Peter Beinart: Breaking Faith. The Atlantic

Breaking Faith

The culture war over religious morality has faded; in its place is something much worse.

• Peter Beinart
• April 2017 Issue

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

Why did religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America?

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. As Wilcox explains, “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community. The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.”

The worse Americans fare in their own lives, the darker their view of the country. According to PRRI, white Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream “still holds true.”

But non-churchgoing conservatives didn’t flock to Trump only because he articulated their despair. He also articulated their resentments. For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. In 2008, the University of Iowa’s Benjamin Knoll noted that among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and born-again Protestants, the less you attended church, the more anti-immigration you were. (This may be true in Europe as well. A recent thesis at Sweden’s Uppsala University, by an undergraduate named Ludvig Broomé, compared supporters of the far-right Swedish Democrats with people who voted for mainstream candidates. The former were less likely to attend church, or belong to any other community organization.)

How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

So is the alt-right. Read Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari’s famous Breitbart.com essay, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It contains five references to “tribe,” seven to “race,” 13 to “the west” and “western” and only one to “Christianity.” That’s no coincidence. The alt-right is ultra-conservatism for a more secular age. Its leaders like Christendom, an old-fashioned word for the West. But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil. As a college student, the alt-right leader Richard Spencer was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously hated Christianity. Radix, the journal Spencer founded, publishes articles with titles like “Why I Am a Pagan.” One essay notes that “critics of Christianity on the Alternative Right usually blame it for its universalism.”

Secularization is transforming the left, too. In 1990, according to PRRI, slightly more than half of white liberals seldom or never attended religious services. Today the proportion is 73 percent. And if conservative nonattenders fueled Trump’s revolt inside the GOP, liberal nonattenders fueled Bernie Sanders’s insurgency against Hillary Clinton: While white Democrats who went to religious services at least once a week backed Clinton by 26 points, according to an April 2016 PRRI survey, white Democrats who rarely attended services backed Sanders by 13 points.

Sanders, like Trump, appealed to secular voters because he reflected their discontent. White Democrats who are disconnected from organized religion are substantially more likely than other white Democrats to call the American dream a myth. Secularism may not be the cause of this dissatisfaction, of course: It’s possible that losing faith in America’s political and economic system leads one to lose faith in organized religion. But either way, in 2016, the least religiously affiliated white Democrats—like the least religiously affiliated white Republicans—were the ones most likely to back candidates promising revolutionary change.

The decline of traditional religious authority is contributing to a more revolutionary mood within black politics as well. Although African Americans remain more likely than whites to attend church, religious disengagement is growing in the black community. African Americans under the age of 30 are three times as likely to eschew a religious affiliation as African Americans over 50. This shift is crucial to understanding Black Lives Matter, a Millennial-led protest movement whose activists often take a jaundiced view of established African American religious leaders. Brittney Cooper, who teaches women’s and gender studies as well as Africana studies at Rutgers, writes that the black Church “has been abandoned as the leadership model for this generation.” As Jamal Bryant, a minister at an AME church in Baltimore, told The Atlantic’s Emma Green, “The difference between the Black Lives Matter movement and the civil-rights movement is that the civil-rights movement, by and large, was first out of the Church.”

Black Lives Matter activists sometimes accuse the black Church of sexism, homophobia, and complacency in the face of racial injustice. For instance, Patrisse Cullors, one of the movement’s founders, grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness but says she became alienated by the fact that the elders were “all men.” In a move that faintly echoes the way some in the alt-right have traded Christianity for religious traditions rooted in pagan Europe, Cullors has embraced the Nigerian religion of Ifa. To be sure, her motivations are diametrically opposed to the alt-right’s. Cullors wants a spiritual foundation on which to challenge white, male supremacy; the pagans of the alt-right are looking for a spiritual basis on which to fortify it. But both are seeking religions rooted in racial ancestry and disengaging from Christianity—which, although profoundly implicated in America’s apartheid history, has provided some common vocabulary across the color line.

Critics say Black Lives Matter’s failure to employ Christian idiom undermines its ability to persuade white Americans. “The 1960s movement … had an innate respectability because our leaders often were heads of the black church,” Barbara Reynolds, a civil-rights activist and former journalist, wrote in The Washington Post. “Unfortunately, church and spirituality are not high priorities for Black Lives Matter, and the ethics of love, forgiveness and reconciliation that empowered black leaders such as King and Nelson Mandela in their successful quests to win over their oppressors are missing from this movement.” As evidence of “the power of the spiritual approach,” she cited the way family members of the parishioners murdered at Charleston’s Emanuel AME church forgave Dylann Roof for the crime, and thus helped persuade local politicians to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s Capitol grounds.

Black Lives Matter’s defenders respond that they are not interested in making themselves “respectable” to white America, whether by talking about Jesus or wearing ties. (Of course, not everyone in the civil-rights movement was interested in respectability either.) That’s understandable. Reformists focus on persuading and forgiving those in power. Revolutionaries don’t.

Black Lives Matter activists may be justified in spurning an insufficiently militant Church. But when you combine their post-Christian perspective with the post-Christian perspective growing inside the GOP, it’s easy to imagine American politics becoming more and more vicious.

In his book Twilight of the Elites, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes divides American politics between “institutionalists,” who believe in preserving and adapting the political and economic system, and “insurrectionists,” who believe it’s rotten to the core. The 2016 election represents an extraordinary shift in power from the former to the latter. The loss of manufacturing jobs has made Americans more insurrectionist. So have the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and a black president’s inability to stop the police from killing unarmed African Americans. And so has disengagement from organized religion.

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

Matt Yglesias: Uber's toxic company culture, explained

Updated by Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Mar 21, 2017, 8:00am EDT

Where technology and economics collide

Last fall, Uber hired Jeff Jones, Target’s former chief marketing officer, to serve as president of the company’s core ride-hailing business, with a mandate to improve relationships with Uber drivers and counteract the company’s increasingly negative public image. But Jones couldn’t solve those problems, and over the weekend he resigned in a way that will exacerbate them, telling Recode’s Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan that “the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber.”

Jones’s resignation is the latest blow in what’s been a brutal 2017 for the high-flying transportation startup, with problems ranging from a consumer boycott sparked by Uber’s participation in a Donald Trump advisory council to a Google lawsuit alleging that Uber’s key self-driving car technology was stolen, from serious sexual harassment allegations to the revelation of a secret program to foil local law enforcement.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick apologized publicly for problems at the company, saying he needs to “grow up.” But at 40 years old, the paper billionaire has been an adult for a long time, and experts say the steps Kalanick is taking to address the harassment issues are woefully inadequate.

Jones’s departure is fundamentally a sign that Uber isn’t really trying to change its ways. The company gained initial traction in the marketplace thanks to a pirate-ship mentality that viewed willingness to break the rules as a core competitive advantage. Having gained enormous revenue and visibility since it launched in 2010, it would probably have made sense to slow down, mature, and try to transform itself into something more like a boring utility company that maintains good relationships with drivers and regulatory stakeholders.

Uber’s view of the marketplace, though, is that the ride-hailing platform is just a stepping stone to a future network of ubiquitous self-driving cars. That’s encouraged the company to plow ahead with the pirate mentality, including perhaps stealing from Google, in an all-out race to win the future of transportation.

It’s far from clear that a rule-breaking company with a toxic public image at war with its own workforce can really pull this off without imploding in the process. The taxi market really was (and is) regulated with little concern for public safety or consumer interests. But Uber’s sense that the rules don’t — or shouldn’t — apply to it is leading to an escalating series of problems that could easily destroy the company.

Uber’s model is ride first, ask questions later

The classic taxicab market in the United States was plagued with regulations restricting the supply of cabs available to be hailed in a way that went far beyond basic safety concerns. All drivers of all cars require a license, and all vehicles on the road are heavily regulated objects that need to pass a battery of safety and environmental tests. Still, in all states obtaining the permission to drive a car is a fairly straightforward process. But in most cities, obtaining permission to not just drive a car but drive people around in exchange for money was cumbersome, requiring access to a limited supply of special permits.

This permit-rationing process generated extraordinary financial returns to the owners of the permits — who, in most cases, were not the actual drivers of the cabs — but also ensured that cabs were harder to find than they should have been.

In cities like New York and Washington, DC, that generally meant taxis were unavailable in lower-income and less central neighborhoods. In a more auto-oriented city like Los Angeles, it generally meant that the economics of the taxi industry was focused on exploiting tourists rather than providing a service to locals looking for an alternative to driving when heading out for a night of intoxicants.

Municipal regulation also often led to inefficiency. A Boston cab that took a passenger from South Station or Logan Airport to the MIT or Harvard campus in Cambridge could not, legally speaking, pick up a new passenger without crossing back to the other side of the Charles River first. This kind of regulatory fragmentation served no real public policy purpose, but as each local regulator’s politics would typically be dominated by the interests of incumbent license holders, it was very hard to get the rules changed.

The laws were, of course, always imperfectly enforced, and illicit “gypsy cabs” and out-of-jurisdiction pickups by real cabs were a longstanding fact of urban life.

Uber’s solution to the basic problem was to boldly plow ahead in a legal gray area, and then wage political battles from a position of strength with customers already in place. As Bradley Tusk, one of Uber’s main political impresarios, told Vanity Fair when recounting a fight in New York, “We mobilized our customers, over 100,000 of them, either e-mailed or tweeted at City Hall or the city council.”

Uber’s CEO is a true-believing libertarian

This business strategy fundamentally worked.

Once Uber existed, most consumers in most cities liked it, and most political authorities gave way to the basic idea that more ride availability was going to make life better for most people. But while it’s certainly possible to believe that the taxi market was excessively regulated without believing that regulation is, in general, illegitimate (the cab market has long been deregulated in Sweden, for example), Kalanick appears to be a true believer in smashing the state.

Years ago, he used the cover image of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar and told the Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis that his company’s regulatory issues bore an “uncanny resemblance” to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Still, in a practical sense, Uber operates overwhelmingly in big, dense liberal cities and needs political cooperation from Democratic Party elected officials. To that end, Uber has always sought political connections with blue-state politicians (Tusk was a former communications director to Chuck Schumer and top aide to Michael Bloomberg) who can help them in concrete ways that Republicans generally can’t. But Kalanick and his inner circle, according to people familiar with the situation, are largely pretty hardcore right-wingers who understand a pragmatic need to go along and get along with progressive values without really believing in them.

Indeed, as Vox’s Tim Lee has written, Uber has consistently applied the “it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” to a huge range of conduct that has nothing to do with rent-seeking taxi regulation:

[W]hen Uber accepted a massive $3.5 billion cash infusion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, I noted the irony of Uber accepting cash from a government that doesn’t allow women to drive cars and that once punished a rape victim for being alone with a male nonrelative. And Uber didn’t just take Saudi Arabia’s cash; it also gave the theocratic regime a seat on its board.

Over the years, Uber has allegedly spied on its own customers, threatened to dig up dirt on journalists, and downplayed sexual assault concerns.

In many of these cases, Uber has backpedaled in the wake of a public backlash. Kalanick, for example, tweeted out an apology in the wake of his executive’s comments about journalists. But often, Uber only seems to take this kind of step after becoming the target of a social media firestorm.

While this attitude was helpful in breaking through initial taxi cartel rules, applying the principle to every situation has enmeshed the company in an endless series of controversies that’s unusual for a consumer-facing company.

Uber wants to make drivers obsolete

All corporate management structures enter into some degree of conflict with their employees. At the same time, a company’s workers are often its best allies in existential regulatory battles. Coal miners are a stronger face of public opposition to environmental regulation than coal company CEOs or electrical utility shareholders. And workers are not only more sympathetic than executives but also more numerous and geographically dispersed.

A natural step in the maturation process for a company like Uber, which faces a significant and dispersed regulatory challenge, would be to try to recruit drivers as allies for the basic proposition that the service is safe and useful.

Instead, Uber has resisted the notion that its drivers are employees at all, and only under threat of litigation came to a resolution of the basic question of how the workforce related to the company. The settlement, in the end, was a broadly reasonable compromise that allowed Uber to maintain the flexibility it wanted while addressing key driver grievances and even moving toward the creation of a formal group to represent the interests of Uber drivers. But this was dragged out of the company as a concession, not put forward proactively as a workforce model.

The key factor here is that to sell investors on Uber’s sky-high valuation and lack of proven profits, the company has very openly espoused a vision of replacing all drivers with autonomous vehicles. The company maintains an aggressive research division based in Pittsburgh that’s working on self-driving technology, and at corporate headquarters it’s taken for granted that the existing hailing business is just a stool to be kicked aside soon enough in favor of the robotic future.

That blocks the otherwise natural turn toward enlisting the broad mass of Uber drivers as political and public relations allies. There are other drawbacks too. Pairing an avowed indifference to a large share of the workforce with a corporate culture that valorizes rule breaking likely encourages misogynistic behavior at the home office, and almost certainly impedes efforts to create a more rule-bound, publicly appealing corporate culture.

Hence the recruitment of Jones from the outside to try to improve things, and his rapid departure as it becomes clear that problems are too deeply rooted from him to change them.

Who wants a fleet of rule-breaking self-driving taxis?

Of course, if the bet on self-driving technology pans out, this could all be irrelevant.

A fleet of cheaply operated fully autonomous taxis would be a massive game changer for the company’s basic economics. And since Uber already owns the relationship with a mass of customers, it would be very difficult to dislodge them from a hypothetical position of leadership in the autonomous vehicle game.

But the bet on an unproven, nonexistent technology in a space where Uber does not have an obvious advantage over companies that are more distinguished either in mapping and artificial intelligence (like Google) or in actually making cars (like, well, car companies) is very much a shot in the dark. And it’s worth asking whether Uber’s reputation for lawlessness could be a considerable impediment.

After all, the core of Uber’s original case for brushing aside taxi licensing regulations was that this was a fundamentally silly area of government intervention into the economy. All of Uber’s drivers had driver’s licenses, and their cars were all legal to drive. The basic regulatory issue was whether legal drivers piloting legal cars should be allowed to let someone ride in the back seat in exchange for money.

Self-driving car technology, by contrast, poses obvious public safety hazards. Like any car, if self-driving cars malfunction, people will die. And there is a reason there’s no such thing as an automaker that has deliberately courted a public image as defiant of the law or the basic legitimacy of the regulatory state — nobody would buy a car they were worried didn’t meet basic safety standards. Recalls at General Motors a few years back cost the company a small fortune, and led to high-profile congressional investigations. It’s a much higher-stakes game than taxi regulation.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about what rules are genuinely necessary for safety’s sake (the public doesn’t realize it, but cars considered safe in Europe generally wouldn’t be allowed on the road in North America, and vice versa), and there is a lot of low-key lobbying around the margins, but all the players in this industry accept that there will be rules and the rules should be followed.

Nothing about Uber’s approach to taxi regulation, labor law, sexual harassment, public relations, or much of anything else, though, suggests the kind of cautious attitude that would tend to give a person — or a city council member, or a state Department of Transportation official — confidence in the safety of Uber’s robot cars. Jones’s words, which characterized a culture that’s so badly broken it took the person brought in to fix it just six months to decide that he couldn’t, do not in any way suggest a company you’d want to trust on life-or-death matters.

Uber has given life to the slogan “move fast and break things” in a way that Facebook, which coined it, never did. It was a perfect pitch for an early venture capital fundraising round, but it’s a frankly terrible motto for a company that aspires to play a critical infrastructure role in piloting fast-moving metal objects down the street.

Paul Ryan Is Trying to Save Himself

March 23, 2017 12:32 PM EST
By Jonathan Bernstein

As I write this, House Republicans and President Donald Trump are scrambling around to find some health care bill, any bill, that they can call "repeal and replace" and pass as scheduled on the House floor on Thursday.

Obamacare

What's really going on? Speaker Paul Ryan, 47, is desperately trying to avoid blame for the top Republican agenda item failing. And he's hooked a foolish, inexperienced president to go all-in with him.

The basic problem is that Republicans have spent years building up expectations for repealing Obamacare without coming up with two crucial parts of their solution: An alternative that they agree on, and the votes in the Senate to impose whatever they want-- if they could agree on what they want. 


(Parenthetical footnote:
To be specific: Senate passage requires defeating a filibuster, which takes 60 votes, or using the reconciliation procedure, which allows the 52 Republicans to win but can only be used for some of the things they want to do.
End of footnote)

Today, the problem boils down to a simple numbers game in the House. With no Democrats voting to scrap Obamacare, Republicans can only afford to lose 22 of their own votes. And while most mainstream conservatives are apparently willing to go along with whatever Ryan produces, satisfying the radical conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus threatens to lose too many votes from relatively moderate conservatives, and vice versa. As of now, they're losing votes from both sides.

It doesn't help that the bill that Ryan pushed through committee polls very badly. Or that the new president pushing the bill publicly is unpopular. Or that members of Congress probably don't trust that president.

And it surely doesn't help that the bill appears doomed in the Senate, despite Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's pledge to rush whatever comes out of the House straight to the Senate floor (perhaps with changes drafted by him), avoiding the committee process. That raises the possibility that individual House Republicans could wind up with a double whammy -- blamed by their constituents for failing to repeal and replace Obamacare, but also hit with attack ads because they will have voted against the many popular provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

No wonder New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested that whatever winds up in the bill, Republicans just oppose it.

So why is the bill still moving forward towards a vote as early as Thursday night, even though there's no final version of the bill and even though there's no sign that anyone actually likes it?

As far as I can tell, it's because Ryan and the rest of the Republican leadership has a strong interest in ducking blame. Conservative activists, fueled by conservative media, are going to be furious if a unified Republican government can't manage to kill off Obamacare. And they're going to find scapegoats. If a bill never even comes up for a vote in the House, Ryan will be the most obvious target to choose.

If, however, the bill dies in the Senate, then partisans might be deflected towards blaming Democrats for filibustering, or at least (from Ryan's perspective) blaming McConnell for the failure. Or the Republican Senators who would vote against it. Anyone but him.

Even if the bill winds up failing on the House floor, it's possible Ryan could pin the blame on Republicans who voted against it, although that's a tricky one given that they could turn against him -- and that he would be forcing every House Republican to take a tough vote. That's because key Republican groups are splitting for (Chamber of Commerce) and against (Heritage, Club for Growth), which won't encourage House Republicans to have warm and cuddly thoughts about their Speaker.

(Will Trump, who is still popular among Republicans, save Ryan? Perhaps -- but it's also entirely possible that Trump, despite spending March trying to pass the bill, could turn around and claim he had always opposed the "Congress" bill and predicted it would fail, while touting his own soon-to-be-unveiled terrific bill that gives everyone perfect coverage at lower prices).

Whatever happens, the last few weeks have been strong evidence that Ryan has utterly failed to fix the dysfunction in the House Republican conference that plagued Speaker John Boehner. But perhaps Ryan can at least prevent himself from becoming Conservative Enemy #1. At least, that seems to be what he's trying to do.

   

The Wall Street Journal editorial: A President's Credibility

Trump's falsehoods are eroding public trust, at home and abroad.

March 21, 2017 7:28 p.m. ET

If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We're not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

The latest example is Mr. Trump's refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had "found out that [Barack] Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory" on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.

Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer—who doesn't deserve this treatment—was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.

That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.

The wiretap tweet is also costing Mr. Trump politically as he hands his opponents a sword. Mr. Trump has a legitimate question about why the U.S. was listening to his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and who leaked news of his meeting with the Russian ambassador. But that question never gets a hearing because the near-daily repudiation of his false tweet is a bigger media story.

FBI director James Comey also took revenge on Monday by joining the queue of those saying the bureau has no evidence to back up the wiretap tweet. Mr. Comey even took the unusual step of confirming that the FBI is investigating ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia.

Mr. Comey said he could make such a public admission only in "unusual circumstances," but why now? Could the wiretap tweet have made Mr. Comey angry because it implied the FBI was involved in illegal surveillance? Mr. Trump blundered in keeping Mr. Comey in the job after the election, but now the President can't fire the man leading an investigation into his campaign even if he wants to.

All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he's President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.

This week should be dominated by the smooth political sailing for Mr. Trump's Supreme Court nominee and the progress of health-care reform on Capitol Hill. These are historic events, and success will show he can deliver on his promises. But instead the week has been dominated by the news that he was repudiated by his own FBI director.

Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump's approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn't show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he's a fake President.

Appeared in the Mar. 22, 2017, print edition.

Foods That Increase Your Sperm Count (Ask Men)

Foods That Increase Your Sperm Count

Add These 10 Foods To Your Diet To Give Your Swimmers More Strength

When it comes to baby-making, there’s more to be concerned about than sperm count. There’s also motility and the shape of your sperm. But first you want to make sure your ranks (read: balls) are full of soldiers. Consider that as the baseline for your reproductive abilities.

The normal sperm count ranges from 15 million to more than 200 million sperm per milliliter of semen. Yes, that’s a lot of, um, fluid. And to be considered to have a low count, you would need to have less than 15 million or fewer than 39 million sperm total per ejaculate. As we know, you chances of getting Bae preggo decreases as your sperm count decreases.

RELATED: The Ultimate Guide To Understanding Testosterone

To be clear, having a low sperm count does not mean you are infertile. Plenty of men father children and have lower-than-normal sperm densities. In fact, Dr. Seth Cohen, assistant professor of Urology and OBGYN at NYU Langone Medical Center, says that unless you’re trying (and failing) to father a child right now, there’s no reason to start obsessing about your count.

“It actually causes more harm than good to know, if you’re just dating,” Dr. Cohen said while explaining that some men might start trying to fix a problem where no real problem exists. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start doing the everyday things that promote healthy sperm and a healthy sperm count.

And that starts with eating right.

“The most important thing a guy can do is to treat your body like a temple,” Dr. Cohen said. “Would you smoke in a temple?” No, you probably wouldn’t. You want to simply put things in your body that help you stay healthy.”

According to Dr. Cohen, there’s no research that says that one particular diet is going to multiply your swimmers or make you more fertile than another. “Eating clean is never a bad thing,” he said. “If you’re eating junky processed foods, it’s not going to be good for your body and it’s not going to be good for your sperm.”

Fine. There’s no food that going to turn your boys into secret egg-fertilizing super agents. And there are some things you can’t control. Varicoceles are a common cause of low sperm production. A varicocele is an enlargement of the veins within the scrotum and must be repaired with surgery. A history of cancer, increased estrogen or hormonal imbalances are other reasons. But there are things you can start doing now to help your case and that starts with your diet.

So if you want to increase your numbers and get your boys moving, start with adding these 10 foods to your diet.

10. Oysters

Oysters

You might know these to be an aphrodisiac (even if they really might not be) that gets the party started. But it’s much more than that. Oysters are loaded with zinc, which help increase sperm production and sperm potency and testosterone, which are all clutch when creating tiny humans inside of your lady’s belly. Zinc deficiency has been linked to impotence and erectile dysfunction so an increase could provide an extra age. For the record, you should think about sharing, as oysters also help regulate libido in both men and women. Oysters are also high in protein, vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin B12, iron, copper and selenium.

9. Eggs

Eggs

You’re probably eating eggs anyway, especially if you’re trying to build lean muscle, which – obviously -- is another step toward getting to the promised land of baby-making. Eggs aren’t just rich in protein but also in vitamin E, which helps keep testicular tissue from degenerating. Including eggs in your diet will help boost sperm count and fertility. Try boiling your eggs though. Prepping them this way helps make nutrients, like amino acids, easier to absorb.

Even if you’re a egg whites kind of person, you’re still getting a rich source of vitamin D, B6, B12, iron, copper and other sperm-boosting properties like zinc.

8. Tomatoes

Tomatoes

The bright red color of tomatoes is good for more than adding some nice color to your plate. The color comes from lycopene, which also boosts fertility. In fact, studies show lycopene can boost sperm count up to 70 percent. It also increases your swimmers’ speed and can reduce the number of sperm abnormalities. Studies have also shown lycopene to reduce prostate diseases as well as prostate cancer.

7. Dark Chocolate

Dark Chocolate

You know that saying, “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice?” Well, same is true for dark chocolate and your, err, man juice. Dark chocolate has proven to help increase the volume of your ejaculate and jack up your sperm count and motility (strength of your swimmers). It’s not just good for your little guys either. Dark chocolate can boost heart health and lower risk of heart disease. Obviously, this candy you want to have in moderation but note that the cocoa is full of copper, and have plenty of zinc selenium, fiber, and potassium.

6. Salmon

Salmon

Hello there Omega-3 fatty acid and thank you for your contribution. Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an Omega-3 fatty acid, is an essential building block for sperm. Omega-3 fatty acid is essential to create the arch that turns an immature sperm cell into a full-fledged pointy-header swimmer with an extra long tail, according to a 2012 study at the University of Illinois. Normal sperm cells have an arc-like structure called acrosome and without DHA that structure doesn’t form which makes the sperm cell useless.

If that’s not enough, salmon is also an excellent source of protein (hello, muscles), potassium and vitamin B.

5. Blueberries

Blueberries

Blueberries – and other berries like raspberries, strawberries and blackberries for that matter – are stocked with vitamin C, which is critical for motility and sperm health. Vitamin C also creates key amino acids that are required to produce sperm. Consider berries the one of the chief protectors of your sperm count.

Additionally, blueberries are a great source of fiber, help lower cholesterol and taste pretty damn good in a smoothie.

4. Garlic

Garlic

OK, so garlic may not help you get laid. You’ll have to grab a handful of breath mints first. But once you’re already doing the deed, just know that this superfood is jammed with selenium and vitamin B6, which help with production of healthy sperm and improves blood flow to your testicles. Garlic also contains nitric oxide synthase, which you can go ahead and thank for your healthy erection.

3. Nuts

Nuts

 “Pumpkin seeds are my favorite food for men with infertility,” Paduch says.

Yes, nuts help your nuts. Now that we’ve addressed that let’s get to the why. Nuts like almond and walnuts contain L-Arginine, which aids in sperm production. Not just that, nuts have protein, omega-3 fatty acids, zinc and vitamin E -- agents of pumping up your sperm count and sperm health. The protein contained in nuts are also a great source of energy and if you’re trying to make a baby, you’re going to need it.

2. Beef

Beef

It’s what’s for dinner — especially if you are vying to put a bun in her oven. L-carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat, is great for sperm production and quality, Paduch says. In one European Academy of Andrology study, men whose diets were supplemented with the nutrient significantly increased their sperm concentration and motility. What’s more, the greatest increase was seen in men who had poor baseline sperm levels.

Nutritional info per 100 grams

Calories: 250

Carbs: 71g

Fat: 15g

Protein: 26g

Other notable nutrients (percentage of daily recommended intake):

Vitamin B6: 20%

Vitamin B12: 82%

1. Water

Water

It’s essential for your life and for creating a new one. Whether you want to lose weight, get more lean, improve your immune system or cure your dry mouth, water is the answer. Staying hydrated also increases the volume of sperm you produce so there’s a better chance your little guy can succeed in his egg hunting quest.