Zunger is an engineer at Google.
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Ray Richmond is a writer in Los Angeles. This article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I won’t reproduce it in full because that would violate copyright law. I hope you will open the article and read it. It expresses my own feelings of personal fear, fear for the future of my nation and my fellow citizens, fear for our democracy, and deep uneasiness about the future.
I never thought I’d have to write that I sense fear from my fellow citizens when it comes to speaking out against a presidential administration. But I do.
I never thought I’d have to write that our president is the biggest and most compulsive liar that I’ve ever encountered in American public life. But I must.
I never thought I’d have to write that the leader of the United States has the demeanor of a middle school-aged adolescent, with mature development arrested at age 13. But it’s true.
I never thought I’d have to write that my government has declared literal war against the truth, or that the president’s chief spokesperson would go on television and with a straight face and present the idea of “alternative facts.” But they have.
I never thought I’d have to write that my president is so insecure and consumed with the size of his support that he would personally phone the acting chief of the National Park Service to produce photographic evidence of a larger turnout at his inauguration. But he did…
I never thought I’d have to write that members of President Trump’s senior staff all were using a private Republican National Committee email server after having made Hillary Clinton’s doing so the centerpiece of the general election campaign. But it has.
I never thought I’d have to write that the winner of the presidential campaign is loudly and persistently making dubious claims of voter fraud despite having come out on top. But he does….
I never thought I’d have to write that an American president this week stood in front of the hallowed CIA Memorial Wall and made a self-aggrandizing speech about his own greatness and popularity, unable to see past his own narcissistic reflection. But he did.
I never thought I’d have to write that five members of the president’s inner circle, including two of his children, are registered to vote in two states. But they are.
I never thought I’d have to write that Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, has gone so far as to tell the New York Times, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. The media here is the opposition party.” But he did.
I never thought I’d have to write that the leader of the once-free world could consume himself with bad-mouthing movie stars and TV shows in tweets and all but declare war on information itself. But he does….
I never thought I’d have to write that waking up in the morning to the news — once an activity embraced with relish — so fills me with dread. But it does.
I never thought I’d have to write that going about the business of my daily life feels utterly empty and foreboding due to what appears to be the purposeful destruction of our hallowed institutions of democracy in real time. But it has.
I never thought I’d have to write that I feel helpless in the face of tyranny and autocratic rule from a man who believes himself at once omnipotent and infallible. But I do.
I never thought I’d have to write that I sense I’m a stranger in my own land. But I do.
Eliot Cohen is a conservative foreign policy expert. He worked on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s staff. During the campaign, he signed a statement opposing Trump, which was co-signed by some 200 others who had worked on foreign policy issues for Republican administrations.
In this post, Cohen says that Trump is even worse than he anticipated and warns his fellow Americans to prepare the worst.
He writes:
“We were right. And friends who urged us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we could “this is abnormal,” to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong. In an epic week beginning with a dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he has lived down to expectations.
“Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better….
“This is one of those clarifying moments in American history, and like most such, it came upon us unawares, although historians in later years will be able to trace the deep and the contingent causes that brought us to this day. There is nothing to fear in this fact; rather, patriots should embrace it. The story of the United States is, as Lincoln put it, a perpetual story of “a rebirth of freedom” and not just its inheritance from the founding generation.
“Some Americans can fight abuses of power and disastrous policies directly—in courts, in congressional offices, in the press. But all can dedicate themselves to restoring the qualities upon which this republic, like all republics depends: on reverence for the truth; on a sober patriotism grounded in duty, moderation, respect for law, commitment to tradition, knowledge of our history, and open-mindedness. These are all the opposites of the qualities exhibited by this president and his advisers. Trump, in one spectacular week, has already shown himself one of the worst of our presidents, who has no regard for the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose patriotism is a belligerent nationalism, whose prior public service lay in avoiding both the draft and taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not read and therefore does not understand our history, and who, at his moment of greatest success, obsesses about approval ratings, how many people listened to him on the Mall, and enemies.
“He will do much more damage before he departs the scene, to become a subject of horrified wonder in our grandchildren’s history books. To repair the damage he will have done Americans must give particular care to how they educate their children, not only in love of country but in fair-mindedness; not only in democratic processes but democratic values. Americans, in their own communities, can find common ground with those whom they have been accustomed to think of as political opponents. They can attempt to renew a political culture damaged by their decayed systems of civic education, and by the cynicism of their popular culture.
“There is in this week’s events the foretaste of things to come. We have yet to see what happens when Trump tries to use the Internal Revenue Service or the Federal Bureau of Investigation to destroy his opponents. He thinks he has succeeded in bullying companies, and he has no compunction about bullying individuals, including those with infinitely less power than himself. His advisers are already calling for journalists critical of the administration to be fired: Expect more efforts at personal retribution. He has demonstrated that he intends to govern by executive orders that will replace the laws passed by the people’s representatives.
“In the end, however, he will fail. He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible—The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“There was nothing unanticipated in this first disturbing week of the Trump administration. It will not get better. Americans should therefore steel themselves, and hold their representatives to account. Those in a position to take a stand should do so, and those who are not should lay the groundwork for a better day. There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”
Noah Feldman wrote today in Bloomberg News that Trump got to the presidency by breaking all the rules, but he has come up against one rule he can’t break: the rule of law.
Unlike the unwritten rules of campaigning that Trump flouted, the legal rules are written down. And they come with a full-blown ecosystem of institutions and actors, not to mention the courts that are profoundly committed to sustaining law itself.
Trump and his team seem truly not to understand that. Astonishingly, they didn’t go through the ordinary and almost mandatory procedures that take place within the government before executive orders with the force of law are issued. This amounted to flouting the legal checks that exist within the executive branch itself.
First, they didn’t run the executive order past lawyers at the Department of Justice, whose Office of Legal Counsel reviews all presidential actions that are potentially unlawful. Even the George W. Bush administration in the fevered aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks managed to submit its plans for interrogation to the OLC (where the so-called torture memos came from).
The OLC would’ve caught most or all of the legal vulnerabilities that plague Trump’s order and that led the various district court s to enjoin it. So it wasn’t just wrong for the administration to ignore the OLC. It was also counterproductive.
Then there is the bizarre fact that the administration didn’t prepare Justice Department lawyers to be able to defend its order by giving them the chance to prepare arguments in advance. Reportedly, in various courts around the country, the department’s lawyers couldn’t answer basic questions about the order or its practical effects — which means they essentially couldn’t defend it. A better defense — or any — might have saved the order.
In practice, the administration failed to give Customs and Border Protection guidance on what the order aimed to do. That led to the kind of embarrassing chaos that helped the courts see the whole thing as an exercise in lawlessness.
All of this points us in one direction: Make a contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, and any other groups prepared to defend the Constitution.
The New York Times published a powerful editorial denouncing Trump’s Muslim ban.
First, reflect on the cruelty of President Trump’s decision on Friday to indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. It took just hours to begin witnessing the injury and suffering this ban inflicts on families that had every reason to believe they had outrun carnage and despotism in their homelands to arrive in a singularly hopeful nation.
The first casualties of this bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating policy were detained early Saturday at American airports just hours after the executive order, ludicrously titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” went into effect. A federal judge in Brooklyn on Saturday evening issued an emergency stay, ordering that those stuck at the airports not be returned to their home countries. But the future of all the others subject to the executive order is far from settled.
It must have felt like the worst trick of fate for these refugees to hit the wall of Donald Trump’s political posturing at the very last step of a yearslong, rigorous vetting process. This ban will also disrupt the lives and careers of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been cleared to live in America under visas. On Saturday, as mass protests against that ban were held in various cities, the White House scaled back the reach of the policy, though not by much, exempting legal permanent residents.
That the order, breathtaking in scope and inflammatory in tone, was issued on Holocaust Remembrance Day spoke of the president’s callousness and indifference to history, to America’s deepest lessons about its own values.
The order lacks any logic. It invokes the attacks of Sept. 11 as a rationale, while exempting the countries of origin of all the hijackers who carried out that plot and also, perhaps not coincidentally, several countries where the Trump family does business. The document does not explicitly mention any religion, yet it sets a blatantly unconstitutional standard by excluding Muslims while giving government officials the discretion to admit people of other faiths.
The order’s language makes clear that the xenophobia and Islamophobia that permeated Mr. Trump’s campaign are to stain his presidency as well. Un-American as they are, they are now American policy.
“The United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles,” the order says, conveying the spurious notion that all Muslims should be considered a threat. (It further claims to spare America from people who would commit acts of violence against women and those who persecute people on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation. A president who bragged about sexually assaulting women and a vice president who has supported policies that discriminate against gay people might well fear that standard themselves.)
The unrighteousness of this new policy should be enough to prompt the courts, Congress and responsible members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet to reverse it immediately. But there is an even more compelling reason: It is extremely dangerous. Extremist groups will trumpet this order to spread the notion, today more credible than ever, that the United States is at war with Islam rather than targeting terrorists. They want nothing more than a fearful, recklessly belligerent America; so, if anything, this ban will heighten their efforts to strike at Americans, to provoke yet further overreaction from a volatile and inexperienced president.
American allies in the Middle East will reasonably question why they should cooperate with, and defer to, the United States while its top officials vilify their faith. Afghans and Iraqis supporting American military operations would be justified in reassessing the merits of taking enormous risks for a government that is bold enough to drop bombs on their homelands but too frightened to provide a haven to their most vulnerable compatriots, and perhaps to them as well. Republicans in Congress who remain quiet or tacitly supportive of the ban should recognize that history will remember them as cowards.
There may be no one better positioned to force a suspension of this policy than Mr. Trump’s secretary of defense, Jim Mattis. Mr. Mattis was clear-eyed about the dangers of a proposed Muslim ban during the election, saying that American allies were reasonably wondering if “we have lost faith in reason.” He added: “This kind of thing is causing us great damage right now, and it’s sending shock waves through this international system.”
His silence now is alarming to all who admire his commitment to American security. Mr. Mattis and other senior government officials who know better cannot lend their names to this travesty. Doing so would do more than tarnish their professional reputations. It would make them complicit in abdicating American values and endangering their fellow citizens.
Nicholas Kristof wrote a moving story about his father, prefaced by a frank admission of the New York Times’s own shoddy history in turning its back on immigrants and refugees in the past.
Yet if fear and obliviousness have led us periodically to target refugees, there’s also another thread that runs through American history. It’s reflected in the welcome received by somebody I deeply admire: Wladyslaw Krzysztofowicz. And this is personal.
Raised in what was then Romania and is now Ukraine, Krzysztofowicz was jailed by the Gestapo for assisting an anti-Nazi spy for the West. His aunt was murdered in Auschwitz for similar spying, but he was freed with a bribe. When World War II was ending, he fled his home as it fell into the hands of the Soviets.
After imprisonment in a Yugoslav concentration camp, he made it to Italy and then France, but he couldn’t get a work permit, and he thought that neither he nor any children he might later have would ever be fully accepted in France.
So he dreamed of traveling to America, which he had heard would be open to all. He explored a fake marriage to an American woman to get a visa, but that fell through. Finally he met an American woman working in Paris who convinced her family back in Portland, Ore., to sponsor him, along with their church, the First Presbyterian Church of Portland.
As Krzysztofowicz stood on the deck of the ship Marseille, approaching New York Harbor in 1952, a white-haired woman from Boston chatted with him and quoted the famous lines from the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ….” Krzysztofowicz spoke little English and didn’t understand, so she wrote them down for him and handed him the paper, saying, “Keep it as a souvenir, young man.”
Then as she was walking away, she corrected herself: “young American.”
Krzysztofowicz kept that scrap of paper and marveled that he — a refugee who had repeatedly faced death in the Old Country for not belonging — now somehow counted as an American even before he had set foot on American soil, even before he had learned English. It was an inclusiveness that dazzled him, that kindled a love for America that he passed on to his son.
That strand of hospitality represents the best of this country. The church sponsored Krzysztofowicz even though he wasn’t a Presbyterian, even though he was Eastern European at a time when the Communist bloc posed an existential threat to America. He could have been a spy or a terrorist.
But he wasn’t. After arriving in Oregon, he decided that the name Krzysztofowicz was unworkable for Americans, so he shortened it to Kristof. He was my dad.
Recently I returned to the First Presbyterian Church to thank the congregation for taking a risk and sponsoring my father, who died in 2010. And the church, I’m delighted to say, is moving to support a refugee family this year.
Mr. President, please remember: This is a country built by refugees and immigrants, your ancestors and mine. When we bar them and vilify them, we shame our own roots.
Trump is not backing down from his immigration ban from seven countries, excluding even those with green cards.
This post from the Daily Kos includes links to two segments of The Rachel Maddow Show.
Maddow says that Russia hacked our presidential election and helped elect Trump.
” Earlier this month they broke a breathtaking story. In December, one of the high ranking official in the Russian security service, in the cyber security department was attending a routine staff meeting when several armed police officers, burst in, threw a hood over his head, and dragged him from the room. That is the last anyone has seen of him, and the State charged him with treason. They then broke the story that another high ranking intelligence official, this time in counter intelligence had been fired. There was sketchy information as to whether or not the official had also been imprisoned and charged.
“Rachel’s point was simple and concise. Russia has denied involvement all along. OK, fine. That’s your story, and you’re sticking with it. But, if you’re innocent, then as a nation, you don’t need to do anything, there is no fire there, you didn’t do anything, and nobody can prove a negative. But when you have police storm into a routine meeting, bag and wrestle out a senior cyber official, and then cashier a senior counter intelligence official in charge of making sure nobody blabs, you have just waved a giant red flag. It means that Putin has looked at the information in the “dossier” that the ex MI6 intelligence officer compiled on information compromising Trump, and has looked at the information in at least the public release of the combined intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the election, and he has realized that there is actually fire behind that smoke. And Putin is taking aggressive steps to stamp out that fire so that it doesn’t occur again.”
Judge Ann Donnelly of the US District Court in Brooklyn granted a request from the ACLU to stay deportations of those detained on entry to the United States following President Trump’s executive order. After a brief hearing in front of a small audience that filtered in from a crowd of hundreds outside, Donnelly determined that the risk of injury to those detained by being returned to their home countries necessitated the decision. She seemed to have little patience for the arguments presented by the government, which focused heavily on the fact that the two defendants named in the lawsuit had already been released. At one point, she visibly lost patience with a government attorney who was participating by phone.
“Donnelly noted that those detained were suffering mostly from the bad fortune of traveling while the ban went into effect.
“Our own government presumably approved their entry to the country,” she said at one point, noting that, had it been two days prior, those detained would have been granted admission without question. In the middle of the hearing ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt informed the court that he’d received word of an imminent deportation to Syria, scheduled within the hour. That prompted Donnelly to ask if the government could assure that the person would not suffer irreparable harm. Receiving no such assurance, she granted the stay to the broad group included in the ACLU’s request.
We should all be reading histories of the 1930s right now.
Such as:
William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
Otto Friedrich, “Before the Deluge”
History teachers and buffs, send your suggestions.
In the meanwhile, dystopian novels are seeing a surge in sales. A reader sent this comment:
“According to this past Wednesday’s story in Time, these dystopian classics are enjoying a “Trump bump.” They are:
1984
Animal Farm
It Can’t Happen Here
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Where are the histories?
