of Democrats and Hillary Clinton, and more recently referred Christopher Steele—a former British intelligence officer who blew the whistle on the Trump campaign—to the FBI to be criminally investigated on the basis of secret evidence. In between, he tweeted a commercial endorsement of one of Trump’s golf clubs.
Because Graham is chatty with the press, and has a not-inconsequential history of taking heterodox stances on major policy issues, he has benefited from a widespread impulse to interpret his behavior in the most generous possible light. Graham insists he has cozied up to the president to influence national policy, including immigration policy, and most political observers have been happy to accept his explanation.
Maybe Graham is telling the truth, and maybe he isn’t, but either way, the ongoing “shithole countries” fiasco underscores something that should have been clear to all thinking Republicans a long time ago: Debasing yourself for the opportunity to bend Trump’s ear is an extremely stupid idea that will leave you debased without the upside of lasting presidential attention or loyalty. By the same token, the Republican congressional leaders who have given Trump free rein to engage in unprecedented corruption, in tacit exchange for control over the policymaking process, have assumed all the downside of complicity in Trump’s crimes without securing the means of assuring Trump won’t foul up policy anyhow. They have all committed reputational suicide-by-Trump, in exchange for practically nothing. As a result, Graham stands to be outflanked by people who are willing to be more shameless than he is, and who will in turn trap their weak leaders into shutting down their own government by the end of the week.
The Lindsey Graham Theory of Groveling suffers from two obvious weaknesses that, when combined, fatally undermine it. First, Graham isn’t the only powerful person who seeks to curry favor with Trump by sucking up to him and abetting his misconduct. Second—in both the retelling of those around him, and in a recent, televised meeting with lawmakers at the White House—Trump has proven to be wildly manipulable, careening between incompatible positions whenever he engages new stakeholders. Trump is regularly driven to undermine his administration by Fox News hosts, who know Trump mindlessly live tweets their shows, and thus tailor their programming to influence administration policy and messaging.
Graham has thus humiliated himself for the most fleeting of rewards: convincing Trump of things that a person with less heterodox views can unconvince him of just as quickly.
On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)—another Trump foe turned Trump yes-man—exploited this vulnerability in Trump’s very stable mind to sabotage Graham, a colleague with whom he has feuded for years. On Meet the Press, Paul suggested to Trump that Graham was behaving hypocritically.
“[T]here are two different standards here,” Paul said. “In 2013, Lindsey Graham said the exact same thing the president did, but he used the [term] hell-hole. ‘We can’t have everybody coming from every hell-hole on the planet here.’ And now everybody thinks Lindsey Graham’s a great statesman because he’s put out this thing about American ideals, and stuff, which was a good statement, but he said almost the identical thing to the president in 2013. So I think we have a selective remembering.”
By all accounts, Graham arrived at the White House on Thursday for an immigration meeting convinced that all of his brown-nosing was about to pay off. Instead, he found himself sandbagged by immigration restrictionists and white nationalists who realized Trump was about to cut a deal, and convinced him to reject it by appealing to his long-held view that immigrants from black majority countries are primitive and disgusting.
These other toadies don’t fare much better than Graham does in securing Trump’s loyalty, but they have no dignity left to sacrifice and thus much less to lose. After the “shithole countries” comment reached the public, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), disgraced themselves by lying promiscuously, and in evolving ways, about what Trump had said. They were rewarded for their dear-leader slavishness with White House leaks acknowledging that Trump had actually said “shithouse countries” rather than “shithole countries.”
If there were a way around these pitfalls, it would run through the Republican congressional leadership. Graham could have used his political clout to ask Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to cut Trump out of the legislative process—including by advancing legislation that both legalizes Dreamers and increases border security spending.
But McConnell and Ryan are too cowardly or cynical or indifferent to use their agenda-setting power in ways that might cross Trump, and know that Trump can upset their best-laid plans simply by tweeting his fleeting opinion. In a different world, they might treat Trump’s obvious befuddlement and naivety as reasons to ignore his interventions, and govern around him. In this world, they are too ineffectual and paralyzed by fear of Trump’s outbursts to negotiate with Democrats in good faith, even when they know they need Democratic votes to keep the government from shutting down.
After a year of abdicating their constitutional obligations on Trump’s behalf, he returns the favor by making routine governance impossible.
The precise mechanisms are different, but in one respect, they’re suffering the same fate as Graham. Like him, they put a career’s worth of political cache on the line for Trump without condition, and in both cases he flushed it unblinkingly down the shithole.
Yascha Mounk on normalizing Trump
slate.com
We haven’t normalized Trump, we’ve just gotten used to him. That may be worse.
Yascha Mounk
14-18 minutes
The Good Fight
We haven’t stopped finding Trump bizarre, we’ve just gotten used to him. That may be worse.
This article is part of a weeklong series on President Trump’s first year in office.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the president of the United States paid $130,000 to a famous porn actress to stop her from revealing details of an alleged affair between them. For Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter—or really, for just about any of their predecessors—the mere hint of such a payoff would have become the defining scandal of their presidency. But somehow, the sordid story of Stormy Daniels has barely entered public consciousness. Few papers featured it on the front page. Within 48 hours, the conversation had already moved on to the next Trumpian controversy. The normal rules of politics simply do not apply to this particular president.
Granted, the payoff to Daniels is hardly the most egregious of Trump’s misdeeds. If nobody cared about it because the political class was too busy chronicling the larger and more consequential outrages committed by his administration, there might have been something redeeming about this silence. But it doesn’t seem as though this is what’s going on here. Instead, we have simply revised down our expectations—big as well as small, public as well as private.
This alone shows that there was something to the biggest fear that the burgeoning class of Trump-watchers expressed after his ascent to the highest office in the land: that America might quickly start to normalize the president. “In the face of the impulse to normalize,” Masha Gessen wrote the day after the 2016 election, “it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock.” “Washington is going about its business talking about who’s going to get what jobs,” David Remnick observed a few days later. “You would think that Mitt Romney had won. It’s a hallucination.”
Thankfully, though, the most extreme fears about normalization have not materialized. In part because of Trump’s insistence on acting like the worst cartoon version of himself—and in part because many of us took Gessen’s and Remnick’s warnings to heart—the president, by and large, continues to be treated as the aberration he really is. Newspapers that had once insisted on quoting two points of view on every conceivable issue openly state when the president lies. Business leaders who were initially willing to play ball with the administration have deserted his advisory councils in droves. Even Republican congressmen and senators who have supported his legislative agenda time and again have repeatedly felt the need to distance themselves from his most shocking comments.
Trump himself has not been normalized. But the fact that the president of the United States is deeply abnormal has.
But while we have mostly managed to resist treating Trump as a normal president, I’m increasingly worried that we have simultaneously fallen into a more subtle trap: Even the private citizens, the business executives, and the politicians who are fully conscious that the president of the United States is a peculiar aberration have not changed their behavior in the day-to-day; despite knowing everything that there is to know about Donald Trump, they go about their personal and professional lives as though we lived in perfectly ordinary times.
Many Republican congressmen and senators, for example, have not only distanced themselves from Trump’s most outrageous comments in public; in private, they have also acknowledged that he is a dangerous fool who will most likely do immense damage to their party, their country, and the world. And yet, they have spectacularly failed to walk that wise talk, neglecting to put real limits on Trump’s ability to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or launch nuclear weapons.
Many of the country’s CEOs are concerned about the ways in which this administration creates uncertainty about economic policy and undermines the rule of law. And yet, the markets barely seem to have priced in the possibility of real disruption: over the past year, the stock market has soared from one record to the next as though these risks did not really exist.
Self-declared members of the #Resistance outcompete each other with apocalyptic predictions about the effect Trump will have on the American republic. And yet, public protests against the president have become smaller and smaller with every passing month.
The journalists who cover the administration are probably in the best position of anyone to understand the deep dysfunction at the center of power—as well as the extraordinary ways in which Trump has attacked the press over the past twelve months. But while they have broken some amazing stories, they too have proven reluctant to heed their lessons off the page.
And so the year-end memo which the White House Correspondents’ Association penned for the administration at the beginning of 2018 listed a series of “positive notes from the year now behind us,” lauding Sarah Sanders, the White House spokesperson, for such unremarkable courtesies as being “accessible to individual reporters” and returning “to the longstanding, bipartisan tradition of on-camera briefings.”
Even when the report acknowledges Trump’s severe attacks on the media, it does so in an astoundingly milquetoast manner. While the WHCA complains about the “public denigration of the free press,” for example, it does not call it a shocking and unprecedented attack; instead, it gingerly describes it as one of a number of “areas for improvement.”
All of these indicators point in the same direction: Trump himself has not been normalized. But the fact that the president of the United States is deeply abnormal has.
There is a hopeful way of reading this, and over the past weeks leading pundits have become increasingly tempted to indulge in this kind of optimism: Our institutions, they are starting to claim, are much more solid and resilient than the pessimists might have thought a year ago.
The first days of Trump’s presidency felt like vertigo. After an inaugural speech which George W. Bush fittingly described as “some weird shit,” the White House instituted a chaotic travel ban, floated a rapprochement with Russia, called the future of NATO into doubt, and threatened to end NAFTA. For a few weeks, it seemed as though Trump might move to change the country with scary speed and efficiency.
But that, of course, is not what transpired. The travel ban was, again and again, overturned by the courts; the version that is now being implemented is much-changed and somewhat-attenuated. America’s alliances have undoubtedly suffered a real battering, with levels of support for the United States in countries from Germany to Greece at record lows; but NATO still exists and the U.S. has so far continued to take a tough stance on Russia, selling weapons to Ukraine and implementing sanctions against Putin cronies. Finally, Trump has talked smack about China and stopped the ratification process for the Trans-Pacific Partnership; but for now, the global trade order mostly remains intact. Even Trump’s attacks on independent institutions have ultimately proved reasonably ineffective: though he still insists that he can do what he wants with the FBI, for example, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller is, for now, continuing apace.
Perhaps, then, it is perfectly rational for all of us to play-act normality. Since our institutions are capable of functioning reasonably well even with a strange and terrible chief executive—since the economy is humming along, since America’s courts continue to adhere to age-old procedural standards, and since a devastating war has not yet broken out—it would seem to make sense both to recognize how bizarre Trump is and to keep going about our daily life as though he weren’t. Eventually, Trump will lose re-election, a more traditional politician will move into the White House, and the nightmare will run its course of its own accord.
This is perfectly plausible. A large portion of Americans long ago made their mind up about the president—and about 50 percent cannot stand him. So long as Democrats run competent campaigns this year, they should make big gains in the House and the Senate. And so long as they run a candidate who isn’t widely hated in 2020, they should have every chance of winning back the White House less than three years from now. Trump’s humbling may not be so far away.
Nor does it seem especially likely that Trump will manage to destroy American democracy in the next few years. While the past 12 months have done little to make me more confident about the stability of our institutions—the serious threat to the independence of law enforcement agencies and the shameful failure of congressional Republicans to hold the president to account are just two of the most obvious warning signs—it takes real competence and strategy to amass power in the hands of the executive. Unlike Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Donald Trump has so far proven totally lacking in these qualities.
Listen to the Good Fight podcast:
So the optimistic story has a lot going for it. And yet, I ultimate find it to be dangerously quietist. Why? Because it assesses the degree of danger we face, and the right way to respond to our dire situation, by the most likely outcome rather than the wide range of plausible outcomes.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb persuasively argued in his book, The Black Swan, human beings are terrible at dealing with scenarios in which there is a very small probability of a very bad outcome. Every time I expose myself to a small risk of something really bad happening, and find that the worst case did not materialize, I am likely to conclude that I made the right decision in ignoring the possibility from the start. And yet, what I did was probably irrational for two reasons.
First, if I run a very small risk of a bad outcome over and over again, the cumulative probability of something very bad happening can quickly grow to be substantial. If the likelihood of me being hit by a car when I rush across the street is 1 in a 100,000, for example, but I do so 10,000 times over the course of many years, this gives me at least a 1 in 10 chance of being involved in a serious accident at some point in my life.
Second, it may be deeply irrational to expose myself to the possibility of something very bad happening even if the cumulative risk remains reasonably low. Out of 10 people who consistently run a small risk of getting run over in the street, nine will lead somewhat better lives as a result: They will spend less time waiting around at intersections, and perhaps they will even seize some opportunities that their more risk-averse compatriots missed. But unless they believe that those small benefits justify a 10 percent chance of suffering very serious injuries—or dying a premature death—they will have acted irrationally. In cases involving a black swan hindsight is not 20/20.
This is directly relevant to the Trump era. For in the end, all of the people who are acting cravenly, or cowardly, at the moment are likely to be vindicated. If we somehow manage to muddle through the next three years—if we avoid war with North Korea, if Russia does not go on any more foreign adventures, if the economy does not crater, and if our independent institutions manage to put up enough resistance to retain some degree of independence—they can point at the fortunate outcome and proudly pronounce their wisdom. “Weren’t you silly to get all freaked out?” they will say. “In the end, the threat wasn’t all that bad. After all, everything turned out just fine!”
But this would be far too self-congratulatory a way of reading our collective behavior during the Trump presidency. For the truth of the matter is that we are proving unwilling or unable to take the radical steps that would be justified by the very real danger of black swan events. That failure should give us pause. For it suggests that humanity’s tendency to act normal in circumstances that are anything but is a much greater political danger than we usually recognize.
If some of the worst-case scenarios do yet come to pass, we will have but ourselves to blame. And even if they don’t, our inability to react to the clear threat posed by Donald Trump should make us more skeptical about whether humanity will prove able and willing to confront dangers like climate change in the decades to come. If we are capable of living life as though everything was normal even though we know that a deeply dangerous man has his fingers on the nuclear button, we will also be capable of continuing to drive our SUVs even as Miami Beach is submerged in seawater.
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Jamelle Bouie on Donald Trump's lasting legacy
Reopening the wounds of racial grievance will be Donald Trump's most lasting achievement.
By Jamelle Bouie
Slate is running a weeklong series on President Trump's first year in office. Read Jim Newell's companion essay about Trump's conventional—and reversible—policy agenda.
"The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."
With that promise—the centerpiece of his inaugural address—Donald Trump committed to a populist presidency. In his first year, President Trump has delivered the opposite.
Trump promised generous health care reform. Instead, he delivered a monthslong effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and end a Medicaid expansion that brought insurance and health services to millions of people, many of them his supporters in states like Kentucky and West Virginia. He promised to bring in the "best people" to staff his administration and—upon taking office—promptly staffed his White House and the larger bureaucracy with a cadre of sycophants, opportunists, and ideologues hostile to the missions and values of the departments they lead. Trump promised tax reform that wouldn't benefit the rich and delivered just the opposite. And, most famously, Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and wash corruption from Washington. What that has meant, in practice, is an open effort to enrich himself and his family at the expense of taxpayers, directing public funds to his private clubs and resorts.
But there's another way to read Trump's promise—not as a commitment to economic populism but as a statement of racial solidarity. Far from acting as a president for all Americans, he's governed explicitly as a president for white Americans and the racial reactionaries among them. He's spoken to their fear and fanned their anger, making his office a rallying point for those who see decline in multiracial democracy and his administration a tool for those who would turn the clock back on racial progress. If those Americans are the "forgotten men and women" of President Trump's inaugural address, then he's been a man of his word. That simmering pursuit of racial grievance has been its defining characteristic and threatens to be its most enduring achievement.
Within a week of taking the oath of office, President Trump moved to deliver on white resentment. His "travel ban" targeted refugees and visitors from predominantly Muslim countries, regardless of their actual threat to the United States. And it had clear roots in the anti-Muslim bigotry of Trump's bid for president. Trump claimed that "Islam hates us." He praised the idea—drawn from a debunked story about Gen. John Pershing during the Philippine–American War—of murdering Muslim prisoners of war with bullets dipped in pigs' blood as a desecration of their bodies. He falsely claimed that "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims cheered the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He proposed ethnic profiling of Muslims and called for surveillance of U.S. mosques. He falsely accused the "Muslim community" of not turning in the San Bernardino, California, shooters.
The travel ban was just the first step for a proudly anti-immigrant and anti-refugee administration, whose ideas were rooted in racialized conceptions of citizenship and belonging. President Trump issued executive orders prioritizing deportation for a wider array of immigrants. With this authorization, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had license to essentially terrorize immigrant communities, uprooting families and deporting otherwise law-abiding residents. Trump has since announced plans to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and to remove similar protections for immigrants who work and reside in the United States under a program that grants status to refugees fleeing war or natural disaster.
There is a chance this is racially neutral, and untethered from Trump's harsh rhetoric on the campaign trail—that the goal here is simply a more manageable, if conservative, immigration system. But this is hard to believe, given what Trump says in the White House as president. "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" he asked during a bipartisan discussion on immigration last week, according to the Washington Post and later corroborated by Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois. "Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out." The president also wondered why the country didn't accept more immigrants from countries like Norway.
The message couldn't be clearer. Poor countries like Haiti, black countries, are shitholes, and their people are shit—untouchable, irredeemable, and unworthy of American shores, regardless of what they've earned or accomplished. By contrast, rich countries like Norway, white countries, are deserving. Their immigrants are welcome, not because of their skills, but because of who they are. President Trump says he wants more "merit-based" immigration to the United States, where merit simply means white.
That expression of white nationalist belief—that the United States is a white country, for white people—is echoed by sympathy for actual white nationalists. Trump accused "many sides" of fomenting violence after a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the killing of local activist Heather Heyer, and asked all Americans to "cherish history," all but endorsing the defense of Confederate monuments. One month later, the president attacked black professional football players who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police violence as disrespecting "our flag." His supporters have gotten the message. In the latest CBS News national tracking poll, 71 percent of Trump voters say that the president has made their "culture and way of life safer."
The idea of the United States as a multiracial endeavor, where its citizens and residents possess equal status and dignity, is not settled.
It was these kinds of appeals that allowed Trump to roll through a crowded field of Republican challengers, and it remains the ideological throughline of his presidency, the quality that distinguishes his tenure from that of a more ordinary Republican president. Trump pays little lip service to the modern ideal of an inclusive, multiracial American democracy. For him, to be a full citizen of this country is to be white, to the point that he presumes Americanness on the part of non-American white people. When the Pittsburgh Penguins toured the White House after winning the National Hockey League championship, Trump praised them as "incredible patriots," despite the fact that most of the players are foreign-born, representing Canada, Finland, Sweden, Russia, and Germany. Meanwhile, the president treats actual American citizens in Puerto Rico as foreigners, hostile of their claims and indifferent to the suffering and disadvantage that has consumed their island in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The idea of the United States as a multiracial endeavor, where its citizens and residents possess equal status and dignity, is not settled. In a slave-holding country whose founding hardened racial hierarchy, the equal citizenship of blacks and other nonwhites is still contested terrain on which political battles are fought. And still looming large in our collective political identity is the belief that America is a white democracy, a "white man's government," where those deemed white hold a racial monopoly on status, resources, and opportunity.
In describing the formation of "whiteness" as a social position, historian David Roediger coined the term "herrenvolk republicanism" to describe the ideology constructed by white Americans in the wake of the Civil War and the aftermath of Reconstruction. Herrenvolk, which translates to "master race," denotes the importance of racial hierarchy to the project at hand. Republicanism has less to do with the political party that shares the name, and more with a deep-rooted American ideology that elevates the independent producer—the farmer or the merchant—over those spurned as dependent, or worse, parasitic. It celebrated the middle of American society, and the preservation of that middle as integral to the maintenance of democracy.
Republican ideology developed in a slave society was theorized by slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and took on the assumptions of that society. Among them was the racial nature of dependency. Like women and children, slaves were considered dependent. But the condition of slavery was reserved for people of African descent. To be a slave was to be black, and critically, to be black was to be a slave, and thus embody a total form of dependency. Even if free, black Americans were the antithesis of republicanism, unable in their bodies to participate in civic life. Under herrenvolk republicanism, blacks could not be producers placing them in permanent opposition to this independent, and white, middle of citizens. They were a permanent subclass, whose perpetual disadvantage guaranteed a measure of status to white Americans. No matter how far they fell, how dependent they became, they would always retain a claim on the polity. They would never be black.
These ideas are too deep-rooted—too recent in American history—to simply disappear with the emergence of formal racial equality. We are, after all, just a century removed from when whiteness legally conferred citizenship, and just a few generations removed from when whiteness opened the door to middle-class opportunity, subsidized by the federal government through programs like the G.I. Bill and benefits like subsidized mortgage loans. We are barely 50 years removed from when the preservation of material whiteness—white suburbs and white schools—was an explicit aim of local and state policy. And through all of this, we witnessed times when the cultural or cash value of whiteness seemed to decline, and white Americans would move in defense of it, fighting to reassert their racial entitlement.
There was the end of the 19th century as Reconstruction came to a close and the white South—with the complicity of the white North, buried biracial democracy under an avalanche of theft, deceit, intimidation, and violence. There were the 1910s and 1920s, when the United States witnessed an explosion of nativism and the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to push back against the modest gains of women, immigrants, religious minorities, and especially black Americans. There was the backlash to the civil rights movement, and there is the present backlash, embodied in Donald Trump, and driven by the primal fear of millions of white Americans who feel themselves losing the social status and economic standing once conferred by whiteness.
Trump fans those flames of racial anger. And to the extent that it has been successful, it's in part because white racial entitlement is embedded in the nation's practices and habits of mind, manifested in the persistence of school segregation and the reality of housing and workplace discrimination. Massive effort has ameliorated this in the past, and fewer Americans than ever hold on to these ideas. But they're still present in our society, still potent, still capable of great damage.
More than anything else, the first year of the Trump administration has been marked by a steady attack on the equal status of racial and religious minorities. This attack grows out of an American tradition of exclusion, one that is reasserting itself in the face of an increasingly multiracial society that—at least on paper—extends the rights and privileges of democratic participation to all citizens. In which case, the Trump administration hasn't just been aggressively right wing, it has been so in service of a larger effort to reassert the old hierarchies, generating what public support it has through appeals to racial and patriarchal authority.
America in 2017 has many futures, but no observer should underestimate the chance that it's a version of this past.
This effort has been the administration's greatest success to date and may well be its most lasting accomplishment. Trump's rhetoric sends the clear message that America does not welcome nonwhites, and his immigration crackdown brings real fear to black and brown communities across the country. His tax policies don't just widen income inequality, they entrench our deep racial inequality too, heightening the zero-sum thinking—their gain is my loss—that makes closing those gaps difficult and politically costly. His court picks may allow Republican politicians—who rely almost exclusively on white voters to win elections—to disenfranchise black and Latino voters through gerrymandering, vote dilution, and outright voter suppression.
Trump's politics of white resentment have overtaken the Republican Party and trickled down to state and local candidates. In Virginia, Corey Stewart's bid for the Republican nomination for governor and then Ed Gillespie's general-election campaign for that office each embraced the same kind of racist demagoguery, appealing to white resentment with a loud promise to defend Confederate monuments, as well as campaign materials that condemned kneeling NFL players and ads that warned of dangerous Hispanic immigrants. A party that just four years ago called for greater outreach to black and Latino voters now sees its future in disrespecting them.
For decades, the politics of the American South were built on a foundation of oligarchy and extraction, where—backed by a white middle class acting out of material advantage and racial solidarity—white elites suppressed labor, disenfranchised blacks, and fanned racist violence when the former proved unable to stop open protest and discontent. This foundation eventually collapsed by force of the black freedom struggle, undermined by its own corruption and discontent among a white minority, but it lasted through most of the 20th century. America in 2017 has many futures, but no observer should underestimate the chance that it's a version of this past.
Which means the resistance to Trump's brand of politics cannot just be resistance to the president himself and the Republican majorities that enable him and his administration. It must also be a resistance to the habits of mind—and material realities—that produced the situation the country finds itself in.
Resisters must challenge the herrenvolk-ism still present in American life by modeling and performing inclusion across all dimensions. This resistance goes beyond electoral politics and the immediate goal of removing Trump, or at least stopping his progress. Americans who have witnessed this first year of the Trump administration and responded with horror must understand that the challenge of defeating Trumpism is more fundamental than just one man and his party. It's not restoration of a status quo ante but genuine progress.
By Jamelle Bouie
Slate is running a weeklong series on President Trump's first year in office. Read Jim Newell's companion essay about Trump's conventional—and reversible—policy agenda.
"The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."
With that promise—the centerpiece of his inaugural address—Donald Trump committed to a populist presidency. In his first year, President Trump has delivered the opposite.
Trump promised generous health care reform. Instead, he delivered a monthslong effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and end a Medicaid expansion that brought insurance and health services to millions of people, many of them his supporters in states like Kentucky and West Virginia. He promised to bring in the "best people" to staff his administration and—upon taking office—promptly staffed his White House and the larger bureaucracy with a cadre of sycophants, opportunists, and ideologues hostile to the missions and values of the departments they lead. Trump promised tax reform that wouldn't benefit the rich and delivered just the opposite. And, most famously, Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and wash corruption from Washington. What that has meant, in practice, is an open effort to enrich himself and his family at the expense of taxpayers, directing public funds to his private clubs and resorts.
But there's another way to read Trump's promise—not as a commitment to economic populism but as a statement of racial solidarity. Far from acting as a president for all Americans, he's governed explicitly as a president for white Americans and the racial reactionaries among them. He's spoken to their fear and fanned their anger, making his office a rallying point for those who see decline in multiracial democracy and his administration a tool for those who would turn the clock back on racial progress. If those Americans are the "forgotten men and women" of President Trump's inaugural address, then he's been a man of his word. That simmering pursuit of racial grievance has been its defining characteristic and threatens to be its most enduring achievement.
Within a week of taking the oath of office, President Trump moved to deliver on white resentment. His "travel ban" targeted refugees and visitors from predominantly Muslim countries, regardless of their actual threat to the United States. And it had clear roots in the anti-Muslim bigotry of Trump's bid for president. Trump claimed that "Islam hates us." He praised the idea—drawn from a debunked story about Gen. John Pershing during the Philippine–American War—of murdering Muslim prisoners of war with bullets dipped in pigs' blood as a desecration of their bodies. He falsely claimed that "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims cheered the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He proposed ethnic profiling of Muslims and called for surveillance of U.S. mosques. He falsely accused the "Muslim community" of not turning in the San Bernardino, California, shooters.
The travel ban was just the first step for a proudly anti-immigrant and anti-refugee administration, whose ideas were rooted in racialized conceptions of citizenship and belonging. President Trump issued executive orders prioritizing deportation for a wider array of immigrants. With this authorization, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had license to essentially terrorize immigrant communities, uprooting families and deporting otherwise law-abiding residents. Trump has since announced plans to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and to remove similar protections for immigrants who work and reside in the United States under a program that grants status to refugees fleeing war or natural disaster.
There is a chance this is racially neutral, and untethered from Trump's harsh rhetoric on the campaign trail—that the goal here is simply a more manageable, if conservative, immigration system. But this is hard to believe, given what Trump says in the White House as president. "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" he asked during a bipartisan discussion on immigration last week, according to the Washington Post and later corroborated by Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois. "Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out." The president also wondered why the country didn't accept more immigrants from countries like Norway.
The message couldn't be clearer. Poor countries like Haiti, black countries, are shitholes, and their people are shit—untouchable, irredeemable, and unworthy of American shores, regardless of what they've earned or accomplished. By contrast, rich countries like Norway, white countries, are deserving. Their immigrants are welcome, not because of their skills, but because of who they are. President Trump says he wants more "merit-based" immigration to the United States, where merit simply means white.
That expression of white nationalist belief—that the United States is a white country, for white people—is echoed by sympathy for actual white nationalists. Trump accused "many sides" of fomenting violence after a gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the killing of local activist Heather Heyer, and asked all Americans to "cherish history," all but endorsing the defense of Confederate monuments. One month later, the president attacked black professional football players who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police violence as disrespecting "our flag." His supporters have gotten the message. In the latest CBS News national tracking poll, 71 percent of Trump voters say that the president has made their "culture and way of life safer."
The idea of the United States as a multiracial endeavor, where its citizens and residents possess equal status and dignity, is not settled.
It was these kinds of appeals that allowed Trump to roll through a crowded field of Republican challengers, and it remains the ideological throughline of his presidency, the quality that distinguishes his tenure from that of a more ordinary Republican president. Trump pays little lip service to the modern ideal of an inclusive, multiracial American democracy. For him, to be a full citizen of this country is to be white, to the point that he presumes Americanness on the part of non-American white people. When the Pittsburgh Penguins toured the White House after winning the National Hockey League championship, Trump praised them as "incredible patriots," despite the fact that most of the players are foreign-born, representing Canada, Finland, Sweden, Russia, and Germany. Meanwhile, the president treats actual American citizens in Puerto Rico as foreigners, hostile of their claims and indifferent to the suffering and disadvantage that has consumed their island in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The idea of the United States as a multiracial endeavor, where its citizens and residents possess equal status and dignity, is not settled. In a slave-holding country whose founding hardened racial hierarchy, the equal citizenship of blacks and other nonwhites is still contested terrain on which political battles are fought. And still looming large in our collective political identity is the belief that America is a white democracy, a "white man's government," where those deemed white hold a racial monopoly on status, resources, and opportunity.
In describing the formation of "whiteness" as a social position, historian David Roediger coined the term "herrenvolk republicanism" to describe the ideology constructed by white Americans in the wake of the Civil War and the aftermath of Reconstruction. Herrenvolk, which translates to "master race," denotes the importance of racial hierarchy to the project at hand. Republicanism has less to do with the political party that shares the name, and more with a deep-rooted American ideology that elevates the independent producer—the farmer or the merchant—over those spurned as dependent, or worse, parasitic. It celebrated the middle of American society, and the preservation of that middle as integral to the maintenance of democracy.
Republican ideology developed in a slave society was theorized by slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and took on the assumptions of that society. Among them was the racial nature of dependency. Like women and children, slaves were considered dependent. But the condition of slavery was reserved for people of African descent. To be a slave was to be black, and critically, to be black was to be a slave, and thus embody a total form of dependency. Even if free, black Americans were the antithesis of republicanism, unable in their bodies to participate in civic life. Under herrenvolk republicanism, blacks could not be producers placing them in permanent opposition to this independent, and white, middle of citizens. They were a permanent subclass, whose perpetual disadvantage guaranteed a measure of status to white Americans. No matter how far they fell, how dependent they became, they would always retain a claim on the polity. They would never be black.
These ideas are too deep-rooted—too recent in American history—to simply disappear with the emergence of formal racial equality. We are, after all, just a century removed from when whiteness legally conferred citizenship, and just a few generations removed from when whiteness opened the door to middle-class opportunity, subsidized by the federal government through programs like the G.I. Bill and benefits like subsidized mortgage loans. We are barely 50 years removed from when the preservation of material whiteness—white suburbs and white schools—was an explicit aim of local and state policy. And through all of this, we witnessed times when the cultural or cash value of whiteness seemed to decline, and white Americans would move in defense of it, fighting to reassert their racial entitlement.
There was the end of the 19th century as Reconstruction came to a close and the white South—with the complicity of the white North, buried biracial democracy under an avalanche of theft, deceit, intimidation, and violence. There were the 1910s and 1920s, when the United States witnessed an explosion of nativism and the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to push back against the modest gains of women, immigrants, religious minorities, and especially black Americans. There was the backlash to the civil rights movement, and there is the present backlash, embodied in Donald Trump, and driven by the primal fear of millions of white Americans who feel themselves losing the social status and economic standing once conferred by whiteness.
Trump fans those flames of racial anger. And to the extent that it has been successful, it's in part because white racial entitlement is embedded in the nation's practices and habits of mind, manifested in the persistence of school segregation and the reality of housing and workplace discrimination. Massive effort has ameliorated this in the past, and fewer Americans than ever hold on to these ideas. But they're still present in our society, still potent, still capable of great damage.
More than anything else, the first year of the Trump administration has been marked by a steady attack on the equal status of racial and religious minorities. This attack grows out of an American tradition of exclusion, one that is reasserting itself in the face of an increasingly multiracial society that—at least on paper—extends the rights and privileges of democratic participation to all citizens. In which case, the Trump administration hasn't just been aggressively right wing, it has been so in service of a larger effort to reassert the old hierarchies, generating what public support it has through appeals to racial and patriarchal authority.
America in 2017 has many futures, but no observer should underestimate the chance that it's a version of this past.
This effort has been the administration's greatest success to date and may well be its most lasting accomplishment. Trump's rhetoric sends the clear message that America does not welcome nonwhites, and his immigration crackdown brings real fear to black and brown communities across the country. His tax policies don't just widen income inequality, they entrench our deep racial inequality too, heightening the zero-sum thinking—their gain is my loss—that makes closing those gaps difficult and politically costly. His court picks may allow Republican politicians—who rely almost exclusively on white voters to win elections—to disenfranchise black and Latino voters through gerrymandering, vote dilution, and outright voter suppression.
Trump's politics of white resentment have overtaken the Republican Party and trickled down to state and local candidates. In Virginia, Corey Stewart's bid for the Republican nomination for governor and then Ed Gillespie's general-election campaign for that office each embraced the same kind of racist demagoguery, appealing to white resentment with a loud promise to defend Confederate monuments, as well as campaign materials that condemned kneeling NFL players and ads that warned of dangerous Hispanic immigrants. A party that just four years ago called for greater outreach to black and Latino voters now sees its future in disrespecting them.
For decades, the politics of the American South were built on a foundation of oligarchy and extraction, where—backed by a white middle class acting out of material advantage and racial solidarity—white elites suppressed labor, disenfranchised blacks, and fanned racist violence when the former proved unable to stop open protest and discontent. This foundation eventually collapsed by force of the black freedom struggle, undermined by its own corruption and discontent among a white minority, but it lasted through most of the 20th century. America in 2017 has many futures, but no observer should underestimate the chance that it's a version of this past.
Which means the resistance to Trump's brand of politics cannot just be resistance to the president himself and the Republican majorities that enable him and his administration. It must also be a resistance to the habits of mind—and material realities—that produced the situation the country finds itself in.
Resisters must challenge the herrenvolk-ism still present in American life by modeling and performing inclusion across all dimensions. This resistance goes beyond electoral politics and the immediate goal of removing Trump, or at least stopping his progress. Americans who have witnessed this first year of the Trump administration and responded with horror must understand that the challenge of defeating Trumpism is more fundamental than just one man and his party. It's not restoration of a status quo ante but genuine progress.
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