The real reason Donald Trump lies The president’s greatest ambitions are neither financial nor political — they’re psychological, writes Stephen Grosz
The Financial Times. January 9.
We all lie, but we don’t lie like President Trump. He is the most extravagant, reckless, inexhaustible fibber of our era — the panjandrum of porky pies.
Because we all lie, we may be tempted to think we understand why Donald Trump does, or even that he lies for the same reasons we do.
He doesn’t.
Last April, a 34-year-old woman I’ve been working with for several years told me that she hadn’t been honest with me. “Not big lies,” Ms A said, “I just couldn’t tell you certain things.” It took us some time to understand why she brought herself to her psychoanalysis in this particular way.
When she was a child, Ms A’s parents saw her as an extension of themselves — they experienced her successes and failures as theirs. Ms A could not, for example, be sad or cry without making her much-loved mother unhappy and unsure of herself. She had to be sunny. As a child, Ms A discovered that lying to her parents allowed her to feel separate from them, self-contained, a bit free. Her deceits felt more hers than the real world. Lying allowed her a private self. She lied to feel independent.
Most of us lie to avoid causing painful feelings in others, and ourselves. Sometimes, like Ms A, we lie to protect some sense of self.
Trump’s lying is different. It’s not just a departure from the norms of the presidency — it’s a departure from the norm.
There are so many examples — The Washington Post’s Fact Checker estimates that during the two years of his presidency, Trump has told some 7,600 lies — but let this one suffice. On Boxing Day last year, during an unannounced visit to Iraq, Trump spoke to US troops about a pay rise. “I got you a big one. I got you a big one.” He continued, “They said: ‘You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 per cent. We could make it 2 per cent. We could make it 4 per cent.’ I said: ‘No. Make it 10 per cent. Make it more than 10 per cent’.” The future pay rise is 2.6 per cent.
Think about what is happening here: a lie — easily discredited — is being made, with complete shamelessness, to people most of us would regard as heroes. When he told the troops about the pay rise, they must have gone wild. For the briefest moment, Trump will have been applauded, celebrated — but then what? How can someone be so oblivious to the consequences of deceit?
Born to parents who, by some accounts, left him feeling deserted and bereft, Trump has been a loner most of his life. At school and university, he seems to have made no friends he kept. While he does collect celebrities, for the most part his friendships seem to be perfunctory, fleeting. Averse to shaking people’s hands, phobic of germs — whatever the origins of his behaviour, many psychoanalysts would describe Trump’s way of relating as “avoidant”. “One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.”
Given this apparent lack — and the effect his lying has on us — my view is that Trump may abuse the truth so we take notice of him, think about him, become emotionally involved with him. Because he’s in no one’s heart, he wants to be in all our minds. More and more, I’m convinced that his greatest ambitions are neither financial nor political — they’re psychological. He wants us never to take our eyes off him. A psychic imperialist, he aims to colonise our minds. He wants to dominate the external and internal landscape.
The word famous has its roots in the Latin fama — rumour, reputation, or renown. Initially, fame was linked to deeds, actions. Over the past hundred years, that link has been broken. Nowadays, if you’re discussed, you’re famous. Much of what presidents do isn’t very interesting — so Trump doesn’t bother. He does things to get people talking about him. Threats and rows get him attention. Shocking, melodramatic, confounding lies work too — he’d rather be infamous than forgotten.
Between 1980 and 1990 Trump spoke to some reporters pretending to be a “John Barron — spokesman for Donald Trump”. During these conversations, Barron would praise Trump — inflating his wealth and business success, describing how beautiful women were sexually attracted to Trump, and so forth. Whatever its beginnings, “John Barron” gives us a sense of the vehemence of Trump’s self-doubt, his craving to be famous.
“John Barron” is a fiction that Trump created because, I presume, he thought no one else would come to his defence or applaud him. This creation may well be the result of child-Trump being disregarded, neglected, unloved. In 2006 Trump and Melania named their only child Barron. I find this poignant — it suggests to me that Trump wanted to bring his imaginary friend to life. In giving his son the name Barron, he may have been trying to make his fiction real.
Does Trump’s invention feel to you — like it feels to me — a male thing? Let me pose a connection between Trump’s lying and masculinity.
Masculinity is complex. For the most part, all of us, male and female, start life loving our mothers. But love is not simple. When a boy loves his mother, he will empathise with her thoughts, feelings and desires. He identifies with her. At times, he will even wish to be her.
One classic study asked three-to-eight-year-old boys and girls whether they wanted to be fathers or mothers when they grew up. Unsurprisingly, boys four or older wanted to become fathers, and girls four or older wanted to become mothers. Three-year-old boys and girls were different. As expected, most of the girls wanted to become mothers. But, unexpectedly — so did the majority of the boys.
In other words, for a period of his childhood, a boy will want to be a woman. And it is upon this foundation — the desire to be a woman — that masculinity is built.
In our “girls like pink, boys like blue” world, a boy quickly learns that he is expected to feel whole and confident of his masculinity. His feelings may be conflicted, shifting, but he is expected to conceal this internal struggle from others as well as himself. A “sissy”, “mama’s boy” or “wimp” will be shamed and humiliated, sometimes assaulted. To have a masculine identity, a boy must reject what he once loved.
The upshot of all this is that a boy’s development leaves him with the fear that there is something feminine in him, that he’s not a real man — at any moment, he can be exposed as a fake.
Trump makes heavy use of this fear. To show you how, let me take you on what may seem like a digression — Trump’s love of professional wrestling.
Before throwing his hat into the political ring, Trump threw it into the wrestling arena. Between 1988 and 2013, he ran wrestling events, appeared ringside (notably in the Battle of the Billionaires), and was even inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. Despite being presented as a competitive sport, professional wrestling is scripted. The competitors, results, pre-match and post-match interviews — all of it is make-believe. The broadcasters give their audience all the things you’d expect in a work of fiction: backstory, suspense, symbolism and so forth.
In wrestling, as in literature, names are never neutral. Naming a character is an essential part of creating them. There’s always a “face” (short for babyface, or hero) and a “heel” (villain). Hulk Hogan and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are faces. Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Rick Rude are heels. Wrestling pits good against bad, a genuine he-man against a phoney rascal.
To emasculate his opponents, Trump uses this trope: “Low Energy Jeb”, “Mr Magoo” (Jeff Sessions) “Lyin’ James” (Comey), “Rat” (Michael Cohen), “Highly Conflicted Bob Mueller”. As part of his two-fisted swagger, Trump tweets in wrestling-speak: “Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is, he is a choker, and once a choker, always a choker! Mr. Meltdown.” It’s not just men — Trump labels groups of people as double-dealing wimps: “fake CNN”, “Fake news”, “Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation”.
“It’s like a manhood thing — as if manhood can be associated with him — this wall thing,” leader of the House Nancy Pelosi said in December. The next day, publicly clarifying her private remark, she said, “there is no justification for this wall. It is not the way to protect our border . . . in terms of factual data.”
For Trump and many others — precisely because it is a manhood thing — the “factual data” doesn’t matter.
In professional wrestling, fact and fiction are worked together to create storylines that connect with the audience’s feelings. Wrestling’s good v bad, real v fake storylines provide clarity. What’s vital is this — fictional storylines can unleash genuine emotion. For the wrestling fan, as long as it feels true, it doesn’t matter that it’s fiction. Facts are beside the point. Feeling true is more important than being true.
Many of Trump’s big political lies work this logic. President Obama’s birth certificate, or, more recently, the invading caravan of “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” — these storylines have been fact-checked and discredited. There may be data proving the wall isn’t the best way to secure the border, but for many Trump supporters, those facts are irrelevant. For his enthusiasts — especially those who share his anxieties — Trump’s lies feel truer than the truth.
Outrage at Trump’s duplicitousness is a dangerous pleasure, in a Trump-like way, self-satisfying — what Philip Roth called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. While it is comforting that journalists are fact-checking Trump, this exercise too may be worse than pointless. If my analysis is correct, outrage and fact-checking will certainly not stop his dishonesty. These acts may even help Trump to have what he wants — forever, to be in our minds.
Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst and author of ‘The Examined Life’.
Some details have been changed in the interest of confidentiality
Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Scarcely a week into Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as president of Brazil, protections for the environment and indigenous and LGBTQ populations have been removed, and both the neoliberal economic policies closely associated in Latin America with the thirteen-year Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the language of Brazil’s military junta, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, have resurfaced. “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism, and political correctness,” Bolsonaro told his inaugural crowd, pleasing Brazil’s elites and the stock market. His call for surgical violence—Brazil’s “whole body needs amputating” was the memorable phrase—left others fearful of a return to “disappeared” bodies and torture cells.
Threat is a fundamental tool of the 21st-century authoritarians on the rise: Dominating is much easier if you’ve prepared people to be afraid of you when you take office. Bolsonaro used it to sell himself as the only candidate capable of tackling Brazil’s soaring violence problem, which included a record murder rate in 2017. “A good criminal is a dead criminal,” he said last fall, earning comparisons to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who has made good on his own campaign promises to carry out extrajudicial killings of those involved in his country’s drug trade.
Yet Bolsonaro has also preventively criminalized all leftists and other political opponents, promising to send such “red outlaws” to prison or into exile. “It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history,” he said in October, raising the possibility that he might aspire to be even harsher than the former junta, which he believes didn’t kill enough people. Years of documented Bolsonaro hate speech against gays and blacks suggest other potential targets, although even if he gets a ruling majority in parliament, “cleansing” an enormous country with a multiracial and ethnically complex population would be a Herculean task.
The slew of executive order legislation following Bolsonaro’s inauguration has hewed closely to the authoritarian playbook, designed to further intimidate the population, cement Bolsonaro’s profile as a “get things done” disrupter from outside the political establishment, and, most importantly, reassure the conservative elites who have always backed such leaders that they will profit handsomely with him in office. The summary removal of indigenous peoples from protection by the Human Rights Ministry (which may go the way of the newly suppressed Labor Ministry) supplements the planned merger of the Environmental and Agricultural Ministries, which will put indigenous lands up for grabs by logging and other agribusiness interests, helped by the highway Bolsonaro envisions building through the Amazon rainforest.
During the Pinochet regime, University of Chicago and Harvard-educated neoliberal economists propping up the dictatorship through spending cuts and privatization were known as “Chicago Boys.” The day following the inauguration, Bolsonaro had his very own Chicago Boy sworn in as Economy Minister: Paulo Guedes, a Milton Friedman-influenced neoliberal who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era. Joaquim Levy, the new head of the Brazilian Development Bank, and Roberto Castello Branco, the new chief executive of the oil and natural gas company Petrobras, are also Chicago economics alumni. The Brazilian economy, long stagnant, definitely needs reforms. But, as of yet, Bolsonarans seem untroubled by the fact that neoliberal successes in Chile capitalized on the “advantages” of authoritarian oppression—bans on unions and strikes and the absence of a political opposition.
Bolsonaro’s savvy appointment of popular corruption fighter Sergio Moro to lead an expanded Ministry of Justice continues an election persona that for many voters seemed to promise “a deep change in the political establishment,” as Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with Brazilian daily Correio Braziliense, wrote to me by email. Yet Bolsonaro would be the unusual authoritarian if he eradicated corruption; he’ll more likely use the moral high ground of anti-corruption to neutralize his political enemies and purge the bureaucracy, the better to populate it with loyalists. Certainly, Bolsonaro has benefited from the corruption scandals that have rocked the traditional political class—widely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who might have defeated Bolsonaro had he not been barred from seeking election in 2018 is now serving a twelve-year jail sentence, while his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016. Moro, the ex-judge who jailed da Silva, and who is crucial for this first phase, may find himself cast aside later.
Bolsonaro, a career politician, used his military background as a paratrooper to separate himself from the corrupt reputations of other career politicians, playing on the idea that the military is nonpartisan, since serving officers are forbidden from making political statements. One-third of his cabinet positions have gone to military officers; a retired general, Hamilton Mourão, is his vice president. It seems the post-dictatorship wariness of having the military play an active role in politics has waned—an increasing number of Brazilians want “law and order” government regardless of the consequences.
“Bolsonaro is as much an apparition from Brazil’s past as a harbinger of its future,” historian Kenneth Serbin wrote at Foreign Affairs the day of the inauguration: Only a “politics of forgetting” about the violence of the military dictatorship has made his ascent possible. I’d go further: Bolsonaro advances a new phase of remembrance that rehabilitates the people and causes of that terrible time. During the 2016 congressional proceedings leading to Rousseff’s impeachment, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote against her to her torturer—Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, de facto chief of army intelligence services, which ordered Rousseff, then a leftist guerrilla, tortured for three weeks in 1970 (she was then a political prisoner for two years). Sympathizers like Bolsonaro publicly honor those who subjected Brazilians to torture methods such as “the barbecue,” where victims were tied to a metal rack and given electric shocks on and inside their bodies.
Bolsonaro may be called the “Trump of the Tropics” for his impolitic and often incoherent remarks, his skill with social media, and hodge-podge coalition of Evangelical Christians, military toughs, and business elites. But the precedent of military rule in Brazil makes him more dangerous than his United States counterpart. In 1999, Bolsonaro declared that if he ever became president he’d immediately launch a coup and declare himself dictator. Twenty years later, he’s in power. Time will tell what kind of strongman he will be.
BERLIN by Jason LutesDrawn & Quarterly, 580 pp., $49.95
Jason Lutes first started drawing Berlin,
his epic graphic novel about the disintegration of the Weimar Republic,
in 1996, when the topic seemed an esoteric choice for an American
storyteller. The winding down of the Cold War brought with it an
ostensible closure of the ideological battles of the early 20th century,
leading some of the more triumphalist partisans of capitalism to
proclaim nothing less than the end of human history. The future seemed
more or less certain: America’s free-market, liberal democratic model
would continue to prevail as the best of all possible worlds.
Yet
in going back to the apparently irrelevant past, Lutes became an
inadvertent prophet. The cartoonist patiently drew his story in short,
irregularly released pamphlets, gathered together every few years in
paperback collections. When he finally finished the project and codified
it in a hefty hardcover in 2018, what had once been antiquarian was now
urgent. In the fraying and polarized America of Donald Trump, the
Weimar Republic looks more like a mirror than a fading photograph.
When I first started reading Berlin
more than two decades ago, I primarily admired it as a bravura feat of
historical reconstruction. Everything—the trains, the buildings, the
fashion, the faces—looked right, a testament not just to archival
research but also, more importantly, to a style that channeled the
imagery of the era. Lutes’s clean, brisk cartooning owes much to Hergé
(the creator of Tintin), but there is more than a dash of noir taken
from German Expressionism and the woodcut novels that flourished in the
1920s and 1930s (notably those by artist Frans Masereel). The style has
an uncanny aptness, as if the book were a product of the very period it
surveys.
Courtesy of Drawn & QuarterlyThe book’s physical presence is also a marriage of form and content. In size and weight, Berlin is
a building block of a book, reminiscent of the cobblestones, bricks,
and concrete slabs that make up the titular city. Cartoonists refer to
the white spaces between the panels in a graphic novel as “gutters,” and
the street metaphor is particularly appropriate for Berlin. Reading a graphic novel, especially one as dense with geographical information as Berlin, is akin to deciphering a map. The inside cover of Berlin is, in fact, a map of the city, which reinforces the experience of the book as a kind of urban guide in narrative form.
Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters. Berlin
features a large and diverse cast: workers and plutocrats, communists
and fascists, bewildered liberals and political activists, Jews and
anti-Semites, pacifists and street fighters. What unites them is the
shared experience of living in a crumbling democracy, where economic
chaos, distrust of the established order, and rising violence all work
to destroy social cohesion. On a personal level, this means the
characters are all tested, again and again, to show empathy, and even
the best of them sometimes fail these tests. But the redemptive thrust
of the book comes from the resilience of solidarity and hope even in the
darkest times.
Indeed, Lutes sees in the Weimar Republics’s
failure an opening for genuine creative excitement. The two sides are
embodied by the main characters of Berlin: Kurt Severing, a jaded
journalist, and his sometime lover Marthe Muller, a young woman who
comes to the city to study art. Even as Severing is baffled and
shattered by the rise of political extremism, Muller finds pleasure in
the city’s flowering of sexual diversity (briefly taking a lover who we
would now call a trans man) and aesthetic pleasures (especially a
visiting band of African American jazz musicians), which are the direct
result of the collapse of suddenly outmoded traditions.
Courtesy of Drawn & QuarterlyIt’s not an accident that Severing and Muller have different experiences of the city. Berlin belongs to the great tradition of the urban novel, which runs from Dickens’s Bleak House to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. But as the critic Roger Sale noted in 2000 in the journal Left History,
this tradition is highly gendered. Sale wrote that “the high modern
conviction that cities are breeding grounds for alienation and despair”
tends to come from male writers and filmmakers.
Sale pointed out that we should “[s]et against all that: Lucy Snowe coming to London in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, or Toni Morrison’s account of southern blacks coming to Harlem in Jazz, or Mrs. Dalloway setting out across London to order her flowers, or Martha Quest coming to London at the opening of The Four-Gated City.
All these women characters and writers acknowledge the reasons for
alienation and despair, the overwhelming confusion of large cities, but
they know also a sense of richness, of possibility, in the very
qualities the men deplore.”
The achievement of Lutes’s Berlin
is that it combines both sides of the gender divide in urban fiction.
In so doing, it offers a more comprehensive way of looking at our own
troubled times, which can easily invite despair and resignation. If
fascism is a death cult, then opposing it has to include not just
political organizing, but also a positive alternative of a good life.
Lutes offers just that: His Berlin is a city of hope as well as pain. He
doesn’t shirk from depicting the rage and violence that brought down
Weimar democracy, but he also shows the heroism and joy that came from
standing against the rise of fascism, from people trying to live
decently, freely and creatively.
newrepublic.com Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem? By Miguel Salazar 19-24 minutes
On an afternoon in July, nearly 200 people packed into the ballroom of a local community center in northern Oakland for a general meeting of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As they settled into folded chairs on the room’s faded wooden floors, the group ran through the week’s agenda, which included votes on the establishment of a code of conduct, a resolution to meet monthly instead of once every two months, and a proposal to support Cat Brooks, a black activist running for Oakland mayor.
Three miles away at the Marriott City Center, Brooks was working events at the California Democratic Caucus. Brooks, a co-founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, which provides support to communities of color in response to police violence, had been invited to speak on a panel defending Prop 10, a ballot measure that sought to repeal a 1995 law restricting rent control in Oakland and other cities in California. At the end of the event, Brooks checked her phone and found a stream of texts from people at the DSA meeting. The messages read: “You need to get here right now.”
Minutes later, Brooks stormed into the ballroom. A proposal to “prioritize” two other endorsements—for Prop 10 and a candidate for California’s state assembly—had snowballed into a referendum on Brooks herself, with critics saying she was too compromised to receive the DSA’s backing. The group’s support shouldn’t be given to people who are “a dime a dozen,” Brooks remembered one man saying. Like many of her rivals, she had pledged to expand affordable housing and reduce Oakland’s growing homeless population. Notably, she had insisted on cutting the city’s police budget in half.
At one point, Tur-ha Ak, a black organizer with Brooks’s Anti-Police Terror Project, asked to speak. As his turn approached, the young man who was chairing the meeting asked if Ak was a member. A number of white people had spoken before him, including Forrest Schmidt, 42, who was attending his first DSA meeting. “None of us had our credentials called,” he said. “Nobody said, ‘Are you a DSA member?’” When Ak responded that he was not a member, the chair asked him to take a seat.
The room erupted. The procedural rules were racist, Ak proclaimed, raising his voice over a cacophony of protests and chants. “The energy,” Brooks recalled, “turned into that of a white mob.” She decided to take the floor. “My name is Cat Brooks,” she said. “I’ve been organizing in this city longer than most of you have lived here.” In a brief, piercing speech, she accused the largely white crowd of being gentrifiers and then walked out, leaving members confused and outraged.
The debate quickly moved to Twitter, Reddit, and other corners of the internet. In an online essay, Jeremy Gong, an East Bay member who sits on DSA’s National Political Committee, the organization’s highest decision-making body, argued that Cat Brooks “weaponized” her race to coerce DSA into supporting her candidacy. He would not endorse her. The July DSA meeting, he wrote, was a textbook example of “race reductionism and liberal guilt politics.” By insinuating that white members were “the problem” when it came to Oakland’s gentrification, he claimed, Brooks had mistakenly reduced what was fundamentally a class conflict into a racial one.
Though a dustup among a small group of lefties in Oakland may seem to be a parochial affair, the controversy surrounding Brooks is part of a fierce debate about race within the newly invigorated socialist movement. Since 2016, when it had only 6,500 members, DSA has added nearly 50,000 members and over 125 chapters across the country. In 2018, two of its members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both women of color—were elected to serve in Congress, and 21 more won seats in state legislatures. Though DSA is separate from the Democratic Party, some of its members represent both institutions, while DSA itself is at the cutting edge of the broader progressive movement, a loud, insistent voice on issues ranging from universal health care to debt forgiveness.
But unlike other progressive groups, DSA has to contend with internal factions that are very seriously wedded to a certain strain of socialist ideology—one that emphasizes, as Karl Marx did, a churning class war that governs the history of humankind. For these socialists, an anti-capitalist movement must be anti-racist, since capitalism has been instrumental in the subjugation of minorities. But they are also weary of liberal politicians who, they say, exploit race to pander to minority groups, all while skirting the deeper class conflict at work. In the past year, these hard-liners have clashed on numerous occasions with other socialists, often minorities themselves, who contend that righting America’s unique wrongs requires an approach distinct from the universal precepts of historical materialism—one that emphasizes racism’s special impact on inequality, supra-class.
In the Brooks controversy and other incidents, these tensions have come to a head, badly dividing the movement and raising difficult questions about socialism’s potential as a political force in the United States. In important respects, these are the same questions that dogged socialism as an ideology throughout the 20th century—questions that America’s fledgling socialists are openly struggling to answer, on Twitter and in left-wing periodicals like Jacobin. Is socialism, as an ideology, capable of welcoming dissenting opinions? And how central should issues of race be in a socialist movement?
Around the time Cat Brooks stepped into the East Bay DSA meeting in July, a similar controversy broke out in the organization’s Philadelphia chapter. In an email to the chapter’s political education committee, a small group of DSA organizers had proposed a new book by Asad Haider, a University of California graduate student and editor of Viewpoint magazine, for a reading group. The book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, envisions a socialism that both addresses racism head-on and advances a class-based movement.
Haider adopts an understanding of identity politics first introduced by the Combahee River Collective, a black lesbian militant group, which held that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The idea is that an authentic socialist movement needed to go beyond a vision of “sexless, raceless workers”; it required centering the identities and lived experiences of marginalized groups, in order to address issues that wouldn’t necessarily be mended through economic reforms alone.
The political education committee responded that it was no longer creating new reading groups. So the organizers, who belonged to a subcommittee created in 2017 to develop local socialist campaigns, held the reading group anyway. On the day before the first meeting, however, they received a letter from the chapter’s leadership. The event, they wrote, was “unrelated” to the subcommittee’s stated purpose; the group was acting “autonomously, apparently as a protest.” Leadership provided an ultimatum: Stay focused on local political campaigns, or resign.
The two sides exchanged correspondence for weeks. Then, in late August, Jacobin published a scathing review of Mistaken Identity, penned by Melissa Naschek, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chair. Attempting to engage in both class politics and identity politics, she wrote, was the left’s own Third Way: a “lopsided advocacy for particularist demands” that would lead the movement to a dead end. The only path to forging a mass socialist movement, she wrote, was by fighting for “universalist” reforms, like single payer health care and free college tuition.
The essay sparked a heated, sometimes nasty intellectual debate, often conducted in the kind of dogmatic jargon that was once a hallmark of Marxist academia. The DSA members who originally proposed the book for the reading group interpreted the review as a blatant partisan attack. They released a statement arguing that Naschek’s “framing inherently privileges white identity.” On Twitter, Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, called the review “class reductionism of sort that I hoped only existed in liberal identitarians’ caricatures of the left.” Adolph Reed Jr., a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped Naschek craft her review, blasted Haider’s arguments on a Marxist podcast, saying they “smell like a truckload of rotten fish.” East Bay DSA’s Jeremy Gong also came to Naschek’s defense in an article claiming the workplace to be the “primary strategic site of class struggle.”
R.L. Stephens, a former member of DSA’s National Political Committee, argued that framing issues of racial justice in moral terms made these issues “either subordinate to or outside of class struggle itself.”* Haider himself penned a long, philosophical response to Naschek’s review. His book, he wrote, was “not a political platform, but a work of theory.” (He did, however, get in a jab: “Naschek dismissively proclaims that the [Combahee River Collective] was not a mass movement. Neither is the DSA.”) When I spoke to Haider, he lamented the idea that “there are two isolable, discrete phenomenon that can be parceled out into race and class.”
What seemed to be a drawn-out exercise in academic hair-splitting, however, revealed profoundly different approaches to organizing a mass movement, particularly around issues of race. “A lot of it is postulating more than it is significant differences on the left within DSA,” said Jack Suria Linares, also a National Political Committee member. “But I also think that in the long run those differences might grow.”
These ideological clashes, usually pitting DSA leadership against rank-and-file membership, have been largely limited to East Bay and Philadelphia, the only two major chapters in the country run by the Momentum caucus, a subgroup described in a 2017 Nation profile as the “most explicitly Marxist” within the organization, with a heavy focus on the campaign for Medicare-for-All. Momentum leaders pride themselves on a precise and strategic, if narrow, political vision. While DSA members in other chapters can form working groups to take on autonomous initiatives, that behavior is heavily regulated in the two Momentum-run chapters.
In public and private, DSA members in the East Bay and Philadelphia have expressed frustration at leadership. In October 2017, ahead of a meeting to vote on the endorsement of candidates for local office in Oakland, two East Bay DSA members prepared a statement demanding more agency. “To date, when members have proposed to do work outside of single payer, we have been told that the organization does not have the bandwidth or capacity,” they wrote.
In one notable dispute, a brake light repair initiative in the East Bay DSA was flatly rejected by the chapter’s co-chairs, who refused to put it up for a vote. The repair clinics first sprouted in New Orleans as a strategy to combat police brutality, as people of color are often pulled over for problems as innocuous as broken taillights. These traffic stops can even lead to—as in the case of Philando Castile—killings by the police. While DSA chapters across the country soon began replicating the program, and embraced it as an effective way to build a stronger working-class base, East Bay leadership remained strongly resistant to the campaign. In a private conversation, one East Bay co-chair insinuated to a member of color organizing the clinic that it would look like “white saviorism.” A former member of the chapter’s leadership referred to it as “charity” in a blog post.
In response, over 300 DSA members—a third of whom identified as people of color—from across the country signed a petition urging East Bay leadership to reconsider. “We are alarmed by what increasingly feels like the erasure of our voices and presence within the DSA,” they wrote. Weeks later, East Bay members collected nearly 100 signatures from their chapter, enough to bring the initiative to a vote at a general meeting. Despite protests from some DSA leaders, the resolution passed.
Momentum’s centralized approach stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on mutual aid and direct action in most chapters across the country. Bianca Cunningham, who co-chairs the New York City chapter and helped found DSA’s Afrosocialist caucus, agrees with Momentum leaders like Naschek and Gong that universal policies like Medicare-for-All and free higher education would disproportionately benefit people of color, but argues that they are not sold that way by the mostly white membership rallying behind them. “You have to take that extra step,” she said, “and do more to engage with that community specifically around their own needs and experiences.”
However, the idea that racial justice is a subsidiary issue to class, one exploited by liberal politicians for cynical gain, is common on the left. “It’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests,” Briahna Joy Gray wrote in The Intercept, criticizing politicians like Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina who opposed free college tuition on the grounds that it would hurt historically black colleges and universities. Gray also cited the example of Hillary Clinton, who, in a dig at Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primaries, asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow ... would that end racism?”
DSA members are understandably wary of such entreaties, which end up pitting working-class people against each other. But the interests of race and class often cross in unexpected ways. Weeks after the East Bay DSA’s July meeting ended in chaos, Cat Brooks submitted a formal endorsement request to the chapter. An electoral subcommittee discovered that, from 2011 to 2014, Brooks had served on the board of GO Public Schools, a pro-charter school nonprofit that has led efforts to destabilize teachers’ unions and promote education privatization in and around the city. Brooks’s critics had found their smoking gun.
Members flooded the DSA’s website with statements and articles urging people to vote against her endorsement. Charter schools, which are publicly owned but privately operated, have had a uniquely destructive effect on Oakland. The city has the highest concentration of charters in the state, which, according to a recent report, has cost the Oakland Unified School District $57 million in funding every year. “I believe in public education. I believe in democratic socialism,” wrote one member in her statement. “I don’t believe that Cat Brooks is right for EBDSA.”
But Brooks had changed her position, and had even told DSA that she supported “a moratorium on charter schools” in Oakland.** Still, DSA members remained unconvinced. Meagan Day, a staff writer for Jacobin and an influential East Bay DSA member, wrote that Brooks’s new position was “fantastic. ... But how can we be certain?” The reversal, she argued, was “too last-minute to constitute a meaningful political transformation.” On September 9, East Bay DSA voted against endorsing her.
The actual story of Brooks’s “political transformation” is more nuanced. Mike Hutchinson, Oakland’s loudest anti-charter activist, who described his relationship with Brooks as “complicated,” recalled that as recently as two years ago, people were calling him “crazy” for his position against charter schools. When charters first began popping up in Oakland in the 1990s, they were sold to residents as a way to give them agency over their own schools. “It was tied into the self empowerment theme that goes back to the Black Panthers,” he said. It was only recently that public opinion shifted, and Brooks’s evolution was representative of that. When she reached out to Hutchinson to consult on her education platform, he was “happily surprised on how she moved away from the charter connections she had in the past.” He ultimately signed on.
The growth of DSA, especially in urban areas, has brought with it a similar set of complications. As of last year, the organization was roughly 90 percent white and composed of people mostly under 35, a palette often associated with gentrification in areas like Oakland, Philadelphia, and New York City. (When I asked DSA for updated numbers, I was told they are not currently collecting demographic data.) It’s a demographic makeup that can be off-putting and even intimidating to leftists of color, many of whom have left DSA or declined to join in the first place. When Cunningham would bring her socialist friends of color to DSA meetings, they would feel uncomfortable. “I would beg them to stay,” she said. She remembered telling them, “‘If you don’t stay, then the next people are going to come in and they’re going to say the same thing.’”
Most leftists agree that, despite the DSA’s overwhelming whiteness, it is committed to recruiting candidates of color like Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez. But such efforts can also border on tokenism. When I spoke with the mostly white members of East Bay DSA’s leadership, some pointed out that, during their July meeting, an older member said this after Brooks stormed out: “If we don’t endorse her, what will black people think of us?”
Online, the debate about race can be particularly alienating to minorities. It is a space where small, intellectualized differences are made insurmountable, and where naked ideology sometimes supersedes the lived experience of organizers who have dedicated their lives to lifting up working-class people. “An organization like DSA might benefit from the kinds of racial sensitivity trainings that we hear about because those are real tendencies that have to get checked,” said Shaun Scott, a DSA member in Seattle. This is particularly true for Momentum, which has an outsized presence within DSA. The group’s modus operandi is predicated on a top-down structure; general meetings are infrequent and subcommittees are limited in their scope. Though small, the group is highly ambitious while also being dismissive of its critics, an attitude seemingly incompatible with DSA’s identity as a “multi-tendency” organization.
On the ground, these battles tend to be fought by proxy, through debates over organizing strategy. Disputes over brake light initiatives and canvassing for Medicare-for-All often have a racial subtext, and tensions between members and the communities they live in can be heightened by DSA’s prescriptive, dismissive attitudes. “As DSA, as relatively new kids on the block, as this predominantly white organization, it’s really paramount that we do that solidarity work,” said Shanti Singh, a co-chair of DSA’s San Francisco chapter, who was one of the signatories on the brake light petition.
Despite DSA’s anti-racist positions, many socialists of color believe there still hasn’t been a full reckoning when it comes to issues of race, nor a resolution between the beliefs of certain socialists and the world we live in. The urgency felt by activists of color doesn’t always exist in white spaces, noted Kristian Hernandez, a 29-year-old Latina DSA member in Texas. In November, two weeks after a gunman killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Proud Boys, a far-right chauvinist group, had planned a demonstration in Philadelphia, which was scheduled during the same time as the local DSA chapter’s general meeting. The organization’s South Jersey chapter had canceled its general meeting to join counter-protesters, but in an email, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chairs, Melissa Naschek and Scott Jenkins, urged members to attend the meeting instead, to make quorum, calling the protesters “far-right LARPers,” a reference to people who dress up as fictional characters. “We shouldn’t be distracted by their theatrics,” they wrote. “Instead, we should push ahead with our collective goals.”
The decision drew scorn from other socialist leaders. “Countering right-wing anti-Semitism should not be a contentious issue,” Singh tweeted. Ultimately, it’s that attitude of downplaying discrimination, a perspective rooted in privilege, that worries leftists of color. They still need assurances that “at the end of the day, if push comes to shove, people are going to have my back,” Hernandez said. “Particularly white people.”
*A previous version of this article misstated R.L. Stephens’s relationship to DSA. He’s a former member of the National Political Committee, not a current one.
**A previous version of this article misstated when Cat Brooks updated her website platform on charter schools. Brooks notified DSA members of her change in position before the September 9 meeting, but updated her website afterwards.
The
Donald J. Trump Foundation was an audacious grift, even by the
standards of its namesake. Charitable foundations are supposed to
operate under a simple premise: They receive certain tax exemptions when
it comes to receiving and disbursing their funds, and in turn, those
funds will be funneled into good works for society’s benefit. For
Trump’s charity, however, those good works largely amounted to crass
self-enrichment—a guiding principle throughout the president’s life and
political career. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported two years ago that the Trump Foundation’s
most generous expenditure, totaling $264,361, went to renovations for a
fountain outside the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in New York City. Its
smallest contribution—just $7—appears to have been used to pay for
Donald Trump Jr.’s registration fee for the Boy Scouts of America. In
one instance, Trump auctioned off a six-foot-tall painting of himself to charity, then spent $20,000 from the foundation’s funds to purchase it. New
York thinks it can find a better use for the money. Barbara Underwood,
the state’s attorney general, announced on Tuesday that the president agreed to shut down the foundation
and let state officials disperse its remaining funds to genuine
charitable organizations. “This is an important victory for the rule of
law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,”
Underwood said in a statement
announcing the agreement. Her office is still pursuing more than $2
million in restitution from Trump and restrictions on his family’s
involvement in non-profit organizations in the state.
An investigation by Underwood’s office uncovered a clear pattern
of instances where the Trump family misused charity funds. The
foundation cut checks for well-publicized donations during Trump’s
presidential campaign, transmogrifying charitable funds into politically
beneficial expenditures. It shelled out hundreds of thousands of
dollars to settle legal disputes involving Trump himself or his
companies. Normal safeguards like an active board of directors, standard
accounting practices, and grant-making policies did not exist. The
charity itself, investigators said, “is little more than an empty
shell.”
“In sum, the Investigation revealed
that the Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments to
not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization,” the attorney
general’s office said in a lawsuit
this summer. “This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal
law because payments were made using Foundation money regardless of the
purpose of the payment. Mr. Trump used charitable assets to pay off the
legal obligations of entities he controlled, to promote Trump hotels,
to purchase personal items, and to support his presidential election
campaign.”
Though the Trump Foundation was an impressively brazen scheme, it’s far from the only one bearing the president’s name. Trump agreed to pay $25 million
to settle a multi-state class-action lawsuit against Trump University,
his now-defunct real-estate seminar program. Court filings showed how
the seminars preyed on customers’ financial anxieties
so they would fork over thousands of dollars for mundane lessons about
buying and selling property. This undercut Trump University’s main
selling point: that “students” would be able to draw upon its eponymous
founder’s reputation for savvy real-estate deals.
Even this
reputation isn’t grounded in anything, though. The underlying basis of
Trump’s political career is his public image as a self-made real-estate
magnate. Careful scrutiny by journalists and investigators, however, has
shown this to be largely mythical. It wasn’t business acumen that
helped Trump establish a foothold in New York real estate in the 1980s
and 1990s, but a steady infusion of at least $413 million
from his father through dubious tax practices. Trump’s inflated
reputation is a source of income in and of itself. Many of the overseas
hotels bearing his name don’t even belong to him: He simply licenses his image to real-estate developers overseas, giving a branding edge to them and a reliable stream of profit to him.
You’d
be hard-pressed to find an aspect of the president’s life that isn’t
marked by grifting. The Trump campaign and its allies heard multipleoffers of assistance from Kremlin-linked figures while Trump’s personal lawyer tried to secure
a hotel deal in Moscow. His inaugural committee later raked in more
than $100 million—more than twice the sum of his predecessors—from
wealthy donors that largely went unaccounted for. A ProPublica
investigation found that the Trump Organization may have overcharged
the committee for use of Trump’s Washington hotel, raising questions
about whether any illegal self-enrichment took place. (Federal
prosecutors are reportedly investigating the matter.) Foreign governments have also poured money
into the Trump Organization’s properties, which may violate a
constitutional ban on federal officials receiving foreign profits.
Ironically, some of these schemes likely would have gone unnoticed if Trump had never run for president. Fahrenthold, of the Post,
began his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into Trump’s charitable
donations after then-candidate Trump handed out oversized checks to
veterans’ groups in campaign stunts. And the illegal hush-money payments
that eventually led former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to start
cooperating with the federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t have been made
if Trump wasn’t trying to win the presidency. Becoming president has
subjected Trump’s hollow empire to a level of scrutiny that he never
imagined. The question is whether any of it will remain by the time he
leaves, or is forced from, the White House.
Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp By Emily Atkin 5-7 minutes
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the gators keep getting bigger and the fence is in tatters.
On Saturday, Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation as secretary of the Interior Department, the seventh-largest agency responsible for most of the nation’s natural resources and public lands. Zinke will be replaced—at least temporarily—by David Bernhardt, a former high-profile lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and the Interior’s current second-in-command. As a lobbyist, Bernhardt worked on behalf of several oil companies that he’ll soon be in charge of regulating. He’s been called “a walking conflict of interest” by his critics.
Bernhardt’s ascent follows Trump’s announcement last month that a former lobbyist for the coal industry would soon be nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Wheeler has been serving as acting administrator since July, after former EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid numerous ethical scandals. As a lobbyist, Wheeler represented Murray Energy—a coal company whose CEO literally sent Trump a wish list of all the environmental regulations he wanted dismantled. Trump’s EPA, now led by Wheeler, is on track toward fulfilling almost all those requests.
David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s new acting chief, has been switching between lobbying jobs and government jobs since the early 1990s.Center for Responsive Politics
It’s alarming to know that two men who became rich by helping polluters dismantle environmental protections are about to lead the two most important federal agencies protecting public lands, wildlife, and human health. Many environmentalists believe that fossil fuel lobbying should disqualify Wheeler and Bernhardt from these positions.
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm of government ethics experts. “The revolving door is a basic part of the Washington Establishment,” said Laura Peterson, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “People go back and forth between the public and private sectors all the time.” It makes sense why they would; government agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they’re crafting regulations, so they hire people who are familiar with the process.
The Trump administration does, however, seem “particularly comfortable stacking high-level posts with former lobbyists whose policy proposals are like a corporate Christmas list,” said Peterson. As ProPublica revealed in March, “At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of.”
These former lobbyists are not only flooding the government. They’re entering “a wild west environment where anything goes,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, when he resigned out of “disappointment” with Trump.
Shaub emphasized that previous administrations had “a lot” of industry members. “But past Republican presidents were similar to Democratic presidents in at least supporting the government ethics programs,” he said. President Barack Obama, for example, signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the government from hiring people who had been a lobbyist in the previous year. Special waivers could be granted, but had to be made public. A hired former lobbyist would also be prohibited from working on any issue on which they had previously lobbied.
Trump repealed Obama’s policy when he took office, replacing it with an executive order that he claimed would more effectively “drain the swamp.” But the ethics order has proven much weaker than Obama’s in practice, Shaub said. Now, lobbyists can be hired for any government position. Lobbyists can also work on issues where they have a direct conflict of interest, provided they get a waiver. And Trump has been giving these waivers out like candy to the most powerful people in his administration—at least 37 “to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies,” according to a March report from the Associated Press.
But the total number of government officials with conflict-of-interest waivers is likely much more than 37, for two reasons: Trump’s ethics policy, unlike Obama’s, does not require waivers to be made public. His waivers are also often extremely vague, said Shaub, who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s impossible to count the number of people listed on a waiver, because they describe the type of person they’re waiving rather than directly naming them,” he said. The waivers granted to ex-lobbyists also “don’t offer any explanation” for why they’re needed.
This secrecy is perhaps the most troubling part of Trump’s lobbying policy. Of course, we want nothing more than to assume that government officials will act in good faith. But American history is littered with examples of those who were able to abuse their power thanks to a lack of transparency and oversight. The current administration is contributing more than its fair share to that ignominious list. Though he ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump is feeding with gators and letting them roam free—then asking us to trust him that the gators won’t bite.
We know that a key, maybe the key to Michael Cohen’s job for Donald Trump was making prob-lems go away, most especially making women who had stories to tell – whether consensual sex-ual encounters or abuse – stay silent. Yesterday I suggested the possibility that this defensive capacity could very easily be weaponized against others. When you consider it, it’s frankly hard to imagine it wouldn’t be. Cohen had close relationships with lawyers for clients with damaging revelations. He had an equally close relationship with The National Enquirer, which is in the busi-ness of damaging revelations but seemed willing to subordinate that business to its transactional relationship with Donald Trump.
We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.
It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.
The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.
At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.
Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …
In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”
Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.
“In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”
Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”
It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.
