Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Sarah Sanders is at her worst at a strange time — when she’s talking about respect for women, by Margaret Sullivan

Sarah Sanders is at her worst at a strange time — when she’s talking about respect for women

By Margaret Sullivan

(Reuters)

5-6 minutes

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Feb. 12 that President Trump "hopes for the best for all American citizens."

She dripped disdain.
She oozed contempt.
“If you were paying attention to what I just read to you . . .” she huffed, like an exasperated teacher reprimanding a classroom troublemaker.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders was responding — though not really — to a reporter’s question that she claimed to have answered multiple times already.
Watching the press secretary at Monday’s briefing, the words that came to mind were these: A new low.
Yes, a new rock bottom from the podium at the Trump White House press briefing.
And that is really saying something, given the lying-from-day-one reign of Sean Spicer, along with Sanders’s own fulsome history of dissembling, and the 10-day flameout of Anthony Scaramucci last summer.
But she did it. Time after time Monday, Sanders stuck to her pallid script, repeating without elaboration the words she said the president had told her to say, expressing his supposed support for domestic violence victims, although just days before he seemed much more sympathetic to those accused of abuse, specifically his deposed aide Rob Porter.
Support for Porter could be expressed in Trump’s own words, colorfully and directly spoken and tweeted. Support for abused women? Robotically, through Sanders.
“The president supports victims of domestic violence and believes everyone should be treated fairly and with due process,” was about all she could muster, no matter how the question was phrased. (To make matters worse, by Tuesday morning, Sanders’s sketchy depiction of the timeline on how the White House had dealt with the Porter allegations was contradicted by FBI Director Christopher Wray at a congressional hearing.)
Sanders’s Monday performance brought to mind a similar instance from mid-December: Trump had tweeted about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), calling her “a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”
When asked in the briefing whether that didn’t sound an awful lot like sexual innuendo, Sanders turned the tables, telling the reporter, “Your mind is in the gutter.”
You might think that as one of the most visible women in the Trump administration, Sanders would bring some credibility — maybe even sympathy — to bear on subjects related to respect for women.
In fact, it seems to bring out the worst in her.
For Jay Rosen, New York University journalism professor, this is another reason to “send the interns.” The press briefings are so devoid of substance, so predictably filled with lies, that they aren’t a valid use of top reporters’ time.
Monday’s performance once again fulfilled what he tweeted was the “brand promise” of the Trump administration when dealing with the press: “Watch: we will put these people down for you.”
The briefing room, as he sees it, is nothing more than a theater for the fulfillment of that promise: “The more the press does the job [it] has traditionally done, the better the put-down script becomes.”
To state the obvious: Holding powerful people and institutions accountable is the chief role of journalism in this country, and a crucial one.
Even the American citizens who are most distrustful and critical of the press want journalists to carry out this function, according to every public opinion poll.
White House press briefings have never been the best place for that. They have always been spin chambers, but have served a limited purpose.
Now, they may be something much worse.
With her dismissive gestures, her curled-lip sneers, her ready insults and guilt-free lies, Sanders is a conduit — a tool — for Trump’s own abusive relationship with journalists.
Does it really make sense to keep coming back for more?

For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan

Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post’s media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

Follow @sulliview

Don't expect the women who enable Trump to be better than the men By Jennifer Rubin

Don't expect the women who enable Trump to be better than the men

By Jennifer Rubin

5-6 minutes

Colbie Holderness, the first wife of disgraced ex-White House staff secretary Rob Porter, takes presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway to task for suggesting that “strong” women such as Hope Hicks have nothing to fear from abusive spouses. “Being strong — with excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts — does not inoculate a person against abuse,” she explains. “It doesn’t prevent her from entering into a relationship with an abuser. Abuse often doesn’t manifest itself early on — only later, when you’re in deep and behind closed doors. The really ugly side of Rob’s abuse only came out after we married, following three years of dating.”

She concludes:

Conway’s statements were made as she was trying to address the good wishes that President Trump sent to Rob, along with his tweets seeming to call into question the allegations and the #MeToo movement overall. Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders again declined to say whether the president believes [Jennifer] Willoughby and me. While I cannot say I am surprised, I expected a woman to do better. But Conway and I definitely agree on one thing she said during that interview: “There’s a stigma and a silence surrounding all these issues. … Those who are in a position to do something about it ought to.”

Her hope that women would be better than that may be well-founded in the aggregate. Trump is hemorrhaging support from women, both college- and non-college-educated ones. However, in the particular case of those women — Conway, Sanders, Concerned Women for America, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Fox News female hosts — who work for, rationalize and sacrifice integrity to defend the indefensible, we should expect them to be just as clueless, disingenuous and morally vacant as the men who have chosen to tie themselves to Trump’s mast.
This smacks of the same thinking that supposes that Ivanka Trump will defy her father, speak up on behalf of those he smears and rebuke racism and xenophobia. Surely we’ve learned by now that whatever she claims to say privately to Trump, she’s all-in with his defense. She isn’t “better” than her brothers or male advisers to the president; in fact, she’s less likely to be critical because she has so much to lose by breaking with her father and his financial empire.
The same is true of Trump’s Jewish advisers. We realize in retrospect that we should not have expected Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and senior adviser Gary Cohn to behave any more admirably in the context of Trump’s responses to Charlottesville neo-Nazis than Trump’s non-Jewish advisers. Sure, as a group American Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic and anti-Trump, but if you’ve gone to work for a man who called Mexican immigrants murderers, bragged about sexually assaulting women, sought to demonize an entire religion and ridiculed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being a POW during the Vietnam War, you probably don’t place social justice and Torah-based values at the top of your concerns. You have rejected or been oblivious to a slew of principles in order to go work for him in the first place.
In short, too much time has been wasted on the soft bigotry of high expectations for Trump’s Jewish, female and non-white enablers. It is not just men or evangelicals or whites who have the capacity for self-delusion, a yen for power, a capacity for intellectual corruption or a dearth of compassion. Just as there are good, decent and courageous evangelicals who stand up to Trump, there are deplorable Jews, women and minorities who will defend the indefensible, give a wink to the alt-right and tell themselves it’s all worthwhile because of corporate tax reform or because they hate Democrats or “But Gorsuch!”
It’s human nature to think that those from the same groups whom Trump insults and abuses would identify with the victims, or that members of any minority group with a history of persecution would feel the sting of bigotry and spot the dangers of destroying democratic norms. And in general, that is true. But lest we think all women, Jews and minorities are angels, one need only look at the cringe-worthy, daily performances of press secretary Sanders, the toadyism of Mnuchin and the presence of Ben Carson in Trump’s Cabinet. What we should expect is that anyone who has sacrificed principle, integrity and humanity to defend this president will keep on defending him, no matter how horrendous his rhetoric and his actions.

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.

Trump won’t stop trying to keep America white by Dana Milbank

Trump won’t stop trying to keep America white

https://www.facebook.com/danamilbank

6-7 minutes

President Trump. (Jabin Botsford/Washington, D.C.)

The efforts by President Trump to keep America white are getting increasingly dark.
Make no mistake: What’s happening on Capitol Hill this week, at Trump’s behest, is nothing other than an attempt by Republicans to slow the inexorable march toward that point at midcentury when the United States becomes a majority-minority nation.
In the long run, they are merely putting a finger in the dike. But in the short term, the Trump-backed immigration proposal, combined with other recent moves by the administration and its allies — support for voter suppression, gerrymandering and various other schemes to disenfranchise minority voters — could extend the white hegemony that brought Trump to power and sustains Republicans.
For ages, Republicans said that their beef was with illegal immigrants and that legal immigrants should be embraced and welcomed. No longer. In the immigration fight on the Hill, there is broad bipartisan consensus to legalize the “dreamers” — illegal immigrants brought here as children — and to fortify border security. The dispute is really about the Trump proposal to rein in legal immigration by undoing the family-based approach, in which immigrants petition to bring over immediate family, that has always been at the heart of U.S. immigration.
Though details aren’t yet known, estimates are that the legislation would cut legal immigration, currently 1.1 million per year, by 300,000 to 500,000 annually. A previous version of the “chain migration” proposal by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) would have cut legal immigration by half a million a year, by their own account.
Essentially, Trump and the Republicans are threatening to make nearly 700,000 dreamers subject to deportation unless Democrats agree to close the door to tens of millions of future legal immigrants.
This won’t stop the loss of a white majority; the youthful Hispanic population already here, with its higher fertility rate, makes that inevitable. “It’s almost impossible to become whiter as a country,” the Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey tells me. “It’s like a demographic tsunami. There aren’t enough people in Norway to migrate here.”
But the GOP might delay by a few years the point at which the United States becomes majority-minority, now expected in 2044. Minorities vote at lower rates than whites (52.7 percent in 2016 vs. 65.3 percent for whites), so, if Republicans can sustain that disparity, the white voting majority that the party relies on could last several years beyond 2044.
Republicans may be acting out of self- interest rather than any racial animus. But if one were to devise a diabolical plan to suppress nonwhite votes, it would look much like what they are doing.
The administration asked to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census, which will determine the apportionment of House seats. This would suppress census participation among the 7 percent of residents who are not citizens — even those here legally — thus causing Latinos to be undercounted.
The administration argued last month before the Supreme Court in favor of an Ohio practice of purging voters from registration rolls if they fail to vote over two federal election cycles. Because of minority voters’ lower participation rates, they would be purged from the rolls in higher numbers.
The administration has given tacit support to other voter-suppression efforts in the states, in the form of voter ID laws and restrictions on early voting. Trump nominated, and the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved, a district court nominee, Thomas Farr, who helped draft and defend the most egregious voter-suppression and gerrymandering laws in the country. Farr unsuccessfully argued for North Carolina’s voter ID law, which was struck down by an appellate court because it targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”
The Republican National Committee, which is under Trump’s authority, also weighed in on a current Supreme Court case in favor of political gerrymandering, often used to dilute minority votes.
Trump’s voter-fraud commission, based on the fallacy that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, has collapsed, but not before an ugly attempt at stigmatizing Latinos. As The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu and John Wagner reported, documents show that a commission representative asked for Texas voter records and requested a “Hispanic surname flag notation.”
Trump himself has continued to stir up fears, often based on falsehoods, of a crime wave caused by illegal immigrants, and he has requested billions of dollars to step up deportations. (At the same time, he has proposed a 5 percent cut to federal education funding, much of it for programs benefiting the urban poor, disproportionately minorities.)
This is, of course, what you would expect from an administration whose chief law enforcement official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, just hailed “the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” This phrase — an ad lib while reading from a prepared text — would be easier to excuse as an innocent reference to common law if Sessions didn’t carry so much racial baggage, and if his boss hadn’t just referred to “shithole” African countries.
Republicans can’t keep America white, but they can stop sullying themselves in the attempt.
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The foreign policy questions that president Trump does not understand by Dan Drezner

By Daniel W. Drezner
February 13 at 8:15 AM

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

President Trump talks with White House communications director Hope Hicks during an event at the White House in October. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In intellectual life, “I don’t understand” can be the scariest and most powerful words one can utter.

When one is surrounded by smart people, it is embarrassing to profess ignorance. Saying you don’t know something can be seen as a sign of weakness in a milieu where knowledge is the most important tool. When confronted with the limits of their understanding, some people will try to bluff their way through. As I noted in “The Ideas Industry,” sheer confidence can be a potent tool in debate. This is particularly true for professors terrified of displaying the limits of their knowledge to students. They may try to bluff their way through a gap in knowledge. From this fear, profs start doing things like insisting that Australia is only a continent and not a country.

The best profs and the sharpest minds are also the most unafraid to profess what puzzles them. When certain colleagues say, “I’m confused” in a seminar, that is a bad omen for the presenter. If they profess confusion, it is not because they are stupid. It is because they are very smart and the speaker has said something that does not make sense. It could be a logical contradiction, a hidden assumption or an unspoken shibboleth. The point is, in the academy, the smartest people in the room are also the ones most likely to profess ignorance.

Is this true in politics as well?

Ignorance comes up an awful lot in conversations about president Trump. Consider the story by my Post colleagues Carol Leonnig, Shane Harris and Greg Jaffe about whether President Trump reads the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB). The official pushback was that Trump’s ignorance was actually an advantage, because it allows him to ask the tough questions:

“The president asks hard questions,” [CIA Director Mike Pompeo] said in public remarks last month. “He’s deeply engaged. We’ll have a rambunctious back-and-forth, all aimed at making sure we’re delivering him the truth as best we understand it.”

Trump’s admirers say he has a unique ability to cut through conventional foreign policy wisdom and ask questions that others have long taken for granted. “Why are we even in Somalia?” or “Why can’t I just pull out of Afghanistan?” he will ask, according to officials.

The president asks “edge” questions, said one senior administration official, meaning that he pushes his staff to question long-held assumptions about U.S. interests in the world.

Clearly, Trump is unafraid to ask the basic existential questions on foreign policy. Is that a trait that leads to better policymaking? There is a strong case for newcomers to the executive branch to ask tough and basic questions, like “Why can’t I just pull out of Afghanistan?” Changes in administration are precisely the moment when foreign policy assumptions must be challenged to see if they are living truth or dead dogma.

The thing is, for the provocative question to work, the questioner needs to have enough information to interrogate the answers that are proffered. As Elizabeth Saunders argued last month in Foreign Affairs, “Experienced leaders provide better oversight of foreign policy decision-making because they are more likely to ask hard questions, spot poor planning, or recognize unrealistic proposals.”

The guy who does not read the PDB most definitely does not possess the information or expertise to challenge shibboleths. Trump might be right to question the wisdom of protracted engagement in Afghanistan, but his inventory of ignorant foreign policy beliefs is so massive that it is easy to dismiss him even if he is onto something. This is a man who believed it was possible to “take the oil” in Iraq and that NATO functioned like a dues-paying society with other countries in arrears. He believed Xi Jinping’s history of Sino-Korean relations because he doesn’t know any better. He did not comprehend the foreign policy ramifications of his Jerusalem decision. Trump does not know what he does not know.

Trump’s factual and historical ignorance means that even when he asks the good question, a skilled operator can deflect the challenge. Consider the debate over Afghanistan strategy last summer. As Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan reported in the Post, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had a ready answer to Trump’s tough question:

Last summer, Trump was weighing plans to send more soldiers to Afghanistan and was contemplating the military’s request for more-aggressive measures to target Islamic State affiliates in North Africa. In a meeting with his top national security aides, the president grew frustrated.

“You guys want me to send troops everywhere,” Trump said, according to officials in the Situation Room meeting. “What’s the justification?”

“Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,” Mattis replied….

It was Mattis who made the argument that would, for the moment at least, sway Trump to embrace the status quo — which has held for the past two presidents.

“Unfortunately, sir, you have no choice,” Mattis told Trump, according to officials. “You will be a wartime president.”

If we’re being honest, Mattis did not give a great answer. But it was good enough to deflect Trump. As I noted last year, “[Trump] lacks the gravitas and expertise to countermand his military advisers, even when his instincts push him in that direction. Trump also lacks any civilian staffers with the knowledge and wherewithal to put an unconventional solution onto the table.”

This problem has only gotten worse since the summer. As the Rob Porter saga has made abundantly clear, Trump has no reservoir of loyal experts to bring into the administration. The White House’s response has been to bring in no experts. This empowers the remaining officials even more. And as Emma Ashford noted in The National Interest:

[Trump has not] been able to recruit those who criticize the liberal international consensus — his views on trade and immigration, and his repugnant statements and personal views, have alienated even those who might be willing or happy to attempt to reshape U.S. foreign policy in any other administration. Instead, Trump has been forced to rely on a mixture of unqualified individuals and former military officers. Many other offices remain unfilled.

Trump’s problem is not that he always asks the wrong questions. In some instances, he is not. The problem is that he lacks the information to properly assess the answers he gets.

Trump is not the smart professor playing dumb. He is the lazy student trying to bluff his way through the presidency as a very stable genius. And everyone, including his own Cabinet, knows that he is bluffing.

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Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything. Follow @dandrezner

The Oval Office deserves better than Trump by Michael Gerson

The Oval Office deserves better than Trump

President Trump in the Oval Office. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

By Michael Gerson Opinion writer February 12 at 7:47 PM Email the author

Among the more revealing moments in the ongoing White House nervous breakdown came in Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s initial defense of staff secretary Rob Porter. As accusations of domestic abuse against Porter became public, Kelly pronounced him a man of “true integrity and honor.”

I have never been in the military and have great respect for Kelly’s distinguished service. But I suspect that, for most people in uniform, this is not what they mean by “honor.”
I did, like the rest of the incoming White House senior staff in 2001, take the oath of office in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. The moment, at least for me, was less joyful than sobering. History hangs heavy in that place, where Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy had lain in repose and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral service was held. Where Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The setting, the moment and the words — “I do solemnly swear . . .” — evoked a mix of awe, pride and fear of being unequal to the honor.
This experience as a staffer, I suspect, helps explain the intensity of my reaction to Donald Trump. The institution of the presidency does not require perfect men or women. But by even the most generous standards, Trump is a figure of monumental smallness. He describes himself in terms that would have embarrassed King Louis XIV. He conducts himself with the decorum of a spoiled and nasty child — lashing out at enemies, elevating lackeys, treating professionals at the FBI or CIA like minions, blurting out conspiracy theories and obvious lies. He regularly brings the presidency and the country into disrepute. And the White House staff — leaky, incompetent, embittered, backbiting — has generally followed his example.
Most Americans probably don’t share this sense that Trump is defiling something noble. For many Trump critics, his misogyny, nativism and religious prejudice are more urgent indictments. For many Trump supporters, the whole idea of nobility in politics is a sham. They can point to Richard Nixon oozing anti-Semitism on the secret tapes, or Bill Clinton having a dalliance in the private hallway near the Oval Office. In this view, political honor is an illusion, dignity is softness, and reverence is pretense. Trump, in refreshing contrast, acts and talks like someone from the real world.
I would dispute the assumption that racism and verbal cruelty are characteristic of ordinary Americans. But in this case, cynicism is also a form of historical blindness. American presidents have often risen to extraordinary moral leadership. Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt pushing a reluctant country toward support for Britain, with the future of liberty in the balance. Or Dwight Eisenhower sending in the 101st Airborne to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. Or Ronald Reagan insisting that the Cold War could be won, because the yoke of oppression does not fit human shoulders.
These leaders believed that America has some special destiny in the world. And they conducted themselves in a manner consistent with that calling.
Presidents are not, in the end, judged primarily by the tax cuts they pass. They are measured by the standards JFK set out in his farewell to the Massachusetts legislature in 1961: “Were we truly men of courage . . . were we truly men of judgment . . . were we truly men of integrity . . . were we truly men of dedication?”
For some presidents, these virtues were a guiding passion; for others a political facade. This president has abandoned even lip service to these ideals, conducting himself like the chief executive of a shady casino company seeking to build his fortune and destroy his competition. Which is exactly what Trump has always been.
By his conduct, the president (metaphorically, as far as I know) puts his muddy boots up on the Resolute desk and spray paints graffiti on the Roosevelt Room wall. He is vandalizing the one house he cannot buy or own.
This is not mere mysticism. Most important institutions are protected and empowered by esteem. To the cynic, a judge is an average woman in a robe; a general is a poser in a costume; a priest is a balding man with sweat staining his armpits. But however accurate these depictions, they are not true. Because of the institutions they serve, these people represent the rule of law, the triumph of duty, the presence of God.
The institution of the presidency will survive Trump, as it has other mediocrities. But the office deserves an occupant of true integrity and honor.
Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .

Trump hates deficits — unless they help rich people by Catherine Rampell

Trump hates deficits — unless they help rich people

President Trump. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

By Catherine Rampell Opinion writer February 12 at 7:48 PM Email the author

When are deficits good?

When they fund tax cuts for donors and rich people.
When are deficits “dangerous”?
When they fund health care for poor people and children, training for workers, and infrastructure and other long-term investments in our economy.
That is the worldview of late of the Trump administration, based on the budget proposal it released Monday and recent comments from its chief budget honcho, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney (who also happens to be working part-time dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).
On “Fox News Sunday,” Mulvaney touted the virtues of the newly passed Republican tax cuts, which punched a $1.5 trillion-size hole in the budget over the coming decade. This is a plutocratic law that primarily benefits the wealthiest Americans (and foreigners, for that matter), with more than 80 percent of tax cuts going to the top 1 percent by 2027, according to the Tax Policy Center.
It’s also incredibly ill-timed, given that it amounts to a major fiscal stimulus when the economy is doing well. Normally, you pass a stimulus when the economy is underperforming — as was the case back in 2009, when Mulvaney railed against President Barack Obama’s stimulus proposals.
Of course, Mulvaney had a different take.
“This is not a fiscal stimulus,” Mulvaney insisted on Fox. “It’s not a sugar high. It’s not the same thing as what President Obama did.”
“If we can keep the economy humming and generate more money for you and me and for everybody else,” he added, “then government takes in more money, and that’s how we hope to be able to keep the debt under control.”
Oddly enough, not a single independent forecaster agrees with Mulvaney’s glowing characterization. Even relatively generous assumptions have this bloated tax cut adding just a tenth of a percentage point to economic growth each year over the next decade, and nearly $2 trillion to our federal debt, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
In a separate interview Sunday, however, Mulvaney suddenly became much more concerned about growth in our national debt. Asked to weigh in on the recent congressional budget deal, which added $300 billion to deficits over the next two years, Mulvaney remembered that he was supposed to be a budget hawk.
Rising budget deficits are “a very dangerous idea, but it’s the world we live in,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The budget proposal that his team put out the following day reflected these priorities: deficits for me, but not for thee.
The president’s budget — a statement of principles rather than anything binding, especially given the recent congressional deal — would slash funding for lots of programs that lower- and middle-income Americans rely on.
The budget would cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid, food stamps, educational programs, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (a program whose funds go toward cash welfare, child care, services related to child abuse and neglect), disability programs and Section 8 housing. Even Head Start and nutritional assistance for impoverished infants and pregnant mothers are not spared.
It would also completely eliminate a number of programs, such as the Social Services Block Grant, which funds public services for the most vulnerable Americans, including poor children, the elderly and those with disabilities.
It cuts $31 billion from training and employment programs.
The budget also includes $178 billion in cuts to transportation, plus cuts to other government infrastructure programs involving water, broadband Internet, energy and rural economic development. In other words, Trump’s grandiose announcement of a $200 billion ramp-up in federal infrastructure spending is offset by roughly equivalent cuts to infrastructure elsewhere in the budget.
Most gallingly, the budget tucks away almost $600 billion in additional tax cuts.
Democrats are, rightly, lambasting this budget for its heartlessness, and all the ways it favors the wealthy and well connected at the expense of the Forgotten Man whom Trump claims to champion.
But there’s another way to critique this proposal, and which purposes and programs the Trump administration has decided are worthy of going into further debt to support.
It has to do with its mistaken impressions of what will pay off economically in the long run.
Now, most economists would probably tell you that if you want to boost the economy, you need to invest: in the young (and in poor kids especially), in good education, in our workforce’s skills and in our crumbling infrastructure.
This plan does the opposite. What does the Trump proposal invest in instead? Tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s enough to make you wonder just whose future we’re really concerned about.

Trump’s Words Will Leave a Lasting Mark by Jeet Heer

Trump’s Words Will Leave a Lasting Mark

History proves that presidential rhetoric impacts policy, sometimes long after the president himself has left office.

By Jeet Heer

February 13, 2018

The unsettled question of whether President Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy increasingly hinges on whether his words matter or not. Those who argue that Trump is an authoritarian can easily point to a nearly endless supply of evidence in the president’s tweets and off-the-cuff comments, notably in his repeated calls for the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies.

As Donald Trump tweeted on Jan. 2:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others

9:48 PM - Jan 2, 2018

Aside from such blatant attacks on the rule of law, Trump’s own words convict him of being unfit in other ways, from his comments as a candidate that Mexican immigrants are rapists to his recent closed-door putdown of “shithole countries” while discussing Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries.
But using quotations to portray Trump as an extremist threat doesn’t convince everyone. There’s a formidable school of thought, encompassing analysts on the right and left, that Trump’s words don’t matter since they rarely manifest themselves in concrete, implemented policy. Trump might sound like an aspiring Mussolini, skeptical analysts argue, but in practice he’s no different than recent Republican presidents.
Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist for New York Times, argued last week that “angry presidential tweets that lack any sustained follow-through” are “not the same thing as a sustained presidential assault on democratic institutions.” Trump, the demagogue, has been tamed by the political system, he contends: “If the president yells about his persecutors and little or nothing happens—the Mueller probe continues, Rod Rosenstein keeps his job, etc.—what’s undermined is presidential authority, not the rule of law.”

Corey Robin, the leftist political scientist, has been making a similar argument for months. “Trump has always thought his words were more real than reality,” Robin wrote last May, having surveyed Trump’s paucity of policy achievements. “He’s always believed his own bullshit. It’s time his liberal critics stopped believing it.” More recently, he argued that “Trump is all bully, no pulpit,” and “that sometimes the main effect of Trump’s words is either nil or negative.”
Are Douthat, Robin, and others right in dismissing Trump as just a windbag? This view of Trump rests on a belief that political effectiveness is measured by legislative and other policy victories. But the office carries symbolic as well as legal power. As history shows, presidents have a real—if difficult to measure—ability to shape public discourse.

Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, convincingly made the case for the real-world impact of Trump’s words in a recent essay for the Niskanen Center. Drawing on the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt, Levy noted that political speech doesn’t exist in an abstract realm, but is a form of action—“the chief way in which we shape and constitute our life together.” Other political actors, including other nations and the American civil service, take cues from Trump’s words. It’s not a surprise, therefore, that Trump’s erratic language distresses allies like South Korea or provoked an exodus from the State Department.
Trump is president, but also the standard bearer of the Republican Party, a position he’s embraced with the capriciousness of a feudal lord. As Levy notes, “over the last year Trump has successfully radicalized the Republican electorate, with his words, in their support of him personally. Congressional Republicans who, a year ago, were still at least trying to keep Trump at arm’s length don’t dare to anymore. Trump has successfully belittled, marginalized, and demonized his occasional critics among Senate Republicans, with his direct line to the Republican electorate (and, again, as always, its amplification in the Trumpist media).”
Because of his high office, Trump shapes not just his own party, but also the opposition. Democrats and others opposed to Trump shape their politics as a negation of what he stands for. As Andrew Sullivan argues in New York magazine, “Polarization has made this worse—because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism, and because on the right, white identity politics has overwhelmed moderate conservatism. And Trump plays a critical role. His crude, bigoted version of identity politics seems to require an equal and opposite reaction.”

Because the U.S. president is the head of state as well as the head of government, his words carry special weight in issues of national identity. As a settler country repeatedly infused by waves of immigration and the enforced migration of enslaved people, the United States has always asked itself, “What is an American?” History shows that presidents have had an outsized role in shaping the answer to that question with their words alone. One of the pivotal events in defining American identity was the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply limited the number of immigrants admitted into the country and set up a quota system which privileged Northwestern European and Scandinavian countries over Southern European and Eastern European ones, while reducing African and Arab immigration to a trickle and excluding Asians entirely.
In the introduction to the 2006 essay collection Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration, Vanderbilt University Communications professor Vanessa Beasley noted that the Immigration Act was shaped by the “inflammatory presidential discourse” of presidents who had left office long before 1924, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt helped popularize eugenicist sentiments with a famous 1902 letter (which was reprinted in a book that same year), warning of the dangers of “race suicide” if “decadence and corruption” leads successful Americans to not have children. Although known as a proponent of the “melting pot,” Roosevelt’s attack on “hyphenated Americans” fueled nativist sentiments.
In a different essay in that collection, the historian Robert Ferrell wrote that Woodrow Wilson, in his five-volume History of the American People, “announced in its fourth volume that everything had been going well in the United States until the 1880s when there was a new immigration of people from Eastern Europe.” In 1916, as president, Wilson spoke against “immigrants who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.”
In policy terms, the real impact of the words Roosevelt and Wilson uttered came after they were out of office. They paved the way for the 1924 Immigration Act, even if they didn’t live to see it.
The same power of presidential rhetoric can be seen in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the racist quota system in the 1924 act. The law was only made possible because of earlier presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, who challenged the public’s acceptance of the 1924 act and an equally xenophobic one in 1952. In policy terms, Truman and Eisenhower had paltry success: Congress overrode Truman’s veto of the 1952 act. But if they lost the short-term policy battle, Truman and Eisenhower won the long-term rhetorical battle.
In vetoing the 1952 act, Truman said, “Today, we are ‘protecting’ ourselves, as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is fantastic.... We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries—on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand, to save those who have managed to flee into Western Europe, to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism, to welcome and restore them against the day when their countries will, as we hope, be free again.” And in a speech that year, while running for president, Eisenhower described America as a nation open to all: “The whole world knows that to these shores came oppressed peoples from every land under the sun, that there they found homes, jobs and a stake in a bright, unlimited future.”
“By defining immigration legislation as a tool of foreign policy,” historian James Aune wrote in Who Belongs in America?, “Truman and Eisenhower were able to lay the groundwork for the eventual elimination of the racist national origin restrictions of the 1924 and 1952 acts.”
Truman and Eisenhower teach the same lesson as Roosevelt and Wilson: The rhetorical power of the presidency has a ripple effect that lasts longer than one’s term in office. The implications for the present are clear. As Levy argues in his essay for the Niskanen Center (italics his, bold mine):

“Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens. It ignores how all those actors will respond to the speech, and how norms, institutions, and the environment for policy and coercion will be changed by those responses. Policy is a lagging indicator; ideas and the speech that expresses them pave the way.

By empowering authoritarian and racist sentiments, and acclimatizing the Republican Party to accept those sentiments, Trump is reshaping American political discourse today in ways that could lead to reprehensible laws long after he’s left office.

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic.

@HeerJeet