Category: Politics

Why Democrats, lacking power, won’t be able to keep the war-plan texting scandal alive

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

We are about to experience the full consequences — or, rather, the lack of consequences — stemming from the Democrats’ electoral wipeout last November.

The texting scandal exposed by The Atlantic earlier this week is serious business. As you have no doubt heard, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used that chat to share war plans about an upcoming air attack in Yemen. In case you haven’t had a chance to read Goldberg’s story, here’s a gift link.

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The scandal raises all sorts of questions. Why were top White House officials using Signal, a commercial app not approved for secure governmental communications? Signal messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time; were steps taken to override that and preserve those messages in accordance with the law? Are Signal chats about sensitive national security issues common within Trump’s inner circle? Are any foreign adversaries listening in? (One of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, took part while he was in Russia.)

So where do we go from here? Not very far, I’m afraid. A number of observers have compared this to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, which became the cause célèbre of the 2016 presidential campaign. So consider:

• This time there will be no criminal investigation — or, if anyone tries, Donald Trump will quickly shut it down. James Comey is not walking through that door. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president in 2016, but he was also a person of integrity who did not interfere with the independence of the Justice Department or the FBI. Such is no longer the case.

• There will be no congressional investigation, not with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. (In 2016, Republicans held both branches.) House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to fire Hegseth, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that Republicans and Democrats should work together on a “full investigation.” Good luck with that.

• Absent a criminal investigation or meaningful congressional hearings, the media coverage will soon fade away. We all remember The New York Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, but we tend to forget that it was largely fed by governmental action, especially by Comey. It was his last-minute intervention over what he described as another round of emails — followed by a “never mind” — that probably cost Clinton the election.

The print edition of today’s Times leads with two stories related to the scandal. I thought I’d point that out given the outrage I saw on social media claiming that Tuesday’s print edition played the story down — a consequence, I’m sure, of early print deadlines and the difficulty of reacting instantly to a huge story broken by another media outlet.

Unless there are more revelations, though, the media wave is likely to crest within the next few days. And then we’ll be on to the next Trump scandal.

Correction: I had a brain cramp regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s name. Now fixed.

Trump extorts a major law firm — then lies to make the deal sound even worse

Illustration via Pixabay

To make the humiliation complete, Donald Trump has apparently lied about the agreement he reached with Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, in order to cast the terms of surrender as being even worse than they actually were.

According to a four-byline article in The New York Times (gift link), Trump’s claim that Paul Weiss had agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion program appears to be false. So, too, is Trump’s assertion that the firm had admitted to “wrongdoing” on the part of former Paul Weiss lawyer Mark Pomerantz, who had worked for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial — you know, the one in which Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, a verdict that still stands.

The Times reports:

The copy of the agreement that Mr. Karp shared with Paul Weiss differed in some ways from Mr. Trump’s characterization of the deal in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Although Mr. Trump said the law firm had specifically agreed to not follow any diversity, equity and inclusion policies in its hiring practices, there is no reference to D.E.I. in the agreement that Mr. Karp shared. Mr. Trump has mounted an aggressive campaign against diversity initiatives in the federal government, labeling it as a form of workplace discrimination.

There also was no mention of Mr. Pomerantz, the former Paul Weiss partner, in the copy of the agreement circulated by Mr. Karp. Five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.

Karp deserves no sympathy. It was bad enough that he was willing to cut a deal with the extortionist-in-chief rather than stand strong. It’s just interesting that Trump would succeed in this corrupt scheme and then decide that it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t resist the urge to pile on false details that made Karp and his firm look even worse.

A couple of weekend reads from the Times that stand out from the daily Trump din

Illustration based on a photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

Today I’m using my gift links to share two important stories from The New York Times. Amid the torrent of news about Donald Trump, I think these two articles rise above the din and underscore the menace he represents both to our democracy and to world peace.

People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”

He [Trump] told Mr. Trudeau [Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada] that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.

Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.

Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”

Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress

My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.

The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.

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Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.

I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.

Continue reading “Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress”

After the ambush of Zelenskyy, some smart commentary — and an exceedingly dumb take

I share the shock and revulsion of every decent person over Donald Trump and JD Vance’s shameful attack Friday on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We are sliding into authoritarianism, and Trump has made it eminently clear that his role model is Russia’s homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin.

There are any number of places you can go for analysis that’s sharper and better-informed than mine, but I do what to share a few tidbits I’ve gleaned in my reading over the past day.

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Among the more interesting questions is whether this happened spontaneously or if Trump and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic argues for the latter (gift link). His evidence: the very fact that Vance spoke up, which was not something he would normally be expected to do and was almost certainly scripted in advance. Nichols writes:

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio — in theory, America’s top diplomat — was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

Also of note is that New York Times political reporter Peter Baker is speaking truth to power. Baker often gets criticized for showing Trump too much deference and normalizing his sociopathic behavior. On Wednesday, though, Baker compared Trump’s treatment of the media to Putin’s during his early days of establishing his authority. Baker was covering Moscow at that time, and he said Trump’s banishment of The Associated Press over the news agency’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” was reminiscent of Putin’s efforts to mold  “a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.”

Baker added we’re still a long way from Trump ordering that anti-regime journalists be poisoned. But it was a harsh characterization of Trump from someone who usually likes to keep his options open. I’d say there’s no going back.

And indeed, Baker brought the truth with him again on Friday, writing this as a riposte to Trump’s invocation of “the Russia hoax” in his meeting with Zelenskyy. Baker says:

In fact, the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was no hoax and concluded definitively that Mr. Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the election eight years ago to Mr. Trump. Although Mr. Mueller said in his final report in 2019 that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” he made clear that Mr. Trump’s campaign benefited from Russian assistance.

Baker could have gone one step further and pointed out that Mueller may well have charged Trump with criminal acts were it not for guidance from the Justice Department that a sitting president is exempt. Still, good for Baker for reminding everyone that the 2016 Trump campaign was awash in Russian influence.

Finally, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, an enthusiastic Trumper, wrote an embarrassing column (gift link if you’re interested) on Thursday headlined “Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow,” with the subhead “A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.” That deal, of course, was what Zelenskyy had supposedly come to the White House to sign, only to be sandbagged by Trump and Vance.

So how did Thiessen react? Naturally, he took to Twitter and blasted Zelenskyy, writing:

There was no ambush. Z was set up for success. All he had to do was not get into a public fight and sign the minerals deal. Not hard. A lot of work went into making a successful moment possible and he blew it and then refused to apologize.

Thiessen has been at the Post for years, so you can’t blame this on Jeff Bezos’ edict that the Post’s opinion section is going full MAGA. But this is the sort of garbage you can expect will be rewarded, while the future of liberal columnists like Dana Milbank, Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart is left very much in doubt.

Memories of the insurrection on a day when Trump is receiving his ultimate reward

Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2021. Photo (cc) 2021 by Mike Maguire.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump staged a violent attempted coup so that he could remain in the White House rather than turn over the presidency to Joe Biden. And today, he’s returning to the office that he disgraced. Here is something I wrote on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. My closing sentence, unfortunately, is even more apt today than it was in 2021.

The media are filled with one-year retrospectives about the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. I can’t say I’m paying much attention to them. We’ve had a firehose of coverage from the moment it happened, and appropriately so. An anniversary doesn’t add anything to what we already know, and to what we still need to know.

Will we remember Jan. 6 the way we remember Sept. 11, 2001, or the way our parents and grandparents remembered Dec. 7, 1941? Probably not, though neither will it soon be forgotten. And one of the acts of remembering is recalling what we were doing on that day.

I was hiking in the Middlesex Fells, as I often do. I took a photo of two signs on a tree because I thought they were funny: one said “Keep Out”; the other urged hikers to maintain social distancing, which seemed like an odd admonition if you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.

I emerged from the woods around 3 p.m. and turned on the car radio. NPR was carrying audio from the “PBS NewsHour,” and Judy Woodruff was freaking out. At first I figured the Republicans were trying to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes to delay Joe Biden’s being declared the official winner of the presidential election. That, after all, had been predicted.

Within a few moments, though, I learned the truth: that a mob of rioters had descended on the Capitol, had broken inside and were rampaging through the halls of Congress. It was our first attempted coup, aided and abetted by Donald Trump, and it may not be the last.

These are dark times, and I’m not optimistic about what the next few years will bring.

In selecting Gaetz, Trump shoves open the Overton Window for his other terrible nominees

Matt Gaetz. Photo (cc) 2022 by Gage Skidmore.

In today’s New York Times, we learn what Donald Trump is really up to with his nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general: he’s trying to shove open the Overton Window, choosing someone so far outside the norms that other terrible appointments he’s made (and will make) can slide through the Senate.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report (gift link):

He [Trump] is making calls on Mr. Gaetz’s behalf, and he remains confident that even if Mr. Gaetz does not make it, the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees who have appalled much of Washington.

In other words, Senate Republicans will have a chance to assert their prerogatives by rejecting Gaetz, who, among other things, has been accused of taking part in drug-fueled orgies and having sex with a 17-year-old girl — a minor in the state of Florida.

Meanwhile, Trump’s unqualified choices for secretary of defense, accused rapist Pete Hegseth, and for secretary of health and human services, all-around loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will win confirmation, according to Trump’s theory of the case, because Republicans will content themselves with rejecting his most egregious appointment rather than all of them.

The Overton Window is generally a term used to describe crazy policy ideas that are put forth in order to make other, slightly less crazy ideas appear to be more plausible. But it works for people as well. The only way Hegseth and Kennedy look good is by standing in contrast to Gaetz. And so it goes.

It was a dark and metaphorically stormy night; plus, Northeastern students get the job done.

I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving way to an era of authoritarianism.

No recriminations. As I wrote Tuesday, Kamala Harris proved to be a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. Do I have quibbles? Sure. I was surprised and disappointed that her running mate, Tim Walz, proved not to be an asset. After he performed poorly in his debate with JD Vance, he pretty much disappeared. But no one votes for running mates. I also thought Harris spent a bit too much time with Liz Cheney and not enough with actual Democrats.

But every candidate has to make choices; some work out, some don’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Voters who ultimately went with Trump decided they want a racist, insurrectionist strongman who hates who they hate. I could go on, but not this morning.

By far the highlight of my Election Day was spending time with our Northeastern journalism students involved in producing a half-hour newscast as part of a national project organized by Student News Live. The students were either part of our fledgling Society of Professional Journalists student chapter, NUTV or both.

Also doing a great job were Northeastern students who covered Election Day for The Scope, our digital social justice publication, and for The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. I expect their coverage will keep rolling in throughout today.

Northeastern students after Tuesday’s newscast at NUTV

A few other observations:

• It was a big night for poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and its founder, Nate Silver, who has moved on and now runs a similar project. For the past month, they’ve had the race in a dead heat with Trump given slightly better odds of winning most of the time. Also: That Iowa poll meant nothing.

• Too early to tell how big a factor the Electoral College played in this. In 2016 it carried Trump to victory even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Four years ago Joe Biden barely squeaked through despite a decisive victory in the popular vote. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but we just don’t know yet.

• Living in Massachusetts, or in any Deep Blue state, will give us some protection from what’s to come. But my heart goes out to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants, the people of Ukraine and anyone else who is going to be hit with the full force of what’s to come.

God help us all.

Win or lose, Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate

Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

No matter how this apocalyptic election turns out, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. If Donald Trump somehow manages to pull out a victory, that won’t be on Harris; rather, it will be on voters who’ve decided they’d like to give authoritarianism a try, decency and the rule of law be damned.

I hope that by tonight, or at least within a day or two, we can call her Madam President-elect. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the future of our country. But we’ll also know that Harris did everything she possibly could. We owe her a debt of gratitude.

And if you haven’t voted yet, get out there.

Northeastern students try to vote — and some run into obstacles

Click here to see all the interviews

Earlier today I asked my First Amendment students to fan out across the Northeastern campus and interview students about whether they had faced any voting obstacles. They posted their findings on Instagram. Most of those interviewed were from out of state and had tried to vote by mail.

Many of them reported an easy experience, but that wasn’t universal. One student from North Carolina, for instance, reported that in addition to having to pay for postage — not a big deal, but really? — she was required to have two witnesses sign her ballot and print out a photo of her driver’s license.

A Tennessee student said she registered to vote in Massachusetts after running into insurmountable obstacles in her home state. “To register for a mail-in ballot, I had to actually be in Tennessee and show my ID,” she said. “They told me that if I can’t come into the county office with an ID, I can’t vote which is just crazy.”

You can find most of my students’ interviews here. We had some technical difficulties, so you’ll find a slightly different mix here.