Trump No Longer Seems Able to Hide His Raw Misogyny. Good.
By Michelle Goldberg
The president of the United States began this morning as he often does, tweeting juvenile insults at the news media. But even by Donald Trump standards, today’s jabs at TV hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were unusually gross. Taken together, they read: “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
There’s a lot you can say about these tweets; among other things, it’s striking that Trump thinks that when journalists seek access to him, it means they like him. But I was most struck by Trump’s raw misogyny. Obviously, that’s not because Trumpian misogyny is anything new, but because, from the time he was inaugurated until this week, he’s mostly been holding it in.
Trump does not get much credit for being disciplined, but for the last five months, he’s mostly checked his tendencies to leeringly appraise women’s looks, at least in public. (Vanity Fair did report in April that during a visit by the Japanese Prime Minister, “the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator’s breasts.”) So far, there’s been no reported pussy-grabbing in the Oval Office, no stumbling in women’s changing rooms or fantasizing aloud about female subordinates on their knees. Instead Trump, like other Republicans before him, has sublimated his misogyny into policies: expanding the global gag rule, sabotaging federal family planning programs, eroding enforcement of the law against gender discrimination in education.
But Trump appears to be feeling a lot of strain. He’s obsessed with the Russia probe, and a recent Washington Post story reported that his friends “privately worry about his health, noting that he appears to have gained weight in recent months and that the darkness around his eyes reveals his stress.” When you’re under pressure, it can be harder to hide your true self. And Trump’s true self is a pig.
On Tuesday, Trump interrupted a phone call with Ireland’s Prime Minister to sexually harass an Irish journalist named Caitriona Perry. Calling her forward, he said, “And where are you from? Go ahead. Come here, come here. Where are you from? We have all of this beautiful Irish press.” She stepped forward awkwardly and he looked her over. Then, returning to the call, he said with a smirk, “She has a nice smile on her face so I bet she treats you well.”
Trump’s insult of Brzezinski is the other side of this connoisseurship. To Trump, women’s worth lies in their fuckability; it’s why he’s praised his own daughter by saying he’d sleep with her if they weren’t related. Trump’s tweet was meant to make Brzezinski seem grotesque and pathetic, a failure in the struggle to remain attractive—the only struggle that, in his eyes, really matters for women. (Another Vanity Fair story alleged that he only let his third wife, Melania, have a baby on the condition that she would “get her body back.”) The reference to Brzezinski “bleeding badly,” of course, also recalls his claim that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her whatever” when she aggressively questioned him during a debate; he instinctively projects his own revulsion toward menstruation onto women who threaten him.
I’m not sure that even well-intentioned men understand how relentlessly degrading this presidency is for many women. Having a man who does not recognize the humanity of more than half the population in a position of such power is a daily insult; it never really goes away. Perhaps this is why many women found the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale so resonant, even though Trump, the former owner of a casino strip club, is the last person one can imagine instituting a Calvinist theocracy. Gilead’s fictional dystopia captures our constant incredulous horror at finding ourselves ruled by thuggish, unaccountable woman-haters who appear to revel in their own impunity.
If there is the barest sliver of consolation, it’s that Trump appears almost as miserable and anxiety-ridden as we are. He’s losing the tiny bit of control he had. It’s better for Trump to show us all who he really is than to let his lackeys pretend he’s remotely worthy of his office. Every time he tweets, he reveals his presidency as a disgusting farce. Let’s hope he keeps doing it.
June 30, 2017
Will Not Die
Why the Obamacare Repeal Effort Will Not Die, No Matter What
People will continue to vote enthusiastically for the party that will strip them of their health care so long as that party promises to turn back the clock.
BY NEAL GABLER
If you want to calibrate just how bad the Senate Republican health care bill is, you don’t need the Congressional Budget Office telling you that 22 million Americans would lose their insurance. Look no further than Susan Collins. The bill is so god-awful that the Republican senator from Maine, whom I lacerated last week for always fretting and dithering over her party’s initiatives only to support them in the end, wouldn’t even vote to bring it to the floor.
Of course, Collins being Collins, she says she is open to negotiations, and I suspect Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will make a concession on Collins’ precious Health Savings Accounts. Whether the opposition of Collins and others ultimately sinks the bill remains to be seen, though I wouldn’t count on it. The vote postponement notwithstanding, Republicans being Republicans are going to resurrect it with nips and tucks for many more go-rounds, since Republicans are absolutely determined to savage Medicaid and ultimately destroy it. Stay tuned.
Since the vast majority of the public loathe the GOP bill, and since it has been universally panned in the media and by just about every stakeholder, you have to wonder how the GOP can keep flogging it. The answer is that they clearly feel there will be no political consequences for doing so, and they may be right. Republican Dean Heller, who came out against it this week, represents Nevada, a blue state with a heavy Medicaid enrollment, so he is unlikely to be wooed, but among Republicans running in 2018, he is virtually alone. (He was not spared, however, from attacks from a Trump super PAC, and he is almost certain to be primaried from the right.) No one else in the party seems to fear retribution as much as they fear bucking conservative ideology.
Take West Virginia. Thirty percent of West Virginians — some 554,000 people — are dependent on Medicaid, which the Republican Senate bill will effectively decimate, and the state has a serious opioid problem, which Obamacare addresses. Still, West Virginia gave Trump, who campaigned on the promise to repeal Obamacare, a whopping 42-point margin of victory, and there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it will vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime.
Or take Kentucky. Out of a population of 4.5 million, 1.3 million are on Medicaid. And yet its senior senator, McConnell, is the architect of the plan to reduce Medicaid, and the state’s other senator, Rand Paul, has no qualms about saying he wants to destroy Medicaid altogether. Once again, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that either McConnell or Paul will lose re-election.
Politics is supposed to operate on the principle that if an officeholder works against the interest of his or her constituents, those constituents will take revenge by booting him or her out of office. That’s just common sense. And it’s also common sense that health care should be a prime consideration for those constituents. When Republicans propose huge tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously cutting health benefits for the poor and the working and middle classes, or when they propose a bill that drives up premiums and deductibles while shredding the safety net, the logical result would be a revolt. Instead, these folks keep coming back to the party, which is why the GOP can keep coming back to its Draconian health care plan.
How do you parse this? You could say that people don’t understand their self-interest very well, and there is certainly some truth to that. A Kaiser Health poll shows that a bare 51 percent of Americans now support Obamacare, which is a high-water mark, while 74 percent have a favorable view of Medicaid, the very linchpin of Obamacare. That suggests they don’t understand how inextricably Obamacare and Medicaid are bound.
Or you can say, as I wrote here, that many of these folks believe in stripping government benefits from the seemingly undeserving, even if doing so hurts themselves.
Yet it isn’t the economy, stupid, or health care reform that drives these voters to Republicanism. It is their perception of the march of history. They have come to believe that they are a persecuted white majority, and that grievance supersedes everything else, including their own health insurance. Republicans count on that.
Three recent surveys support this explanation. One, a recent post-mortem of the 2016 election by the non-partisan Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, reports that Trump’s vote, especially among whites, had far less to do with economic distress than with nativism, racism, sexism and Islamophobia — what you might call cultural distress.
Another analysis conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic magazine also found that economic distress did not correlate with Trump support. In fact, it was the opposite: “Those who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape.” But those who felt culturally dispossessed and felt that the country needed to be safeguarded against immigrant invasion were 3.5 times as likely to support Trump as those who felt differently.
If you still don’t think that lots of working-class white Americans feel culturally aggrieved, consider another survey in February by PRRI finding that white evangelicals believe Christians are more discriminated against in America than Muslims, with 57 percent asserting “a lot” of discrimination against Christians.
This jibes with an earlier study from Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Samuel Sommers of Tufts that showed deep white belief in “reverse racism” coupled with the belief that African-American gains come at the expense of white losses.
On its face, of course, this is absurd. There is virtually no metric — be it education, wages, wealth, social mobility or health — in which African-Americans have it better than whites. (I won’t even address Islamophobia versus an animus against Christianity because it is beyond absurd.) But we now generally accept that many whites, especially older, uneducated and religious whites, believe — not entirely without justification — that they are on the wrong side of history. Everything seems to be moving against them and against the dominance they once asserted, and to them, America seems cleaved between a halcyon past and a foreboding future, which may be the real division in America that subsumes so many others.
This sense of dispossession is the what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “deep story” — the story told by one’s feelings as opposed to the story told by the facts. In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild writes that working-class Republicans’ deep story is one of betrayal, neglect, disrespect, suspicion and unfairness.
Such cultural disaffection is what our ahistorical president preys upon. He promised that he would push back history, that he would rescue whites from immigrants and minorities and women and intellectuals and homosexuals. He promised that he would restore the America they believed they had lost.
“Make America Great Again” is a euphemism for “Make America White Again.” It is no coincidence that Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters are white, male, uneducated and evangelical — people for whom history is moving in the wrong direction. They are Trump’s political superfecta.
Which brings me back to the health care bill. The Obamacare repeal effort has always functioned on two levels: the practical and the symbolic. On a practical policy level, Obamacare repeal was never particularly realistic. The original bill had been compromised and jiggered about as much as one could possibly do in an effort to build a government/market hybrid, so the idea of jiggering it any more without just scrapping it for single payer was highly unlikely to make it more effective. After seven years, the only thing Republicans can seem to come up with is undoing Obamacare without really replacing it.
But you could only let it lapse and throw those 22 million off insurance if you were confident the symbolism would supplant the practicality, that it was more important for those beneficiaries of Obamacare to score a victory against the encroaching forces of cultural liberalism than to get decent health care. Symbolically, Obamacare represented change, government interference, social engineering by pointy heads and uncertainty. It was yet one more thing that would push the glorious past farther away.
There is a strange poignancy in this. People will continue to vote enthusiastically for the party that will strip them of their health care so long as that party promises to turn back the clock. So we will get another GOP health care bill and another and another until one finally passes, as I am fairly certain it will. And when it does, the congressional Republicans and their addled president can rejoice because whatever price their constituents pay, they themselves will pay none.
People will continue to vote enthusiastically for the party that will strip them of their health care so long as that party promises to turn back the clock.
BY NEAL GABLER
If you want to calibrate just how bad the Senate Republican health care bill is, you don’t need the Congressional Budget Office telling you that 22 million Americans would lose their insurance. Look no further than Susan Collins. The bill is so god-awful that the Republican senator from Maine, whom I lacerated last week for always fretting and dithering over her party’s initiatives only to support them in the end, wouldn’t even vote to bring it to the floor.
Of course, Collins being Collins, she says she is open to negotiations, and I suspect Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will make a concession on Collins’ precious Health Savings Accounts. Whether the opposition of Collins and others ultimately sinks the bill remains to be seen, though I wouldn’t count on it. The vote postponement notwithstanding, Republicans being Republicans are going to resurrect it with nips and tucks for many more go-rounds, since Republicans are absolutely determined to savage Medicaid and ultimately destroy it. Stay tuned.
Since the vast majority of the public loathe the GOP bill, and since it has been universally panned in the media and by just about every stakeholder, you have to wonder how the GOP can keep flogging it. The answer is that they clearly feel there will be no political consequences for doing so, and they may be right. Republican Dean Heller, who came out against it this week, represents Nevada, a blue state with a heavy Medicaid enrollment, so he is unlikely to be wooed, but among Republicans running in 2018, he is virtually alone. (He was not spared, however, from attacks from a Trump super PAC, and he is almost certain to be primaried from the right.) No one else in the party seems to fear retribution as much as they fear bucking conservative ideology.
Take West Virginia. Thirty percent of West Virginians — some 554,000 people — are dependent on Medicaid, which the Republican Senate bill will effectively decimate, and the state has a serious opioid problem, which Obamacare addresses. Still, West Virginia gave Trump, who campaigned on the promise to repeal Obamacare, a whopping 42-point margin of victory, and there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it will vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime.
Or take Kentucky. Out of a population of 4.5 million, 1.3 million are on Medicaid. And yet its senior senator, McConnell, is the architect of the plan to reduce Medicaid, and the state’s other senator, Rand Paul, has no qualms about saying he wants to destroy Medicaid altogether. Once again, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that either McConnell or Paul will lose re-election.
Politics is supposed to operate on the principle that if an officeholder works against the interest of his or her constituents, those constituents will take revenge by booting him or her out of office. That’s just common sense. And it’s also common sense that health care should be a prime consideration for those constituents. When Republicans propose huge tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously cutting health benefits for the poor and the working and middle classes, or when they propose a bill that drives up premiums and deductibles while shredding the safety net, the logical result would be a revolt. Instead, these folks keep coming back to the party, which is why the GOP can keep coming back to its Draconian health care plan.
How do you parse this? You could say that people don’t understand their self-interest very well, and there is certainly some truth to that. A Kaiser Health poll shows that a bare 51 percent of Americans now support Obamacare, which is a high-water mark, while 74 percent have a favorable view of Medicaid, the very linchpin of Obamacare. That suggests they don’t understand how inextricably Obamacare and Medicaid are bound.
Or you can say, as I wrote here, that many of these folks believe in stripping government benefits from the seemingly undeserving, even if doing so hurts themselves.
Yet it isn’t the economy, stupid, or health care reform that drives these voters to Republicanism. It is their perception of the march of history. They have come to believe that they are a persecuted white majority, and that grievance supersedes everything else, including their own health insurance. Republicans count on that.
Three recent surveys support this explanation. One, a recent post-mortem of the 2016 election by the non-partisan Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, reports that Trump’s vote, especially among whites, had far less to do with economic distress than with nativism, racism, sexism and Islamophobia — what you might call cultural distress.
Another analysis conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic magazine also found that economic distress did not correlate with Trump support. In fact, it was the opposite: “Those who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape.” But those who felt culturally dispossessed and felt that the country needed to be safeguarded against immigrant invasion were 3.5 times as likely to support Trump as those who felt differently.
If you still don’t think that lots of working-class white Americans feel culturally aggrieved, consider another survey in February by PRRI finding that white evangelicals believe Christians are more discriminated against in America than Muslims, with 57 percent asserting “a lot” of discrimination against Christians.
This jibes with an earlier study from Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Samuel Sommers of Tufts that showed deep white belief in “reverse racism” coupled with the belief that African-American gains come at the expense of white losses.
On its face, of course, this is absurd. There is virtually no metric — be it education, wages, wealth, social mobility or health — in which African-Americans have it better than whites. (I won’t even address Islamophobia versus an animus against Christianity because it is beyond absurd.) But we now generally accept that many whites, especially older, uneducated and religious whites, believe — not entirely without justification — that they are on the wrong side of history. Everything seems to be moving against them and against the dominance they once asserted, and to them, America seems cleaved between a halcyon past and a foreboding future, which may be the real division in America that subsumes so many others.
This sense of dispossession is the what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “deep story” — the story told by one’s feelings as opposed to the story told by the facts. In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild writes that working-class Republicans’ deep story is one of betrayal, neglect, disrespect, suspicion and unfairness.
Such cultural disaffection is what our ahistorical president preys upon. He promised that he would push back history, that he would rescue whites from immigrants and minorities and women and intellectuals and homosexuals. He promised that he would restore the America they believed they had lost.
“Make America Great Again” is a euphemism for “Make America White Again.” It is no coincidence that Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters are white, male, uneducated and evangelical — people for whom history is moving in the wrong direction. They are Trump’s political superfecta.
Which brings me back to the health care bill. The Obamacare repeal effort has always functioned on two levels: the practical and the symbolic. On a practical policy level, Obamacare repeal was never particularly realistic. The original bill had been compromised and jiggered about as much as one could possibly do in an effort to build a government/market hybrid, so the idea of jiggering it any more without just scrapping it for single payer was highly unlikely to make it more effective. After seven years, the only thing Republicans can seem to come up with is undoing Obamacare without really replacing it.
But you could only let it lapse and throw those 22 million off insurance if you were confident the symbolism would supplant the practicality, that it was more important for those beneficiaries of Obamacare to score a victory against the encroaching forces of cultural liberalism than to get decent health care. Symbolically, Obamacare represented change, government interference, social engineering by pointy heads and uncertainty. It was yet one more thing that would push the glorious past farther away.
There is a strange poignancy in this. People will continue to vote enthusiastically for the party that will strip them of their health care so long as that party promises to turn back the clock. So we will get another GOP health care bill and another and another until one finally passes, as I am fairly certain it will. And when it does, the congressional Republicans and their addled president can rejoice because whatever price their constituents pay, they themselves will pay none.
White Supremacy and Armed Insurrection
NRA Issues Call for White Supremacy and Armed Insurrection
The gun lobby's new "recruitment ad" is really a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, deliberately crafted to stir anger and fear.
BY BILL MOYERS AND MICHAEL WINSHIP
Take a look at the ad below and ask whether the National Rifle Association can go any lower. Ponder this flagrant call for violence, this insidious advocacy of hate delivered with a sneer, this threat of civil war, this despicable use of propaganda to arouse rebellion against the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.
On the surface this is a recruitment video for the National Rifle Association. But what you are really about to see is a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, each word and image deliberately chosen to stir the feral instincts of troubled souls who lash out in anger and fear.
Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.
“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”
Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.
It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Watching this expertly produced ad, we thought of how the Nazis produced slick propaganda like this to demonize the Jews, round up gypsies and homosexuals, foment mobs, burn books, crush critics, justify torture and incite support for state violence.
It’s the crack in the Liberty Bell, this ad: the dropped stitch in the American flag, the dregs at the bottom of the cup of freedom. It’s a Trump-sized lie invoked to bolster his base, discredit critics, end dissent. Joseph McCarthy must be smiling in hell at such a powerful incarnation on earth of his wretched, twisted soul.
With this savage ad, every Democrat, every liberal, every person of color, every immigrant or anyone who carries a protest sign or raises a voice in disagreement becomes a target in the diseased mind of some tormented viewer. Heavily armed Americans are encouraged to lock and load and be ready for the ballistic solution to any who oppose the systematic looting of Washington by an authoritarian regime led by a deeply disturbed barracuda of a man who tweets personal insults, throws tantrums and degrades everything he touches.
Look again at the ad. Ask yourself: What kind of fools are they at the NRA to turn America into a killing ground for sport? To be choked with hate is a terrible fate, and it is worst for those on whom it is visited.
Take one more look, and ask: Why do they get away with it? What is happening to us? How long do we have before the fire this time?
The gun lobby's new "recruitment ad" is really a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, deliberately crafted to stir anger and fear.
BY BILL MOYERS AND MICHAEL WINSHIP
Take a look at the ad below and ask whether the National Rifle Association can go any lower. Ponder this flagrant call for violence, this insidious advocacy of hate delivered with a sneer, this threat of civil war, this despicable use of propaganda to arouse rebellion against the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.
On the surface this is a recruitment video for the National Rifle Association. But what you are really about to see is a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, each word and image deliberately chosen to stir the feral instincts of troubled souls who lash out in anger and fear.
Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.
“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”
Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.
It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Watching this expertly produced ad, we thought of how the Nazis produced slick propaganda like this to demonize the Jews, round up gypsies and homosexuals, foment mobs, burn books, crush critics, justify torture and incite support for state violence.
It’s the crack in the Liberty Bell, this ad: the dropped stitch in the American flag, the dregs at the bottom of the cup of freedom. It’s a Trump-sized lie invoked to bolster his base, discredit critics, end dissent. Joseph McCarthy must be smiling in hell at such a powerful incarnation on earth of his wretched, twisted soul.
With this savage ad, every Democrat, every liberal, every person of color, every immigrant or anyone who carries a protest sign or raises a voice in disagreement becomes a target in the diseased mind of some tormented viewer. Heavily armed Americans are encouraged to lock and load and be ready for the ballistic solution to any who oppose the systematic looting of Washington by an authoritarian regime led by a deeply disturbed barracuda of a man who tweets personal insults, throws tantrums and degrades everything he touches.
Look again at the ad. Ask yourself: What kind of fools are they at the NRA to turn America into a killing ground for sport? To be choked with hate is a terrible fate, and it is worst for those on whom it is visited.
Take one more look, and ask: Why do they get away with it? What is happening to us? How long do we have before the fire this time?
California official bristles
California official bristles at Trump voter fraud panel’s records request
By John Wildermuth
A startling call by a White House commission studying voter fraud in the 2016 election for the name, address, date of birth and partial Social Security number of everyone who has cast a ballot since 2006 has provoked howls of outrage from voting rights advocates across the country and outright defiance from California’s secretary of state.
“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a committee that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” Alex Padilla said in a statement Thursday. “California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”
In May, President Trump formed the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity by executive order, a move he had promised days after his inauguration as part of a “major investigation into voter fraud.”
After November’s election, Trump said, without providing any evidence, that he would have won the popular vote if it weren’t for “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.” He also claimed, also without citing any facts, that as many as 5 million illegal votes were cast.
While Vice President Mike Pence is the chairman of the commission, the letters sent Wednesday to all 50 states were signed by the vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has called for tough new laws that could make it harder for many people — most notably poor, minority and young people — to qualify to cast ballots.
Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, while saying in a statement Thursday that she would share “publicly available information” with the commission, added that Kobach “has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.”
The courts “have repudiated his methods on multiple occasions,” Merrill said. “Given Kobach’s history, we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of the commission.”
Kobach is spreading a wide net for voter information, saying that the data, which he wants by July 14, is needed “to fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.”
While much of the information, including the names and addresses of voters, is publicly available, it is typically kept by individual counties, although since 2016 California has had a statewide voter database.
But Kobach also is requesting information that’s more questionable, such as the last four digits of Social Security numbers, a list of elections individuals have voted in since 2006, information about any felony convictions, military status and more.
The commission also wants the states to provide information about any instances of voter or registration fraud or convictions for election-related crimes since November 2000.
Given Kobach’s record as an election rights hard-liner and Trump’s oft-stated conviction that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, there are real questions about just how independent and unbiased the commission’s investigation will be, said Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
“What’s the reason for getting this information?” she said. “This is a fishing expedition to find something that will allow the federal government to implement laws that shouldn’t be implemented.”
In a tweet, Vanita Gupta, chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was more direct.
“The letter @KrisKobach1787 is sending to states confirms: Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple,” he tweeted.
Virginia has joined California in refusing to provide the voter information. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said there is no evidence of voter fraud in his state.
“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts,” McAuliffe said in a statement Thursday. “At worst it (is) a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”
The commission “is a waste of taxpayer money,” Padilla, a former Democratic legislator, said.
While election officials in other states hedged, saying only that they will provide what information their state voting and privacy laws allow, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, said the state will “offer our support in the collective effort to enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the system.”
It’s impossible to say whether Padilla and McAuliffe will be able to avoid producing any voter information, said Levinson, the election law professor.
“I expect that everything that’s public likely needs to be turned over,” she said. “Anything else, I can see a judge telling the commission, ‘You need to show a reason.’”
If Padilla refuses to follow a court order to produce the information, he could be held in contempt, which possibly could lead to a night in jail.
Given California’s anti-Trump leanings, however, “I imagine (Padilla) would live tweet every step of the way to jail and never have to send out a campaign mailer again,” Levinson said.
It’s just as likely, though, that Kobach would use the refusals as talking points, she said, suggesting that those states “must have something to hide.”
If the states do comply, for the first time it would give the federal government direct access to the records of the more than 200 million people now registered as voters, as well as information about anyone else who has been registered anytime in the past decade. Until now, it has been the individual states that maintained the hold on their own voters’ information.
The commission has suggested that all the voter data collected might be made public, which would provide a “one-stop shop” for anyone seeking to collect and use that trove of information, for good or ill.
Regardless of the final outcome, Kobach’s request alone could have repercussions in future elections, Levinson warned.
“A lot of people already are anxious about voting and even about registering, for no good reason,” she said. With Kobach now calling for all that information to be turned over to a federal committee, “The sheer act of the request could have negative effects on would-be voters.”
By John Wildermuth
A startling call by a White House commission studying voter fraud in the 2016 election for the name, address, date of birth and partial Social Security number of everyone who has cast a ballot since 2006 has provoked howls of outrage from voting rights advocates across the country and outright defiance from California’s secretary of state.
“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a committee that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” Alex Padilla said in a statement Thursday. “California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”
In May, President Trump formed the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity by executive order, a move he had promised days after his inauguration as part of a “major investigation into voter fraud.”
After November’s election, Trump said, without providing any evidence, that he would have won the popular vote if it weren’t for “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.” He also claimed, also without citing any facts, that as many as 5 million illegal votes were cast.
While Vice President Mike Pence is the chairman of the commission, the letters sent Wednesday to all 50 states were signed by the vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has called for tough new laws that could make it harder for many people — most notably poor, minority and young people — to qualify to cast ballots.
Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, while saying in a statement Thursday that she would share “publicly available information” with the commission, added that Kobach “has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.”
The courts “have repudiated his methods on multiple occasions,” Merrill said. “Given Kobach’s history, we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of the commission.”
Kobach is spreading a wide net for voter information, saying that the data, which he wants by July 14, is needed “to fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.”
While much of the information, including the names and addresses of voters, is publicly available, it is typically kept by individual counties, although since 2016 California has had a statewide voter database.
But Kobach also is requesting information that’s more questionable, such as the last four digits of Social Security numbers, a list of elections individuals have voted in since 2006, information about any felony convictions, military status and more.
The commission also wants the states to provide information about any instances of voter or registration fraud or convictions for election-related crimes since November 2000.
Given Kobach’s record as an election rights hard-liner and Trump’s oft-stated conviction that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, there are real questions about just how independent and unbiased the commission’s investigation will be, said Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
“What’s the reason for getting this information?” she said. “This is a fishing expedition to find something that will allow the federal government to implement laws that shouldn’t be implemented.”
In a tweet, Vanita Gupta, chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was more direct.
“The letter @KrisKobach1787 is sending to states confirms: Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple,” he tweeted.
Virginia has joined California in refusing to provide the voter information. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said there is no evidence of voter fraud in his state.
“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts,” McAuliffe said in a statement Thursday. “At worst it (is) a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”
The commission “is a waste of taxpayer money,” Padilla, a former Democratic legislator, said.
While election officials in other states hedged, saying only that they will provide what information their state voting and privacy laws allow, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, said the state will “offer our support in the collective effort to enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the system.”
It’s impossible to say whether Padilla and McAuliffe will be able to avoid producing any voter information, said Levinson, the election law professor.
“I expect that everything that’s public likely needs to be turned over,” she said. “Anything else, I can see a judge telling the commission, ‘You need to show a reason.’”
If Padilla refuses to follow a court order to produce the information, he could be held in contempt, which possibly could lead to a night in jail.
Given California’s anti-Trump leanings, however, “I imagine (Padilla) would live tweet every step of the way to jail and never have to send out a campaign mailer again,” Levinson said.
It’s just as likely, though, that Kobach would use the refusals as talking points, she said, suggesting that those states “must have something to hide.”
If the states do comply, for the first time it would give the federal government direct access to the records of the more than 200 million people now registered as voters, as well as information about anyone else who has been registered anytime in the past decade. Until now, it has been the individual states that maintained the hold on their own voters’ information.
The commission has suggested that all the voter data collected might be made public, which would provide a “one-stop shop” for anyone seeking to collect and use that trove of information, for good or ill.
Regardless of the final outcome, Kobach’s request alone could have repercussions in future elections, Levinson warned.
“A lot of people already are anxious about voting and even about registering, for no good reason,” she said. With Kobach now calling for all that information to be turned over to a federal committee, “The sheer act of the request could have negative effects on would-be voters.”
Takes feud into second day...
Trump takes MSNBC feud into second day with tabloid charge
By Arit John and Elizabeth Titus
President Donald Trump continued his feud with two MSNBC hosts on Friday, alleging one of them asked him to intervene to stop a story in the National Enquirer tabloid.
The latest skirmish began Thursday when Trump said the hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, tried to join him at Mar-a-Lago last winter while Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."
His attack sparked outrage among Republican lawmakers who said he was behaving beneath the dignity of his office and distracting from their legislative agenda, including repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to negotiate a compromise on his health bill by the end of the week as Republicans seek to fulfill a major campaign promise.
The hosts on Friday said in a Washington Post op-ed it was "false" they asked to join Trump at his Florida resort three nights in a row around New Year's Eve, "laughable" that Trump says he refused to see them, and "a lie" that Brzezinski was badly bleeding from the cosmetic surgery Trump claimed.
They also said top White House officials told them the Enquirer "was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas."
Trump said Friday on Twitter that Scarborough "called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no!" Scarborough responded on the social-media network that it was "yet another lie."
Trump has a history with the tabloid: He's written first-person essays for the outlet, which endorsed him for president, held its 90th birthday party at his SoHo hotel in New York, and is published by his friend David Pecker.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump praised the tabloid and trumpeted its claim that the father of one of his political rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz, had been photographed with John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald -- a claim Cruz denied and the nonpartisan fact-checker PolitiFact rated a "pants on fire" inaccuracy.
On air Friday prior to Trump's Enquirer tweet, Brzezinski called the incident "fascinating" and "sad for our country."
"We're OK, the country's not," Scarborough said. "Yesterday was just another example of how deeply personal he is. He attacks women, because he fears women."
The hosts said in their op-ed that while it's "no one's business," Trump's attack "compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift" and "did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret."
Trump's treatment of female critics -- which was a recurring issue during the 2016 campaign -- was also highlighted by some of the lawmakers who denounced his comments Thursday.
"This is not OK," Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, tweeted. "As a female in politics I am often criticized for my looks. We should be working to empower women."
The White House defended Trump's comments about the hosts. The American people chose to elect "a fighter" and "knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump," spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday.
First lady Melania Trump's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said, "As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder."
By Arit John and Elizabeth Titus
President Donald Trump continued his feud with two MSNBC hosts on Friday, alleging one of them asked him to intervene to stop a story in the National Enquirer tabloid.
The latest skirmish began Thursday when Trump said the hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, tried to join him at Mar-a-Lago last winter while Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."
His attack sparked outrage among Republican lawmakers who said he was behaving beneath the dignity of his office and distracting from their legislative agenda, including repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to negotiate a compromise on his health bill by the end of the week as Republicans seek to fulfill a major campaign promise.
The hosts on Friday said in a Washington Post op-ed it was "false" they asked to join Trump at his Florida resort three nights in a row around New Year's Eve, "laughable" that Trump says he refused to see them, and "a lie" that Brzezinski was badly bleeding from the cosmetic surgery Trump claimed.
They also said top White House officials told them the Enquirer "was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas."
Trump said Friday on Twitter that Scarborough "called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no!" Scarborough responded on the social-media network that it was "yet another lie."
Trump has a history with the tabloid: He's written first-person essays for the outlet, which endorsed him for president, held its 90th birthday party at his SoHo hotel in New York, and is published by his friend David Pecker.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump praised the tabloid and trumpeted its claim that the father of one of his political rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz, had been photographed with John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald -- a claim Cruz denied and the nonpartisan fact-checker PolitiFact rated a "pants on fire" inaccuracy.
On air Friday prior to Trump's Enquirer tweet, Brzezinski called the incident "fascinating" and "sad for our country."
"We're OK, the country's not," Scarborough said. "Yesterday was just another example of how deeply personal he is. He attacks women, because he fears women."
The hosts said in their op-ed that while it's "no one's business," Trump's attack "compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift" and "did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret."
Trump's treatment of female critics -- which was a recurring issue during the 2016 campaign -- was also highlighted by some of the lawmakers who denounced his comments Thursday.
"This is not OK," Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, tweeted. "As a female in politics I am often criticized for my looks. We should be working to empower women."
The White House defended Trump's comments about the hosts. The American people chose to elect "a fighter" and "knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump," spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday.
First lady Melania Trump's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said, "As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder."
Democrats Demand Investigation
House Democrats Demand Investigation of Jeff Sessions
They want the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to examine whether the attorney general violated his recusal promise.
DAN FRIEDMAN
Democrats on two House committees want the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to investigate whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions violated his pledge to recuse himself from any investigations into the 2016 election when he participated in the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Comey had been in charge of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the election and potential coordination between associates of Donald Trump and the Kremlin.
“The actions of Attorney General Sessions in collaborating directly with President Trump to fire Director Comey reflect a lapse in judgment by our nation’s top law enforcement official and appear to violate multiple promises made by the Attorney General and his aides,” says the letter sent Thursday to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. It was signed by Democrats on the judiciary and oversight committees.
Horowitz’s office may already be looking into the matter. The IG’s office said in January that it is looking into Comey’s actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email while she was Secretary of State. That IG probe includes Comey’s decision to hold a press conference last year detailing why he did not believe believe Clinton should face charges and his October 28 letter to members of Congress—sent just days before the presidential election—announcing that the FBI had reopened the Clinton investigation.
The IG’s office has not commented further on that probe or said if it is looking into the actions of Sessions and other DOJ officials related Comey’s firing. But the January announcement noted the office “will consider including” in the probe “other issues that may arise during the course of the review,” suggesting Sessions’ role in Comey’s ouster may already be part of the probe.
Other lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) have already asked Horowitz to look into Sessions’ recusal. But Thursday’s letter, signed by 35 House members, adds pressure for the IG to weigh in on the attorney general’s conduct.
On March 2, Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from any “existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.”
The announcement came after news broke that Sessions, who was a leading Trump supporter and confidante during the campaign, had falsely told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had not had contact with Russian officials during the election contest.
Sessions this month provided a narrow interpretation of that recusal promise.
“I do not believe that it is a sound position to say that, if you’re recused for a single case involving any one of the great agencies like DEA or US Marshals or ATF that are part of the Department of Justice, you can’t make a decision about the leadership in that agency,” Sessions told the Senate intelligence committee at a June 13 hearing.
Trump has suggested his firing of Comey was at least partly related to the Russia investigation. Sessions’ role in the matter included signing off on a letter by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein making a case for firing Comey based on his handling of the Clinton investigation.
The Democrats’ letter says that by broadly rescuing himself from any matters related to the 2016 campaign, Sessions made it irrelevant why Comey was fired.
“Both matters were supposed to be off limits for the Attorney General,” they write.
The letter says they are turning to the IG because the DOJ has failed to respond to inquires about the recusal.
The Democrats cite a law that bars DOJ officials from participating in any investigation which poses a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest. Penalties for violation include termination.
“We ask that your office also provide recommendations you determine are warranted relating to the department’s processes for handling recusals and its administrative procedures for handling related disciplinary actions,” they write.
They want the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to examine whether the attorney general violated his recusal promise.
DAN FRIEDMAN
Democrats on two House committees want the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to investigate whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions violated his pledge to recuse himself from any investigations into the 2016 election when he participated in the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Comey had been in charge of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the election and potential coordination between associates of Donald Trump and the Kremlin.
“The actions of Attorney General Sessions in collaborating directly with President Trump to fire Director Comey reflect a lapse in judgment by our nation’s top law enforcement official and appear to violate multiple promises made by the Attorney General and his aides,” says the letter sent Thursday to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. It was signed by Democrats on the judiciary and oversight committees.
Horowitz’s office may already be looking into the matter. The IG’s office said in January that it is looking into Comey’s actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email while she was Secretary of State. That IG probe includes Comey’s decision to hold a press conference last year detailing why he did not believe believe Clinton should face charges and his October 28 letter to members of Congress—sent just days before the presidential election—announcing that the FBI had reopened the Clinton investigation.
The IG’s office has not commented further on that probe or said if it is looking into the actions of Sessions and other DOJ officials related Comey’s firing. But the January announcement noted the office “will consider including” in the probe “other issues that may arise during the course of the review,” suggesting Sessions’ role in Comey’s ouster may already be part of the probe.
Other lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) have already asked Horowitz to look into Sessions’ recusal. But Thursday’s letter, signed by 35 House members, adds pressure for the IG to weigh in on the attorney general’s conduct.
On March 2, Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from any “existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.”
The announcement came after news broke that Sessions, who was a leading Trump supporter and confidante during the campaign, had falsely told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had not had contact with Russian officials during the election contest.
Sessions this month provided a narrow interpretation of that recusal promise.
“I do not believe that it is a sound position to say that, if you’re recused for a single case involving any one of the great agencies like DEA or US Marshals or ATF that are part of the Department of Justice, you can’t make a decision about the leadership in that agency,” Sessions told the Senate intelligence committee at a June 13 hearing.
Trump has suggested his firing of Comey was at least partly related to the Russia investigation. Sessions’ role in the matter included signing off on a letter by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein making a case for firing Comey based on his handling of the Clinton investigation.
The Democrats’ letter says that by broadly rescuing himself from any matters related to the 2016 campaign, Sessions made it irrelevant why Comey was fired.
“Both matters were supposed to be off limits for the Attorney General,” they write.
The letter says they are turning to the IG because the DOJ has failed to respond to inquires about the recusal.
The Democrats cite a law that bars DOJ officials from participating in any investigation which poses a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest. Penalties for violation include termination.
“We ask that your office also provide recommendations you determine are warranted relating to the department’s processes for handling recusals and its administrative procedures for handling related disciplinary actions,” they write.
What Orangutan's eat...
If You Want to Understand Donald Trump, Pay Attention to What He Eats
His love for well-done steak and iceberg lettuce says a lot about his politics.
JENNY LUNA
As President Donald Trump adapts to his new life as the leader of the country, his food choices have remained pretty stodgy. Steaks doused in ketchup, chocolate soufflé, wedges of iceberg lettuce served with creamy dressing: “He basically has the eating habits of someone who was spending lots of time and money in fine-dining establishments in the early ’80s and late ’70s,” said Slate political correspondent Jamelle Bouie on our recent episode of our food politics podcast.
What do these tastes tell us about the president’s politics? Bouie had some thoughts: “He is someone who does not like change,” he said. “Someone who, you might say, has a core immaturity about him, who does not see the value in seeking out new experiences or even trying to understand them.”
To better understand Trump’s weird eating habits, take a stroll through some of the weirdest food moments from the president’s past:
1995
Several years after their divorce, Donald Trump and his former wife, Ivana, appear in a Pizza Hut commercial. In the ad, Trump jokes about secretly eating pizza “crust first” in a penthouse suite with Ivana. “Let ’em talk,” he tells her.
2002
In a commercial set in what appears to be a New York City high-rise, a darker-haired Trump asks a McDonald’s mascot how the company pulls off such a stellar deal: selling the Big n’ Tasty for just a buck. “You’re a man of few words,” Trump tells the purple mascot; “I like that.”
2004
In his book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, he lists one of his favorite Mar-a-Lago meals as yellow heirloom tomato gazpacho with summer squash and lingonberry sorbet. He offers some dieting advice: “If you eat the best foods and watch your waistline, you’ll begin to look and feel great in no time.” The key to the “Mar-a-Lago Diet,” he writes, is:
1. It has to be served in a fantastic setting.
2. It has to look fantastic.
3. It has to taste incredible.
4. It cannot make you gain wait.
Easy, right?
2007
Trump enters a partnership with Buckhead Beef to sell his patented Trump Steaks. “When it comes to great steaks, I’ve just raised the stakes!” he boasted. As detailed in Think Progress‘ “definitive history” of the product, Trump Steaks were for sale in the June 2007 Sharper Image catalog for $999 for 24 burgers and 16 steaks. Reviews varied; one online reviewer complained that the Angus Beef Steakburgers were “really greasy, have no flavor, over-priced and just gross!!”
2009
Trump licenses his name to Ideal Health, which rebrands and becomes the Trump Network. “The Trump Network wants to give millions of people renewed hope, and with an exciting plan to opt out of the recession,” he said in a video. The multilevel marketing vitamin and weight-loss company recruits people to sell snacks such as “BBQ puffs,” “Peanut passion bars,” and “Chocolate colossal shakes.” The Washington Post later reports that some salespeople complained to the Federal Trade Commission that they had been taken advantage of; Trump’s attorney told the Post that the Trump Network never received any complaints from the FTC.
2014
Trump addresses the National Press Club about Japan’s refusal to import American crops. “If I was negotiating, I’d say, ‘fellas, you’re gonna take our food and you’re gonna love it.’…You’d have so much food pouring into Japan right now they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
February 2016
At a presidential town hall in South Carolina, Trump reveals that his love for fast food from McDonald’s and Wendy’s isn’t just about its taste: “I like cleanliness and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”
May 2016
Trump goes against his campaign manager’s advice and tweets a photo of himself munching on a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo, accompanied by a note: “I love Hispanics!” Janet MurguÃa, the president and CEO of National Council of La Raza, responds on Twitter: “Eating a taco or wearing a sombrero doesn’t cut it w/ our community.”
August 2016
Trump tweets a photo of himself from his private plane dining on Kentucky Fried Chicken with silverware. Top Chef star Tom Colicchio interpreted the image for us on one of last year’s episodes of Bite: “I think by putting that bucket of chicken on the plane, he was saying, ‘The cultural elites are making fun of your fried chicken and your fast food and I’m embracing it. I’m one of you.'” It remains a mystery whether Trump also uses his own cutlery when munching on Popeye’s or Burger King.
January 12, 2017
Donald Trump gives his first press conference as president-elect and shares some personal information: “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.”
January 20, 2017
Trump’s three-course inaugural luncheon includes Maine lobster, Angus beef, and chocolate soufflé, along with California wines. Six months later, the president has yet to choose a new White House chef.
February 2017
Trump’s first meal out in the nation’s capital consists of a $54 well-done steak, served with ketchup. The press has a heyday, while others, like food writer Frank Bruni, say to leave him alone.
April 2017
Reports of the president’s “Coke button” surface: When Trump presses a red button on the Oval Office desk, a butler appears, cold Coca-Cola in tow.
May 2017
Time reports that during a White House dinner, Trump is served two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, while others at the table get one.
His love for well-done steak and iceberg lettuce says a lot about his politics.
JENNY LUNA
As President Donald Trump adapts to his new life as the leader of the country, his food choices have remained pretty stodgy. Steaks doused in ketchup, chocolate soufflé, wedges of iceberg lettuce served with creamy dressing: “He basically has the eating habits of someone who was spending lots of time and money in fine-dining establishments in the early ’80s and late ’70s,” said Slate political correspondent Jamelle Bouie on our recent episode of our food politics podcast.
What do these tastes tell us about the president’s politics? Bouie had some thoughts: “He is someone who does not like change,” he said. “Someone who, you might say, has a core immaturity about him, who does not see the value in seeking out new experiences or even trying to understand them.”
To better understand Trump’s weird eating habits, take a stroll through some of the weirdest food moments from the president’s past:
1995
Several years after their divorce, Donald Trump and his former wife, Ivana, appear in a Pizza Hut commercial. In the ad, Trump jokes about secretly eating pizza “crust first” in a penthouse suite with Ivana. “Let ’em talk,” he tells her.
2002
In a commercial set in what appears to be a New York City high-rise, a darker-haired Trump asks a McDonald’s mascot how the company pulls off such a stellar deal: selling the Big n’ Tasty for just a buck. “You’re a man of few words,” Trump tells the purple mascot; “I like that.”
2004
In his book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, he lists one of his favorite Mar-a-Lago meals as yellow heirloom tomato gazpacho with summer squash and lingonberry sorbet. He offers some dieting advice: “If you eat the best foods and watch your waistline, you’ll begin to look and feel great in no time.” The key to the “Mar-a-Lago Diet,” he writes, is:
1. It has to be served in a fantastic setting.
2. It has to look fantastic.
3. It has to taste incredible.
4. It cannot make you gain wait.
Easy, right?
2007
Trump enters a partnership with Buckhead Beef to sell his patented Trump Steaks. “When it comes to great steaks, I’ve just raised the stakes!” he boasted. As detailed in Think Progress‘ “definitive history” of the product, Trump Steaks were for sale in the June 2007 Sharper Image catalog for $999 for 24 burgers and 16 steaks. Reviews varied; one online reviewer complained that the Angus Beef Steakburgers were “really greasy, have no flavor, over-priced and just gross!!”
2009
Trump licenses his name to Ideal Health, which rebrands and becomes the Trump Network. “The Trump Network wants to give millions of people renewed hope, and with an exciting plan to opt out of the recession,” he said in a video. The multilevel marketing vitamin and weight-loss company recruits people to sell snacks such as “BBQ puffs,” “Peanut passion bars,” and “Chocolate colossal shakes.” The Washington Post later reports that some salespeople complained to the Federal Trade Commission that they had been taken advantage of; Trump’s attorney told the Post that the Trump Network never received any complaints from the FTC.
2014
Trump addresses the National Press Club about Japan’s refusal to import American crops. “If I was negotiating, I’d say, ‘fellas, you’re gonna take our food and you’re gonna love it.’…You’d have so much food pouring into Japan right now they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
February 2016
At a presidential town hall in South Carolina, Trump reveals that his love for fast food from McDonald’s and Wendy’s isn’t just about its taste: “I like cleanliness and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”
May 2016
Trump goes against his campaign manager’s advice and tweets a photo of himself munching on a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo, accompanied by a note: “I love Hispanics!” Janet MurguÃa, the president and CEO of National Council of La Raza, responds on Twitter: “Eating a taco or wearing a sombrero doesn’t cut it w/ our community.”
August 2016
Trump tweets a photo of himself from his private plane dining on Kentucky Fried Chicken with silverware. Top Chef star Tom Colicchio interpreted the image for us on one of last year’s episodes of Bite: “I think by putting that bucket of chicken on the plane, he was saying, ‘The cultural elites are making fun of your fried chicken and your fast food and I’m embracing it. I’m one of you.'” It remains a mystery whether Trump also uses his own cutlery when munching on Popeye’s or Burger King.
January 12, 2017
Donald Trump gives his first press conference as president-elect and shares some personal information: “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.”
January 20, 2017
Trump’s three-course inaugural luncheon includes Maine lobster, Angus beef, and chocolate soufflé, along with California wines. Six months later, the president has yet to choose a new White House chef.
February 2017
Trump’s first meal out in the nation’s capital consists of a $54 well-done steak, served with ketchup. The press has a heyday, while others, like food writer Frank Bruni, say to leave him alone.
April 2017
Reports of the president’s “Coke button” surface: When Trump presses a red button on the Oval Office desk, a butler appears, cold Coca-Cola in tow.
May 2017
Time reports that during a White House dinner, Trump is served two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, while others at the table get one.
NGC 7814: The Little Sombrero in Pegasus
Point your telescope toward the high flying constellation Pegasus and you can find this expanse of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies. Dominated by NGC 7814, the pretty field of view would almost be covered by a full moon. NGC 7814 is sometimes called the Little Sombrero for its resemblance to the brighter more famous M104, the Sombrero Galaxy. Both Sombrero and Little Sombrero are spiral galaxies seen edge-on, and both have extensive halos and central bulges cut by a thin disk with thinner dust lanes in silhouette. In fact, NGC 7814 is some 40 million light-years away and an estimated 60,000 light-years across. That actually makes the Little Sombrero about the same physical size as its better known namesake, appearing smaller and fainter only because it is farther away. Very faint dwarf galaxies, potentially a satellites of NGC 7814, have been discovered in deep exposures of Little Sombrero.
The fallacy...
The fallacy at the heart of the defense of Trump's tweeting
By Chris Cillizza
On "Good Morning America" Friday, White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway repeatedly insisted that President Trump can and should keep tweeting despite the massive negative blowback from two tweets he sent Thursday attacking Mika Brzezinski's looks and intelligence.
"I like the fact that the president uses a social media platform to connect directly with Americans," Conway told "GMA" host George Stephanapoulos, adding: "I endorse his ability to connect on social media with Americans."
That's been the default position of Trump's aides since he started creating controversy on Twitter, which is to say, since he started using Twitter in his presidential campaign, which is to say, since the first day he announced his run for president.
The argument goes like this: Twitter allows Trump to end-run the media filter. It allows him to speak directly with the public. The only people who oppose his use of Twitter are the media who hate that they can't control him! (Sidebar: Not true!)
"The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media - over 100 million people! I can go around them," Trump tweeted on June 16.
Here's the thing: A series of recent polls suggest that the public -- including lots and lots of Republicans -- don't think Trump's tweets are a good thing. At all.
Six in 10 Americans in a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday said that Trump should stop tweeting from his personal account. Just 32% said he should continue tweeting. Almost half (49%) of self-identified Republicans said Trump should stop tweeting; 43% wanted him to keep at it. That's the first time since Quinnipiac started asking the "tweet" question that more Republicans thought Trump should stop tweeting than thought he should keep it up.
In an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released earlier this week, just 1 in 5 people said they found Trump's tweeting to be "effective and informative" while 69% said it was "reckless and distracting." Among Republicans, 43% called his tweets effective while 41% said they were distracting. Among Trump supporters, 48% opted for effective and 37% said distracting.
The broader point: Even among Trump's most committed supporters, his use of Twitter is something far short of a slam dunk. And Republicans are becoming less and less accepting of his tweets as he continues to send them.
And remember this: These two polls were conducted before Trump's twin tweets about Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough. It's hard to see how, if those same polls were conducted today, the results would look better for Trump. In fact, they would almost certainly look worse.
None of this means Trump is going to stop tweeting. He won't. He likes the ability to drive the daily narrative. He likes the immediate positive feedback he gets from some of his supporters. He likes the thrill of stirring it up. (Trump is, at heart, a provocateur.)
Lots of people -- including his allies, his wife and scores of Republican elected officials -- have told him to tone down (or cut out) his tweets. He hasn't listened. And he won't listen.
But what deserves to be debunked is the idea that the public at large is clamoring for Trump's tweets. Or that the party he represents is cheering on his social media presence. They aren't.
What they are doing is learning to live with something they know they can't change. Toleration is not adulation.
By Chris Cillizza
On "Good Morning America" Friday, White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway repeatedly insisted that President Trump can and should keep tweeting despite the massive negative blowback from two tweets he sent Thursday attacking Mika Brzezinski's looks and intelligence.
"I like the fact that the president uses a social media platform to connect directly with Americans," Conway told "GMA" host George Stephanapoulos, adding: "I endorse his ability to connect on social media with Americans."
That's been the default position of Trump's aides since he started creating controversy on Twitter, which is to say, since he started using Twitter in his presidential campaign, which is to say, since the first day he announced his run for president.
The argument goes like this: Twitter allows Trump to end-run the media filter. It allows him to speak directly with the public. The only people who oppose his use of Twitter are the media who hate that they can't control him! (Sidebar: Not true!)
"The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media - over 100 million people! I can go around them," Trump tweeted on June 16.
Here's the thing: A series of recent polls suggest that the public -- including lots and lots of Republicans -- don't think Trump's tweets are a good thing. At all.
Six in 10 Americans in a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday said that Trump should stop tweeting from his personal account. Just 32% said he should continue tweeting. Almost half (49%) of self-identified Republicans said Trump should stop tweeting; 43% wanted him to keep at it. That's the first time since Quinnipiac started asking the "tweet" question that more Republicans thought Trump should stop tweeting than thought he should keep it up.
In an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released earlier this week, just 1 in 5 people said they found Trump's tweeting to be "effective and informative" while 69% said it was "reckless and distracting." Among Republicans, 43% called his tweets effective while 41% said they were distracting. Among Trump supporters, 48% opted for effective and 37% said distracting.
The broader point: Even among Trump's most committed supporters, his use of Twitter is something far short of a slam dunk. And Republicans are becoming less and less accepting of his tweets as he continues to send them.
And remember this: These two polls were conducted before Trump's twin tweets about Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough. It's hard to see how, if those same polls were conducted today, the results would look better for Trump. In fact, they would almost certainly look worse.
None of this means Trump is going to stop tweeting. He won't. He likes the ability to drive the daily narrative. He likes the immediate positive feedback he gets from some of his supporters. He likes the thrill of stirring it up. (Trump is, at heart, a provocateur.)
Lots of people -- including his allies, his wife and scores of Republican elected officials -- have told him to tone down (or cut out) his tweets. He hasn't listened. And he won't listen.
But what deserves to be debunked is the idea that the public at large is clamoring for Trump's tweets. Or that the party he represents is cheering on his social media presence. They aren't.
What they are doing is learning to live with something they know they can't change. Toleration is not adulation.
Insane Orangutan...
Opinion: Donald Trump is not well
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
President Donald Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America's leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, "Morning Joe."
The president's unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika "neurotic" and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.
The president's unhealthy obsession with "Morning Joe" does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs. Despite his constant claims that he no longer watches the show, the president's closest advisers tell us otherwise. That is unfortunate. We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to "Fox & Friends."
For those lucky enough to miss Thursday's West Wing temper tantrum, the president continued a year-long habit of lashing out at "Morning Joe" while claiming to never watch it. During his early-morning tirade, Mr. Trump spit out schoolyard insults about "low I.Q. Crazy Mika," "Psycho Joe" and much worse. He also fit a flurry of falsehoods in his two-part tweetstorm.
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar- a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family's living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year's Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
Mr. Trump also claims that Mika was "bleeding badly from a face-lift." That is also a lie.
Putting aside Mr. Trump's never-ending obsession with women's blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal. And though it is no one's business, the president's petulant personal attack against yet another woman's looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching "Morning Joe" on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.
More significant is Mr. Trump's continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly, to his fat- shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women's genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples.
It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women's empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
President Donald Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America's leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, "Morning Joe."
The president's unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika "neurotic" and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.
The president's unhealthy obsession with "Morning Joe" does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs. Despite his constant claims that he no longer watches the show, the president's closest advisers tell us otherwise. That is unfortunate. We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to "Fox & Friends."
For those lucky enough to miss Thursday's West Wing temper tantrum, the president continued a year-long habit of lashing out at "Morning Joe" while claiming to never watch it. During his early-morning tirade, Mr. Trump spit out schoolyard insults about "low I.Q. Crazy Mika," "Psycho Joe" and much worse. He also fit a flurry of falsehoods in his two-part tweetstorm.
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar- a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family's living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year's Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
Mr. Trump also claims that Mika was "bleeding badly from a face-lift." That is also a lie.
Putting aside Mr. Trump's never-ending obsession with women's blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal. And though it is no one's business, the president's petulant personal attack against yet another woman's looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching "Morning Joe" on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.
More significant is Mr. Trump's continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly, to his fat- shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women's genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples.
It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women's empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.
Theresa May’s first big test
5 takeaways on Theresa May’s first big test in parliament
The government passes the queen’s speech but faces a host of problems — and they aren’t going away.
By TOM MCTAGUE AND ANNABELLE DICKSON
Britain may have a government but how much control it has over parliament remains to be seen.
On Thursday evening, MPs voted by 323 to 309 — that’s a majority of 14 — in favor of the queen’s speech setting out the government’s pared-back, Brexit-focused agenda for the next two years.
A government that cannot pass a queen’s speech cannot govern, so it was an important milestone which could set Prime Minister Theresa May on course to stay in power for long enough to oversee Britain’s exit from the European Union.
But in order to do so the prime minister was forced to offer a major concession — a promise to provide funding for women forced to travel from Northern Ireland to Britain for an abortion. Abortion in Northern Ireland is only permitted to save the life of the mother, and if a Northern Irish woman travels to England for an abortion, she has to pay for it. A Labour backbench MP put forward an amendment calling for abortions to be free on the NHS for Northern Irish women and the government was almost certain to have suffered defeat, forcing it to make the last-minute financial offer.
It was an inauspicious start for a government which looks anything but strong and stable.
Here are five takeaways from another day of drama in the British parliament.
1. MPs empowered
It takes just seven rebel Tories and a united opposition to defeat the government. That is the new reality for the prime minister as she seeks to push through the most ambitious program of legislation in a parliamentary session in decades.
Labour’s Stella Creasy’s amendment ensuring Northern Irish women can have abortions for free in England was selected for a vote by the Speaker John Bercow — a man who knows how to cause mischief — and backed by more than 50 MPs from across the main political parties.
It was an example of how MPs can make life very difficult for the government over the next two years.
The government needs to pass eight separate pieces of legislation to smooth Britain’s exit from the European Union — including the central “repeal bill” downloading EU law on to the U.K.’s statute books.
A smart opposition could force concessions left, right and center.
2. Labour still split
Despite Jeremy Corbyn’s new-found authority, there remains a sizable chunk of his parliamentary party willing to defy him.
An amendment to the queen’s speech laid down by centrist former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna on Thursday was backed by 49 Labour MPs, despite Corbyn instructing his party to abstain. Four shadow ministers were sacked from the frontbench for defying the party line — Catherine West, Ruth Cadbury and Andy Slaughter. A fourth, Daniel Zeichner, resigned in order to vote against the leadership.
The vote was the clearest indication since the election that the split in the party over Europe and Corbyn’s leadership is far from healed.
Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are broadly keeping quiet for now, but privately expect battle to recommence with the leadership.
“He will overplay his hand,” said one Labour MP, who wished to remain anonymous. “He won’t be able to help himself.”
3. Five years to go
The PM will arrive at her next audience with the queen having delivered on her promise to form a government — and it withstood its first key parliamentary test.
May can be heartened that Conservative MPs fell into line relatively painlessly. Nobody wanted the infamy of bringing down the government and the fear of another general election, and potential Labour victory, has tempered post-election anger.
But to get to this point needed money, lots of it. The £1 billion “confidence and supply” deal bought the backing of 10 Democratic Unionist Party MPs, who were true to their word and supported the Tories.
To get to the end of this parliament, May (or the next Conservative leader, although the party doesn’t have an obvious election-winning personality to replace May) will likely face new demands from the DUP in exchange for queen’s speech support in two years’ time, after Britain leaves the EU.
Tory MP Bernard Jenkin summed it up by saying, “This is going to be the pattern. There were no nail-biting votes but the government will keep an ear open to genuine issues which backbenchers are concerned about.”
A week is currently a very long time in British politics, and five years is an eternity.
4. Single market is dead
The bell has finally tolled for Britain’s membership of the single market.
A strengthened Corbyn whipped his MPs to abstain on arch-moderate Umunna’s amendment calling for the U.K. to stay in the single market. The majority obeyed.
On the other side of the House of Commons, a Tory rebellion never materialized and the single marketeers’ short-lived post-election hope that Chancellor Philip Hammond’s renewed swagger might see a government change of heart was swiftly dashed.
While the dial has been turned down on the “no deal is better than a bad deal” rhetoric and up on talk of avoiding a cliff edge, Hammond has reiterated in recent weeks that Britain will be leaving the single market. He is pushing for a transition on customs arrangements.
With no appetite to fight a single market exit from the official opposition or internal opposition, Thursday marked the final nail in the coffin for hope of a single market change of heart.
5. Bye bye ‘Singapore Britain’
Twice in two days Corbyn attempted to embarrass the government on austerity. It was the subject he fought the election on and the subject his team believe will take him to Downing Street — even if they don’t all share his optimism that it will be in six months.
On Wednesday, a Labour amendment aiming to lift the cap on public sector pay increases was defeated by the government but not before causing chaos in Downing Street, headlines about a “U-turn on a U-turn,” and Tory MPs hitting the airwaves siding with Labour. It was smart politics by Corbyn.
On Thursday, another amendment by Corbyn, this time essentially calling for Labour’s manifesto to be enacted, was defeated without as much fanfare.
Despite Corbyn’s failure to win over any Tory rebels to his side on the amendments, the pressure to soften — or end — government austerity has intensified dramatically as a result of his election performance.
A radical anti-austerity Labour Party denying the Tories a majority has changed the rules of the game. The first victim is the government’s (already hard-to-believe) threat to rip up Britain’s European-style economy in the event of a “punishment Brexit” from Brussels. The idea of turning into a low-tax, small state Singapore is now, in effect, dead.
Related stories on these topics:
The government passes the queen’s speech but faces a host of problems — and they aren’t going away.
By TOM MCTAGUE AND ANNABELLE DICKSON
Britain may have a government but how much control it has over parliament remains to be seen.
On Thursday evening, MPs voted by 323 to 309 — that’s a majority of 14 — in favor of the queen’s speech setting out the government’s pared-back, Brexit-focused agenda for the next two years.
A government that cannot pass a queen’s speech cannot govern, so it was an important milestone which could set Prime Minister Theresa May on course to stay in power for long enough to oversee Britain’s exit from the European Union.
But in order to do so the prime minister was forced to offer a major concession — a promise to provide funding for women forced to travel from Northern Ireland to Britain for an abortion. Abortion in Northern Ireland is only permitted to save the life of the mother, and if a Northern Irish woman travels to England for an abortion, she has to pay for it. A Labour backbench MP put forward an amendment calling for abortions to be free on the NHS for Northern Irish women and the government was almost certain to have suffered defeat, forcing it to make the last-minute financial offer.
It was an inauspicious start for a government which looks anything but strong and stable.
Here are five takeaways from another day of drama in the British parliament.
1. MPs empowered
It takes just seven rebel Tories and a united opposition to defeat the government. That is the new reality for the prime minister as she seeks to push through the most ambitious program of legislation in a parliamentary session in decades.
Labour’s Stella Creasy’s amendment ensuring Northern Irish women can have abortions for free in England was selected for a vote by the Speaker John Bercow — a man who knows how to cause mischief — and backed by more than 50 MPs from across the main political parties.
It was an example of how MPs can make life very difficult for the government over the next two years.
The government needs to pass eight separate pieces of legislation to smooth Britain’s exit from the European Union — including the central “repeal bill” downloading EU law on to the U.K.’s statute books.
A smart opposition could force concessions left, right and center.
2. Labour still split
Despite Jeremy Corbyn’s new-found authority, there remains a sizable chunk of his parliamentary party willing to defy him.
An amendment to the queen’s speech laid down by centrist former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna on Thursday was backed by 49 Labour MPs, despite Corbyn instructing his party to abstain. Four shadow ministers were sacked from the frontbench for defying the party line — Catherine West, Ruth Cadbury and Andy Slaughter. A fourth, Daniel Zeichner, resigned in order to vote against the leadership.
The vote was the clearest indication since the election that the split in the party over Europe and Corbyn’s leadership is far from healed.
Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are broadly keeping quiet for now, but privately expect battle to recommence with the leadership.
“He will overplay his hand,” said one Labour MP, who wished to remain anonymous. “He won’t be able to help himself.”
3. Five years to go
The PM will arrive at her next audience with the queen having delivered on her promise to form a government — and it withstood its first key parliamentary test.
May can be heartened that Conservative MPs fell into line relatively painlessly. Nobody wanted the infamy of bringing down the government and the fear of another general election, and potential Labour victory, has tempered post-election anger.
But to get to this point needed money, lots of it. The £1 billion “confidence and supply” deal bought the backing of 10 Democratic Unionist Party MPs, who were true to their word and supported the Tories.
To get to the end of this parliament, May (or the next Conservative leader, although the party doesn’t have an obvious election-winning personality to replace May) will likely face new demands from the DUP in exchange for queen’s speech support in two years’ time, after Britain leaves the EU.
Tory MP Bernard Jenkin summed it up by saying, “This is going to be the pattern. There were no nail-biting votes but the government will keep an ear open to genuine issues which backbenchers are concerned about.”
A week is currently a very long time in British politics, and five years is an eternity.
4. Single market is dead
The bell has finally tolled for Britain’s membership of the single market.
A strengthened Corbyn whipped his MPs to abstain on arch-moderate Umunna’s amendment calling for the U.K. to stay in the single market. The majority obeyed.
On the other side of the House of Commons, a Tory rebellion never materialized and the single marketeers’ short-lived post-election hope that Chancellor Philip Hammond’s renewed swagger might see a government change of heart was swiftly dashed.
While the dial has been turned down on the “no deal is better than a bad deal” rhetoric and up on talk of avoiding a cliff edge, Hammond has reiterated in recent weeks that Britain will be leaving the single market. He is pushing for a transition on customs arrangements.
With no appetite to fight a single market exit from the official opposition or internal opposition, Thursday marked the final nail in the coffin for hope of a single market change of heart.
5. Bye bye ‘Singapore Britain’
Twice in two days Corbyn attempted to embarrass the government on austerity. It was the subject he fought the election on and the subject his team believe will take him to Downing Street — even if they don’t all share his optimism that it will be in six months.
On Wednesday, a Labour amendment aiming to lift the cap on public sector pay increases was defeated by the government but not before causing chaos in Downing Street, headlines about a “U-turn on a U-turn,” and Tory MPs hitting the airwaves siding with Labour. It was smart politics by Corbyn.
On Thursday, another amendment by Corbyn, this time essentially calling for Labour’s manifesto to be enacted, was defeated without as much fanfare.
Despite Corbyn’s failure to win over any Tory rebels to his side on the amendments, the pressure to soften — or end — government austerity has intensified dramatically as a result of his election performance.
A radical anti-austerity Labour Party denying the Tories a majority has changed the rules of the game. The first victim is the government’s (already hard-to-believe) threat to rip up Britain’s European-style economy in the event of a “punishment Brexit” from Brussels. The idea of turning into a low-tax, small state Singapore is now, in effect, dead.
Related stories on these topics:
Bumbling Hothead
Saudi Arabia’s New Crown Prince Is a Bumbling Hothead. Trump Needs to Treat Him Like One.
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY
President Donald Trump, like a star-struck teenager, has been swooning over King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his 31-year-old son and new crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, known to U.S. diplomats as MBS. Since FDR, American presidents have been enamored by Saudi royals, but in this case the infatuation may be downright dangerous. The young prince who would be king might not only get his own country into heaps of trouble, he could also drag the United States down with it.
It’s not just Trump who’s been heaping praise on the new crown prince. MBS has also been hailed by the likes of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the German foreign minister, the IMF and the head of the World Bank. As the architect of Vision 2030, a galactically ambitious plan to transform and diversify the Saudi economy, MBS is seen as a potentially modernizing, dynamic and risk-ready monarch who has broken with the cautious traditionalism and risk-aversion of aging Saudi kings.
Who knows whether or not the young king will be able to live up to these expectations on the domestic side. Countervailing forces and challenges might limit his horizons. But one thing is already stunningly clear when it comes to his handling of foreign policy: In two short years, as the deputy crown prince and defense minister, MBS has driven the Kingdom into a series of royal blunders in Yemen, Qatar and Iran, and he has likely over promised what Saudi Arabia is able and willing to do on the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking front. Far from demonstrating judgment and experience, he’s proven to be reckless and impulsive, with little sense of how to link tactics and strategy. And sadly, he’s managed to implicate and drag the new Trump administration into some of these misadventures, too.
We don’t blame the crown prince for snookering Washington into its schemes and designs—this is almost entirely the fault of a White House that seems naively to believe Riyadh and the Sunni Gulf coalition are critical to helping the United States achieve its three key Middle East goals: destroying ISIS, rolling back Iran and delivering Arab-Israeli peace. Based on Saudi behavior since King Salman and MBS came to power in 2015, it’s not at all clear that Riyadh can deliver on any of these objectives. Indeed, if Washington doesn’t lay down some rules and distance itself from Saudi misadventures, it will find its objectives even more elusive. Here are three considerations the Trump administration needs to think through before its Middle East policy becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia.
Can the Saudis avoid further misadventures? MBS has the Midas touch in reverse: Every initiative he has spearheaded has turned into a hot mess. For one, the crown prince owns the war against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Under his direction, the Saudis along with some of their Gulf Arab allies have conducted a relentless and brutal air campaign that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, killing thousands of civilians, inflicting massive damage on civilian infrastructure and worsening an ongoing famine.
The Saudis are stuck in a quagmire: Their military campaign, even after doubling down, has failed to dislodge the Houthis and their allies from the capital or wrest control of the northern part of the country; and they have no viable diplomatic strategy for ending the war. By aiding and abetting the Saudis in Yemen, the United States has empowered al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, strengthened Iranian influence in Yemen, undermined Saudi security and brought Yemen closer to the brink of collapse. The Saudis have driven themselves—and the United States—into a deep ditch in the country. They need to stop digging to get out.
The crown prince’s fingerprints are also all over the Saudi decision to rupture its relations with Qatar. (As in Yemen, the Kingdom has also encouraged some of its Sunni Arab allies to go along for the ride.) This crisis, exacerbated by Trump’s open embrace of the Saudi view, has dealt a serious blow to U.S. diplomacy in the Gulf. The Trump administration hoped to build a strong and united Sunni Arab coalition to achieve its Middle East goals; instead, the needless fight the Saudis picked with Qatar has ripped this coalition apart. And make no mistake: The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state—as they have done with Bahrain—as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf. But the crown prince’s grandiose ambition and national chauvinism have put the Kingdom on a collision course with Iran—and the United States, with its uncritical support for Saudi Arabia and more muscular stance against Iran, could easily get dragged into the dispute. Further, MBS’s incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising position toward Tehran only stoke the sectarian conflict that is tearing the region apart.
The Trump administration’s decision to side with Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Qatar and in Yemen is akin to pouring gasoline on a fire. Washington instead should be doing whatever it can to extinguish the flames.
Can Saudi Arabia deliver on the peace process? There’s no question that the twin threats of Iran and Sunni jihadi groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, plus Arab fatigue with the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a greater coincidence of interests between the Gulf states and Israel than ever before. The still unanswered question is whether this new alignment can be converted into useable currency to facilitate and support Israeli-Palestinian negotiations leading to Trumps’s desired “ultimate deal.” It may well be that the Saudis are prepared to do more than they have in the past, particularly with regard to setting up overflight rights, telecommunications links and commercial contacts with Israel.
But—and the qualification is a critical one—that will happen only if Washington is prepared to do its part. There are no free lunches here. And the down payment, from the Saudi perspective, involves the Trump administration’s willingness to intensify its effort not just to contain but also to rollback Iranian influence in the region (which we think is both unrealistic and potentially harmful to the United States) as well as a serious effort to press the Israelis for concessions both large and small on behalf of the Palestinians. The Saudis might be willing to start with offering small confidence-building concessions. But if team Trump is looking for big moves—the establishment of diplomatic relations, for example—the administration will need to get the Israelis to deliver on Jerusalem and June 1967 borders. And that seems to be mission impossible with the Netanyahu government.
There is a real danger that the administration has unrealistic and exaggerated expectations of what the Saudis are prepared to do. Riyadh will not expose itself to criticism from Iran and the Arab world on an issue like Jerusalem unless Palestinian and Arab requirements are met. And without Israeli give on Jerusalem, there can be no ultimate deal.
Can the United States stop enabling the Saudis and set some rules? Clearly Trump is enamored by the Saudis, with whom he’s done business for years and who flattered and catered to him during his trip to the Kingdom earlier this month. He also sees Saudi Arabia as the key to achieving U.S. policy goals in the region, giving them a pass on human rights and permitting them wide latitude to pursue their anti-Iranian agenda without considering America’s interests. MBS is the driver of much of this impulsive risk-taking. The crown prince has dragged the United States into its local quarrels, creating a serious risk of a direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation, which could undermine the nuclear agreement with Iran at a time when the United States confronts a much more serious nuclear challenge from North Korea.
It’s time that the Trump administration draws some red lines with Riyadh. Washington does have leverage it can apply to the Saudis, who remain heavily dependent on American military and intelligence support for their security. In Yemen, Washington should put the Saudis on notice that if they do not lend their unqualified support for the U.N.-sponsored effort to mediate a negotiated end to the conflict, the United States will cut off the military, intelligence and logistics support it is providing to Saudi Arabia and coalition forces. With Qatar, the White House and State Department should intervene directly with the Saudis (and UAE) to press both countries to moderate the extreme demands they have just presented to Qatar to end their dispute.
And with Iran, as painful as it might be, the president should take a page from President Barack Obama’s playbook. Rather than engage in rhetoric that escalates the conflict, the United States should make it clear to the Saudis that America’s support for its military and security establishment is not unconditional and will hinge to some extent on Saudi efforts to bring its relationship with Iran to a slower boil.
We’re not at all sure the White House is prepared to do any of this. For years during our long tenure at the Department of State, the two of us in memo after memo criticized Saudi Arabia’s unhealthy dependence on the United States to solve its own security problems and its failure to project its power to resolve regional security threats. And we lamented the Kingdom’s chronic risk aversion on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Now that we have gotten what we wished for, a more independent and assertive Saudi Arabia, maybe the U.S. can channel some of the new Saudi risk-readiness in a way that benefits U.S. policy. But if we don’t lay down some ground rules and stick to them when the Saudis push back, Washington will be further enmeshed in the parochial agenda of a small power whose interests aren’t entirely our own. It’s bad enough to be used and abused by our adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran; it’s even worse to be diddled by our so-called friends.
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY
President Donald Trump, like a star-struck teenager, has been swooning over King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his 31-year-old son and new crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, known to U.S. diplomats as MBS. Since FDR, American presidents have been enamored by Saudi royals, but in this case the infatuation may be downright dangerous. The young prince who would be king might not only get his own country into heaps of trouble, he could also drag the United States down with it.
It’s not just Trump who’s been heaping praise on the new crown prince. MBS has also been hailed by the likes of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the German foreign minister, the IMF and the head of the World Bank. As the architect of Vision 2030, a galactically ambitious plan to transform and diversify the Saudi economy, MBS is seen as a potentially modernizing, dynamic and risk-ready monarch who has broken with the cautious traditionalism and risk-aversion of aging Saudi kings.
Who knows whether or not the young king will be able to live up to these expectations on the domestic side. Countervailing forces and challenges might limit his horizons. But one thing is already stunningly clear when it comes to his handling of foreign policy: In two short years, as the deputy crown prince and defense minister, MBS has driven the Kingdom into a series of royal blunders in Yemen, Qatar and Iran, and he has likely over promised what Saudi Arabia is able and willing to do on the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking front. Far from demonstrating judgment and experience, he’s proven to be reckless and impulsive, with little sense of how to link tactics and strategy. And sadly, he’s managed to implicate and drag the new Trump administration into some of these misadventures, too.
We don’t blame the crown prince for snookering Washington into its schemes and designs—this is almost entirely the fault of a White House that seems naively to believe Riyadh and the Sunni Gulf coalition are critical to helping the United States achieve its three key Middle East goals: destroying ISIS, rolling back Iran and delivering Arab-Israeli peace. Based on Saudi behavior since King Salman and MBS came to power in 2015, it’s not at all clear that Riyadh can deliver on any of these objectives. Indeed, if Washington doesn’t lay down some rules and distance itself from Saudi misadventures, it will find its objectives even more elusive. Here are three considerations the Trump administration needs to think through before its Middle East policy becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia.
Can the Saudis avoid further misadventures? MBS has the Midas touch in reverse: Every initiative he has spearheaded has turned into a hot mess. For one, the crown prince owns the war against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Under his direction, the Saudis along with some of their Gulf Arab allies have conducted a relentless and brutal air campaign that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, killing thousands of civilians, inflicting massive damage on civilian infrastructure and worsening an ongoing famine.
The Saudis are stuck in a quagmire: Their military campaign, even after doubling down, has failed to dislodge the Houthis and their allies from the capital or wrest control of the northern part of the country; and they have no viable diplomatic strategy for ending the war. By aiding and abetting the Saudis in Yemen, the United States has empowered al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, strengthened Iranian influence in Yemen, undermined Saudi security and brought Yemen closer to the brink of collapse. The Saudis have driven themselves—and the United States—into a deep ditch in the country. They need to stop digging to get out.
The crown prince’s fingerprints are also all over the Saudi decision to rupture its relations with Qatar. (As in Yemen, the Kingdom has also encouraged some of its Sunni Arab allies to go along for the ride.) This crisis, exacerbated by Trump’s open embrace of the Saudi view, has dealt a serious blow to U.S. diplomacy in the Gulf. The Trump administration hoped to build a strong and united Sunni Arab coalition to achieve its Middle East goals; instead, the needless fight the Saudis picked with Qatar has ripped this coalition apart. And make no mistake: The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state—as they have done with Bahrain—as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf. But the crown prince’s grandiose ambition and national chauvinism have put the Kingdom on a collision course with Iran—and the United States, with its uncritical support for Saudi Arabia and more muscular stance against Iran, could easily get dragged into the dispute. Further, MBS’s incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising position toward Tehran only stoke the sectarian conflict that is tearing the region apart.
The Trump administration’s decision to side with Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Qatar and in Yemen is akin to pouring gasoline on a fire. Washington instead should be doing whatever it can to extinguish the flames.
Can Saudi Arabia deliver on the peace process? There’s no question that the twin threats of Iran and Sunni jihadi groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, plus Arab fatigue with the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a greater coincidence of interests between the Gulf states and Israel than ever before. The still unanswered question is whether this new alignment can be converted into useable currency to facilitate and support Israeli-Palestinian negotiations leading to Trumps’s desired “ultimate deal.” It may well be that the Saudis are prepared to do more than they have in the past, particularly with regard to setting up overflight rights, telecommunications links and commercial contacts with Israel.
But—and the qualification is a critical one—that will happen only if Washington is prepared to do its part. There are no free lunches here. And the down payment, from the Saudi perspective, involves the Trump administration’s willingness to intensify its effort not just to contain but also to rollback Iranian influence in the region (which we think is both unrealistic and potentially harmful to the United States) as well as a serious effort to press the Israelis for concessions both large and small on behalf of the Palestinians. The Saudis might be willing to start with offering small confidence-building concessions. But if team Trump is looking for big moves—the establishment of diplomatic relations, for example—the administration will need to get the Israelis to deliver on Jerusalem and June 1967 borders. And that seems to be mission impossible with the Netanyahu government.
There is a real danger that the administration has unrealistic and exaggerated expectations of what the Saudis are prepared to do. Riyadh will not expose itself to criticism from Iran and the Arab world on an issue like Jerusalem unless Palestinian and Arab requirements are met. And without Israeli give on Jerusalem, there can be no ultimate deal.
Can the United States stop enabling the Saudis and set some rules? Clearly Trump is enamored by the Saudis, with whom he’s done business for years and who flattered and catered to him during his trip to the Kingdom earlier this month. He also sees Saudi Arabia as the key to achieving U.S. policy goals in the region, giving them a pass on human rights and permitting them wide latitude to pursue their anti-Iranian agenda without considering America’s interests. MBS is the driver of much of this impulsive risk-taking. The crown prince has dragged the United States into its local quarrels, creating a serious risk of a direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation, which could undermine the nuclear agreement with Iran at a time when the United States confronts a much more serious nuclear challenge from North Korea.
It’s time that the Trump administration draws some red lines with Riyadh. Washington does have leverage it can apply to the Saudis, who remain heavily dependent on American military and intelligence support for their security. In Yemen, Washington should put the Saudis on notice that if they do not lend their unqualified support for the U.N.-sponsored effort to mediate a negotiated end to the conflict, the United States will cut off the military, intelligence and logistics support it is providing to Saudi Arabia and coalition forces. With Qatar, the White House and State Department should intervene directly with the Saudis (and UAE) to press both countries to moderate the extreme demands they have just presented to Qatar to end their dispute.
And with Iran, as painful as it might be, the president should take a page from President Barack Obama’s playbook. Rather than engage in rhetoric that escalates the conflict, the United States should make it clear to the Saudis that America’s support for its military and security establishment is not unconditional and will hinge to some extent on Saudi efforts to bring its relationship with Iran to a slower boil.
We’re not at all sure the White House is prepared to do any of this. For years during our long tenure at the Department of State, the two of us in memo after memo criticized Saudi Arabia’s unhealthy dependence on the United States to solve its own security problems and its failure to project its power to resolve regional security threats. And we lamented the Kingdom’s chronic risk aversion on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Now that we have gotten what we wished for, a more independent and assertive Saudi Arabia, maybe the U.S. can channel some of the new Saudi risk-readiness in a way that benefits U.S. policy. But if we don’t lay down some ground rules and stick to them when the Saudis push back, Washington will be further enmeshed in the parochial agenda of a small power whose interests aren’t entirely our own. It’s bad enough to be used and abused by our adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran; it’s even worse to be diddled by our so-called friends.
Short, Unhappy Life
The Short, Unhappy Life of a Libertarian Paradise
The residents of Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government. Here’s what they got.
By CALEB HANNAN
Colorado Springs has always leaned hard on its reputation for natural beauty. An hour’s drive south of Denver, it sits at the base of the Rocky Mountains’ southern range and features two of the state’s top tourist destinations: the ancient sandstone rock formations known as Garden of the Gods, and Pikes Peak, the 14,000-foot summit that’s visible from nearly every street corner. It’s also a staunchly Republican city—headquarters of the politically active Christian group Focus on the Family (Colorado Springs is nicknamed “the Evangelical Vatican”) and the fourth most conservative city in America, according to a recent study. It’s a right-wing counterweight to liberal Boulder, just a couple of hours north, along the Front Range.
It was its jut-jawed conservatism that not that long ago made the city’s local government a brief national fixation. During the recession, like nearly every other city in America, Colorado Springs’ revenue—heavily dependent on sales tax—plunged. Faced with massive shortfalls, the city’s leaders began slashing. Gone were weekend bus service and nine buses.
Out went some police officers along with three of the department’s helicopters, which were auctioned online. Trash cans vanished from city parks, because when you cut 75 percent of the parks’ budget, one of the things you lose is someone to empty the garbage. For a city that was founded when a wealthy industrialist planted 10,000 trees on a shadeless prairie, the suddenly sparse watering of the city’s grassy lawns was a profound and dire statement of retreat.
To fill a $28 million budget hole, Colorado Springs’ political leaders—who until that point might have been described by most voters as fiscal conservatives—asked citizens to triple their property taxes. Nearly two-thirds of voters said no. In response, city officials (some would say almost petulantly) turned off one out of every three street lights. That’s when people started paying attention to a city that seemed to be conducting a real-time experiment in fiscal self-starvation. But that was just the prelude. The city wasn’t content simply to reject a tax increase. Voters wanted something genuinely different, so a little more than a year later, they elected a real estate entrepreneur as mayor who promised a radical break from politics as usual.
For a city, like the country at large, that was hurting economically, Steve Bach seemed like a man with an answer. What he promised sounded radically simple: Wasteful government is the root of the pain, and if you just run government like the best businesses, the pain will go away. Easy. Because he had never held office before and because he actually had been a successful entrepreneur, people were inclined to believe he really could reinvent the way a city was governed.
The city’s experiment was fascinating because it offered a chance to observe some of the most extreme conservative principles in action in a real-world laboratory. Producers from “60 Minutes” flew out to talk with the town’s leaders. The New York Times found a woman in a pitch-black trailer park pawning her flatscreen TV to buy a shotgun for protection. “This American Life” did a segment portraying Springs citizens as the ultimate anti-tax zealots, willing to pay $125 in a new “Adopt a Streetlight” program to illuminate their own neighborhoods, but not willing to spend the same to do so for the entire city. “I’ll take care of mine” was the gist of what one councilmember heard from a resident when she confronted him with this fact.
That’s where Colorado Springs was frozen in the consciousness of the country—a city determined to redefine the role of government, led by a sharp-elbowed businessman who didn’t care whom he offended along the way (not unlike a certain president). But it has been five years since “This American Life” packed up its mics. A lot has changed in that time, not least of which is that the local economy, which nearly drowned the city like a concrete block tied around its balance sheet, is buoyant once again. Sales tax revenue has made the books plump with surplus. Enough to turn those famous streetlights back on. Seven years after the experiment began, the verdict is in—and it’s not at all what its architects planned.
One of the lessons: There’s a real cost to saving money.
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
“Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t work out the way you’d hope,” says Merv Bennett, who served on the City Council at the time and asked officials at the utilities about whether the savings were real.
There has been a lot of this kind of reckoning over the past half-decade. From crisis came a desire for disruption. From disruption came, well, too much disruption. And from that came a full-circle return to professional politicians. Including one—a beloved mayor and respected bureaucrat who was short-listed to replace James Comey as FBI director—who is so persuasive he has gotten Colorado Springs residents to do something the outside world assumed they were not capable of: Five years after its moment in the spotlight, revenue is so high that the same voters who refused to keep the lights on have overwhelmingly approved ballot measures allowing the city to not only keep some of its extra tax money, but impose new taxes as well.
In the process, many residents of Colorado Springs, but especially the men and women most committed to making the city thrive, have learned a few other lessons. That perpetual chaos can be exhausting. That the value of the status quo rises in tandem with the budget’s bottom line. And that it helps when the people responsible for running the city are actually talking with one another. All it took was a few years running an experiment that everyone involved seems happy is over.
***
Like many revolutions, the one in Colorado Springs began with a manifesto.
It was an email, intended to be private, sent from Steve Bartolin, then CEO of luxury hotel The Broadmoor, to the mayor and council. The Broadmoor is a city unto itself—a century-old resort whose three golf courses, 779 rooms and skating rink sprawl over 3,000 acres around a lake in the foothills on the city’s western boundary. In a tourist-dependent region with an unusually large reliance on sales taxes, The Broadmoor is an economic powerhouse. In 2009, at the height of the impasse over the worsening budget, Bartolin had made a comparison between Colorado Springs’ budget and the budget of his resort. Observations like the fact that the city had a computer department with 81 people, while The Broadmoor employed only nine. The email didn’t stay private for long. It quickly went viral, was published in full in the newspaper, and so energized the business community that it inspired a dozen locals to start their own shadow council, which they called the City Committee. One of the members of the committee was Bach, a private real-estate broker who had gotten his first corporate job by the audacious move of cold-calling—collect—the CEO of Procter & Gamble. Soon, the committee members prevailed upon Bach to run for mayor, to bring their principles to City Hall.
Bach’s mantra on the campaign trail was one that voters nationwide would recognize from last year’s presidential cycle: Run the government more like a business. He said he was intent on “transforming city government so it works for everyone—and without tax increases.” In fact, he wanted to do away with the personal property tax for businesses and expedite how long it takes developers to get permits, all in service of promoting job growth, which he later vowed would hit 6,000 a year. Bach considered himself an outsider fighting against the city’s “regulatory agency mind-set.”
“The only difference I can see between me and Donald Trump,” he told Politico Magazine recently, “is that I don’t tweet.”
In 2011, Bach was swept into City Hall with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Not only did he win, but he arrived in office with powers no mayor of Colorado Springs had ever wielded. A ballot amendment approved by voters a year earlier had taken power away from the City Council and given it to the mayor. Now that mayor happened to be someone who felt that political compromise was a dirty word. Shortly after the election, two top councilmembers asked Bach to give them a detailed weekly report just as the previous city manager had done. He said no. The mayor wouldn’t answer to anyone. The council, he indicated, would answer to him. And he showed that by taking on a major deal the council was negotiating to rid itself of the local hospital.
Leaders at Memorial Health claimed the hospital was hemorrhaging money in the recession. But to Bach, the hospital was an incredible asset that was just being mismanaged—an argument he buttressed by pointing out that it was sitting on some $300 million in free cash. The council wanted to lease the hospital to a team of local leaders led by Memorial Health’s CEO for a cost of about $15 million over 20 years. Bach called it a giveaway. He demanded that the council open up the process to other bidders. Eventually, that process led to a very different financial arrangement with the massive University of Colorado Health System: a 40-year lease that, counting capital improvements, came out to nearly $2 billion. You don’t have to have an MBA to appreciate the benefits of Bach’s deal.
“I was really angry when I got on council and found out they just wanted to hand over the hospital,” Merv Bennett says. “Steve kept us from going down a terrible path.”
Bach also turned out to be right on another deal he said City Council had mismanaged before he was elected. The council had approved a generous contract to a physicist from the nearby U.S. Air Force Academy to develop and implement what he said would be a $20 million, coal-scrubbing technology on the city’s downtown power plant. “Just a terrible deal,” Bach says.
The city had pitched it as a way of making a profit—when the technology was licensed to other plants, Colorado Springs would share in the rewards. But the city was also on the hook to pay for the research and development it required, and costs quickly spiraled. Just last month, the business shut down without having made a single additional sale. The cost: some $150 million over budget. As with the hospital deal, in which the council chose to go with a local rather than open the bidding to all comers, Bach raked officials for their shortsighted provincialism that he and others felt wasn’t befitting America’s 40th-most populous city.
“This town is so easily scammed,” says John Hazlehurst, himself a former councilmember and now a columnist with the Colorado Springs Business Journal. “Why? Because we’re hicks. It’s really that simple.”
But there was a cost for all that head-butting in City Hall. Although the economy continued to improve, and although Bach’s outsourcing of jobs had done enough to repair the parks budget so that trees were being watered and the lights were back on, some business leaders were skittish about moving to town or expanding.
For those who opposed Bach, the political newcomer was doing damage by firing longstanding department heads without consulting anyone beforehand. Jan Martin, then the council’s pro-tem president, said she heard of Bach’s firing of the city’s police chief by word of mouth, rather than from Bach himself. “He was draining the city of all of this accumulated knowledge,” she says. Hazlehurst, watching from the sidelines, is more succinct. “Bach’s dysfunction and [the] council’s dysfunction were intimately related,” he says. “It was just a rookie government.”
There was a price to pay for Bach’s imperiousness and lack of diplomacy, and this is something about which he and his critics agree to some extent. Job creation, which had been a pillar of Bach’s campaign, never got up the steam that he had promised and, by his own admission, lagged behind other similarly sized cities in the region like Albuquerque, Omaha and Oklahoma City. He never managed to get the business tax repealed. And his signature plan to boost tourism with a multipronged project of museums and an outdoor stadium ran into headwinds from a council that said it wasn’t sufficiently involved in the planning.
By 2015, the final year of his term, Bach was no longer talking to any member of City Council, save for Bennett. Both sides were fighting proxy battles in the middle of council meetings, quibbling over the sorts of things—moving money from one government account to another to pay bills—that would normally be routine. People outside the council chambers were paying attention, and they didn’t care for what they were seeing—the city that was supposed to run like a business was actually scaring companies. The business leaders who had once supported him had even started their own, newer version of the City Committee—called Colorado Springs Forward—and were looking for a different candidate to back.
Mike Juran, CEO of a midsized company that “puts displays in anything that’s not a laptop or a phone,” had a choice to make in the last year of Bach’s administration. He believed his company, Altia, was poised for big growth—thanks to an automobile industry that wanted to put more gadgets in their cars. Juran wanted to stay put, but he wondered whether he would have trouble attracting young software engineers to Colorado Springs. “The city was in a weird funk and getting a bad national reputation,” he says. Juran knew that if any of his potential recruits googled the city, they would see that it had gone dark, a wildfire had recently destroyed 300 homes, and the city was home to disgraced pastor Ted Haggard. Much of this had nothing to do with Bach’s administration, but Juran also knew that Bach’s belt-tightening had hidden effects that were going to erode the city’s quality of life. Colorado Springs had spent years putting off enormous infrastructure problems that would one day come due—one, an issue with stormwater, was so bad it would soon be the focus of a lawsuit from the Environmental Protection Agency. Juran began looking into offices in Denver or Silicon Valley.
Bach had made a campaign promise to serve only one term. But the promise wasn’t necessary—by 2015, he, along with everyone else, knew the then-71-year-old’s chances for reelection were close to zero. Even the business leaders who had helped get him elected knew Bach wasn’t the man for the job anymore. What was needed was a steady hand, and Colorado Springs ended up getting exactly what it needed.
“Finally,” Juran says, “we had grown up and decided we wanted to be a real city.”
***
If every election is a referendum on the politician who came before, John Suthers was as clear a renunciation of Steve Bach as could be found. Far from a political outsider, Suthers had spent his life working inside government, from student body president of his high school (“No others than Suthers”), to local district attorney, to head of the Department of Corrections, to state attorney and all the way up to attorney general of Colorado, where he served for 10 years.
“When Suthers came in it was as if Michael Jordan had joined your pickup basketball team,” says columnist Hazlehurst. “He’s a consummate politician. … He knows what he’s doing.”
Suthers was a Republican like Bach, and he shared Bach’s belief in keeping government budgets on a leash. But unlike Bach, he wasn’t going to try to strangle the city with it. Suthers believed there was a fundamental difference between business and government—no matter how strong the mayor’s office is, there are still a bunch of other elected officials who need a say. So Suthers’ first goal after getting elected was, he says, to improve his relationship with the City Council. He did that by scheduling two monthly catered lunch meetings, acquiescing to many of their requests for staff and resources and, in the minds of many, treating them like partners rather than combatants. “My predecessor sent over a budget on the day it was due and said, ‘Take it or leave it,’” Suthers says. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. … I didn’t wait until [the last minute] to tell [the council] what I was thinking.”
Suthers’ collaborative approach also led to something that might have been unthinkable in the dark, budget-strapped days of 2010.
Colorado Springs’ reputation as a Republican stronghold might seem overblown to a visitor walking downtown. Just minutes from the pricey liberal arts school Colorado College is a kombucha shop, a store that sells hour-and-a-half long stays in sensory deprivation tanks, and a book seller that gives prominent shelf space to the latest Noam Chomsky and is owned by Richard Skorman, the current City Council president. Yet despite those superficial signs of changing demographics, Donald Trump still beat Hillary Clinton by more than 22 points in Colorado Springs’ El Paso County. Even with that small-government mind-set still relatively intact, three times in his first two years as mayor, Suthers has gone to voters either proposing a new tax or asking to keep extra tax revenue. By overwhelming margins, he has now persuaded the supposedly anti-tax zealots of Colorado Springs to commit $250 million to new roads, $2 million to new park trails and as much as $12 million for new stormwater projects. “The ballot items were enormous statements of confidence,” says Chamber of Commerce Director Dirk Draper. “They showed that while the community is fiscally conservative, it’s not radically so. If you can find someone to explain it to where it makes sense, voters will allow it.”
Today, Suthers can point to a whole host of data points that suggest Colorado Springs has more than recovered. “We’re on a roll, big time,” he says. The city’s unemployment is a vanishingly low 2.7 percent. Some 16,000 new jobs have been created in the past 24 months—a pace that exceeds Bach’s lofty goals. Flights at the airport have increased nearly 50 percent from a year ago. And large projects have either opened recently—such as a National Cybersecurity Center that takes advantage of the defense ecosystem built up around the Air Force Academy—or will soon, like the U.S. Olympic Museum slated for 2018, a natural offshoot of the fact that Colorado Springs has been home to the U.S. Olympic Training Center for nearly 40 years.
The city’s experience as a political petri dish might not have produced any easy answers. But at least for Suthers, it has produced a verdict on the run-the-government-as-a-business mantra. “Some personalities in the business world don’t suffer fools very much,” he says. “You’ve got to suffer a lot of fools in politics.”
This is the larger lesson of Colorado Springs’ experiment: Ideas matter, but so do relationships. Colorado Springs remains fiscally conservative; on this score there’s more agreement than not between elected officials and their constituents. But ideological consensus isn’t enough to overcome a lack of surrogates willing to advocate your policies when, even with the strongest mayor system, it’s not entirely up to you.
At a recent charity roast, the 180-degree change in attitude among the city’s political class was on full display. The emcee joked that while Suthers had agreed to come and endure good-natured jokes about his comb-over, the previous year Bach had been invited and offered a different response. “It was two words,” he said, “and the second one was ‘you.’”
Despite Bach’s sandpapery reputation, many who used to spar with him are willing to give the former mayor credit today. Suthers says Bach’s extreme focus on the budget helped right the city financially, and his efforts helped set the stage for a revival of the airport. But most of all, what the leaders of Colorado Springs seem most thankful for is that one man’s turmoil begat another man’s harmony.
“Steve was the ultimate change agent and they usually have a short shelf life,” Bennett says. “If it weren’t for the lights going out, we might not have had Steve. And if it weren’t for Steve we might not have John.”
The residents of Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government. Here’s what they got.
By CALEB HANNAN
Colorado Springs has always leaned hard on its reputation for natural beauty. An hour’s drive south of Denver, it sits at the base of the Rocky Mountains’ southern range and features two of the state’s top tourist destinations: the ancient sandstone rock formations known as Garden of the Gods, and Pikes Peak, the 14,000-foot summit that’s visible from nearly every street corner. It’s also a staunchly Republican city—headquarters of the politically active Christian group Focus on the Family (Colorado Springs is nicknamed “the Evangelical Vatican”) and the fourth most conservative city in America, according to a recent study. It’s a right-wing counterweight to liberal Boulder, just a couple of hours north, along the Front Range.
It was its jut-jawed conservatism that not that long ago made the city’s local government a brief national fixation. During the recession, like nearly every other city in America, Colorado Springs’ revenue—heavily dependent on sales tax—plunged. Faced with massive shortfalls, the city’s leaders began slashing. Gone were weekend bus service and nine buses.
Out went some police officers along with three of the department’s helicopters, which were auctioned online. Trash cans vanished from city parks, because when you cut 75 percent of the parks’ budget, one of the things you lose is someone to empty the garbage. For a city that was founded when a wealthy industrialist planted 10,000 trees on a shadeless prairie, the suddenly sparse watering of the city’s grassy lawns was a profound and dire statement of retreat.
To fill a $28 million budget hole, Colorado Springs’ political leaders—who until that point might have been described by most voters as fiscal conservatives—asked citizens to triple their property taxes. Nearly two-thirds of voters said no. In response, city officials (some would say almost petulantly) turned off one out of every three street lights. That’s when people started paying attention to a city that seemed to be conducting a real-time experiment in fiscal self-starvation. But that was just the prelude. The city wasn’t content simply to reject a tax increase. Voters wanted something genuinely different, so a little more than a year later, they elected a real estate entrepreneur as mayor who promised a radical break from politics as usual.
For a city, like the country at large, that was hurting economically, Steve Bach seemed like a man with an answer. What he promised sounded radically simple: Wasteful government is the root of the pain, and if you just run government like the best businesses, the pain will go away. Easy. Because he had never held office before and because he actually had been a successful entrepreneur, people were inclined to believe he really could reinvent the way a city was governed.
The city’s experiment was fascinating because it offered a chance to observe some of the most extreme conservative principles in action in a real-world laboratory. Producers from “60 Minutes” flew out to talk with the town’s leaders. The New York Times found a woman in a pitch-black trailer park pawning her flatscreen TV to buy a shotgun for protection. “This American Life” did a segment portraying Springs citizens as the ultimate anti-tax zealots, willing to pay $125 in a new “Adopt a Streetlight” program to illuminate their own neighborhoods, but not willing to spend the same to do so for the entire city. “I’ll take care of mine” was the gist of what one councilmember heard from a resident when she confronted him with this fact.
That’s where Colorado Springs was frozen in the consciousness of the country—a city determined to redefine the role of government, led by a sharp-elbowed businessman who didn’t care whom he offended along the way (not unlike a certain president). But it has been five years since “This American Life” packed up its mics. A lot has changed in that time, not least of which is that the local economy, which nearly drowned the city like a concrete block tied around its balance sheet, is buoyant once again. Sales tax revenue has made the books plump with surplus. Enough to turn those famous streetlights back on. Seven years after the experiment began, the verdict is in—and it’s not at all what its architects planned.
One of the lessons: There’s a real cost to saving money.
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
“Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t work out the way you’d hope,” says Merv Bennett, who served on the City Council at the time and asked officials at the utilities about whether the savings were real.
There has been a lot of this kind of reckoning over the past half-decade. From crisis came a desire for disruption. From disruption came, well, too much disruption. And from that came a full-circle return to professional politicians. Including one—a beloved mayor and respected bureaucrat who was short-listed to replace James Comey as FBI director—who is so persuasive he has gotten Colorado Springs residents to do something the outside world assumed they were not capable of: Five years after its moment in the spotlight, revenue is so high that the same voters who refused to keep the lights on have overwhelmingly approved ballot measures allowing the city to not only keep some of its extra tax money, but impose new taxes as well.
In the process, many residents of Colorado Springs, but especially the men and women most committed to making the city thrive, have learned a few other lessons. That perpetual chaos can be exhausting. That the value of the status quo rises in tandem with the budget’s bottom line. And that it helps when the people responsible for running the city are actually talking with one another. All it took was a few years running an experiment that everyone involved seems happy is over.
***
Like many revolutions, the one in Colorado Springs began with a manifesto.
It was an email, intended to be private, sent from Steve Bartolin, then CEO of luxury hotel The Broadmoor, to the mayor and council. The Broadmoor is a city unto itself—a century-old resort whose three golf courses, 779 rooms and skating rink sprawl over 3,000 acres around a lake in the foothills on the city’s western boundary. In a tourist-dependent region with an unusually large reliance on sales taxes, The Broadmoor is an economic powerhouse. In 2009, at the height of the impasse over the worsening budget, Bartolin had made a comparison between Colorado Springs’ budget and the budget of his resort. Observations like the fact that the city had a computer department with 81 people, while The Broadmoor employed only nine. The email didn’t stay private for long. It quickly went viral, was published in full in the newspaper, and so energized the business community that it inspired a dozen locals to start their own shadow council, which they called the City Committee. One of the members of the committee was Bach, a private real-estate broker who had gotten his first corporate job by the audacious move of cold-calling—collect—the CEO of Procter & Gamble. Soon, the committee members prevailed upon Bach to run for mayor, to bring their principles to City Hall.
Bach’s mantra on the campaign trail was one that voters nationwide would recognize from last year’s presidential cycle: Run the government more like a business. He said he was intent on “transforming city government so it works for everyone—and without tax increases.” In fact, he wanted to do away with the personal property tax for businesses and expedite how long it takes developers to get permits, all in service of promoting job growth, which he later vowed would hit 6,000 a year. Bach considered himself an outsider fighting against the city’s “regulatory agency mind-set.”
“The only difference I can see between me and Donald Trump,” he told Politico Magazine recently, “is that I don’t tweet.”
In 2011, Bach was swept into City Hall with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Not only did he win, but he arrived in office with powers no mayor of Colorado Springs had ever wielded. A ballot amendment approved by voters a year earlier had taken power away from the City Council and given it to the mayor. Now that mayor happened to be someone who felt that political compromise was a dirty word. Shortly after the election, two top councilmembers asked Bach to give them a detailed weekly report just as the previous city manager had done. He said no. The mayor wouldn’t answer to anyone. The council, he indicated, would answer to him. And he showed that by taking on a major deal the council was negotiating to rid itself of the local hospital.
Leaders at Memorial Health claimed the hospital was hemorrhaging money in the recession. But to Bach, the hospital was an incredible asset that was just being mismanaged—an argument he buttressed by pointing out that it was sitting on some $300 million in free cash. The council wanted to lease the hospital to a team of local leaders led by Memorial Health’s CEO for a cost of about $15 million over 20 years. Bach called it a giveaway. He demanded that the council open up the process to other bidders. Eventually, that process led to a very different financial arrangement with the massive University of Colorado Health System: a 40-year lease that, counting capital improvements, came out to nearly $2 billion. You don’t have to have an MBA to appreciate the benefits of Bach’s deal.
“I was really angry when I got on council and found out they just wanted to hand over the hospital,” Merv Bennett says. “Steve kept us from going down a terrible path.”
Bach also turned out to be right on another deal he said City Council had mismanaged before he was elected. The council had approved a generous contract to a physicist from the nearby U.S. Air Force Academy to develop and implement what he said would be a $20 million, coal-scrubbing technology on the city’s downtown power plant. “Just a terrible deal,” Bach says.
The city had pitched it as a way of making a profit—when the technology was licensed to other plants, Colorado Springs would share in the rewards. But the city was also on the hook to pay for the research and development it required, and costs quickly spiraled. Just last month, the business shut down without having made a single additional sale. The cost: some $150 million over budget. As with the hospital deal, in which the council chose to go with a local rather than open the bidding to all comers, Bach raked officials for their shortsighted provincialism that he and others felt wasn’t befitting America’s 40th-most populous city.
“This town is so easily scammed,” says John Hazlehurst, himself a former councilmember and now a columnist with the Colorado Springs Business Journal. “Why? Because we’re hicks. It’s really that simple.”
But there was a cost for all that head-butting in City Hall. Although the economy continued to improve, and although Bach’s outsourcing of jobs had done enough to repair the parks budget so that trees were being watered and the lights were back on, some business leaders were skittish about moving to town or expanding.
For those who opposed Bach, the political newcomer was doing damage by firing longstanding department heads without consulting anyone beforehand. Jan Martin, then the council’s pro-tem president, said she heard of Bach’s firing of the city’s police chief by word of mouth, rather than from Bach himself. “He was draining the city of all of this accumulated knowledge,” she says. Hazlehurst, watching from the sidelines, is more succinct. “Bach’s dysfunction and [the] council’s dysfunction were intimately related,” he says. “It was just a rookie government.”
There was a price to pay for Bach’s imperiousness and lack of diplomacy, and this is something about which he and his critics agree to some extent. Job creation, which had been a pillar of Bach’s campaign, never got up the steam that he had promised and, by his own admission, lagged behind other similarly sized cities in the region like Albuquerque, Omaha and Oklahoma City. He never managed to get the business tax repealed. And his signature plan to boost tourism with a multipronged project of museums and an outdoor stadium ran into headwinds from a council that said it wasn’t sufficiently involved in the planning.
By 2015, the final year of his term, Bach was no longer talking to any member of City Council, save for Bennett. Both sides were fighting proxy battles in the middle of council meetings, quibbling over the sorts of things—moving money from one government account to another to pay bills—that would normally be routine. People outside the council chambers were paying attention, and they didn’t care for what they were seeing—the city that was supposed to run like a business was actually scaring companies. The business leaders who had once supported him had even started their own, newer version of the City Committee—called Colorado Springs Forward—and were looking for a different candidate to back.
Mike Juran, CEO of a midsized company that “puts displays in anything that’s not a laptop or a phone,” had a choice to make in the last year of Bach’s administration. He believed his company, Altia, was poised for big growth—thanks to an automobile industry that wanted to put more gadgets in their cars. Juran wanted to stay put, but he wondered whether he would have trouble attracting young software engineers to Colorado Springs. “The city was in a weird funk and getting a bad national reputation,” he says. Juran knew that if any of his potential recruits googled the city, they would see that it had gone dark, a wildfire had recently destroyed 300 homes, and the city was home to disgraced pastor Ted Haggard. Much of this had nothing to do with Bach’s administration, but Juran also knew that Bach’s belt-tightening had hidden effects that were going to erode the city’s quality of life. Colorado Springs had spent years putting off enormous infrastructure problems that would one day come due—one, an issue with stormwater, was so bad it would soon be the focus of a lawsuit from the Environmental Protection Agency. Juran began looking into offices in Denver or Silicon Valley.
Bach had made a campaign promise to serve only one term. But the promise wasn’t necessary—by 2015, he, along with everyone else, knew the then-71-year-old’s chances for reelection were close to zero. Even the business leaders who had helped get him elected knew Bach wasn’t the man for the job anymore. What was needed was a steady hand, and Colorado Springs ended up getting exactly what it needed.
“Finally,” Juran says, “we had grown up and decided we wanted to be a real city.”
***
If every election is a referendum on the politician who came before, John Suthers was as clear a renunciation of Steve Bach as could be found. Far from a political outsider, Suthers had spent his life working inside government, from student body president of his high school (“No others than Suthers”), to local district attorney, to head of the Department of Corrections, to state attorney and all the way up to attorney general of Colorado, where he served for 10 years.
“When Suthers came in it was as if Michael Jordan had joined your pickup basketball team,” says columnist Hazlehurst. “He’s a consummate politician. … He knows what he’s doing.”
Suthers was a Republican like Bach, and he shared Bach’s belief in keeping government budgets on a leash. But unlike Bach, he wasn’t going to try to strangle the city with it. Suthers believed there was a fundamental difference between business and government—no matter how strong the mayor’s office is, there are still a bunch of other elected officials who need a say. So Suthers’ first goal after getting elected was, he says, to improve his relationship with the City Council. He did that by scheduling two monthly catered lunch meetings, acquiescing to many of their requests for staff and resources and, in the minds of many, treating them like partners rather than combatants. “My predecessor sent over a budget on the day it was due and said, ‘Take it or leave it,’” Suthers says. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. … I didn’t wait until [the last minute] to tell [the council] what I was thinking.”
Suthers’ collaborative approach also led to something that might have been unthinkable in the dark, budget-strapped days of 2010.
Colorado Springs’ reputation as a Republican stronghold might seem overblown to a visitor walking downtown. Just minutes from the pricey liberal arts school Colorado College is a kombucha shop, a store that sells hour-and-a-half long stays in sensory deprivation tanks, and a book seller that gives prominent shelf space to the latest Noam Chomsky and is owned by Richard Skorman, the current City Council president. Yet despite those superficial signs of changing demographics, Donald Trump still beat Hillary Clinton by more than 22 points in Colorado Springs’ El Paso County. Even with that small-government mind-set still relatively intact, three times in his first two years as mayor, Suthers has gone to voters either proposing a new tax or asking to keep extra tax revenue. By overwhelming margins, he has now persuaded the supposedly anti-tax zealots of Colorado Springs to commit $250 million to new roads, $2 million to new park trails and as much as $12 million for new stormwater projects. “The ballot items were enormous statements of confidence,” says Chamber of Commerce Director Dirk Draper. “They showed that while the community is fiscally conservative, it’s not radically so. If you can find someone to explain it to where it makes sense, voters will allow it.”
Today, Suthers can point to a whole host of data points that suggest Colorado Springs has more than recovered. “We’re on a roll, big time,” he says. The city’s unemployment is a vanishingly low 2.7 percent. Some 16,000 new jobs have been created in the past 24 months—a pace that exceeds Bach’s lofty goals. Flights at the airport have increased nearly 50 percent from a year ago. And large projects have either opened recently—such as a National Cybersecurity Center that takes advantage of the defense ecosystem built up around the Air Force Academy—or will soon, like the U.S. Olympic Museum slated for 2018, a natural offshoot of the fact that Colorado Springs has been home to the U.S. Olympic Training Center for nearly 40 years.
The city’s experience as a political petri dish might not have produced any easy answers. But at least for Suthers, it has produced a verdict on the run-the-government-as-a-business mantra. “Some personalities in the business world don’t suffer fools very much,” he says. “You’ve got to suffer a lot of fools in politics.”
This is the larger lesson of Colorado Springs’ experiment: Ideas matter, but so do relationships. Colorado Springs remains fiscally conservative; on this score there’s more agreement than not between elected officials and their constituents. But ideological consensus isn’t enough to overcome a lack of surrogates willing to advocate your policies when, even with the strongest mayor system, it’s not entirely up to you.
At a recent charity roast, the 180-degree change in attitude among the city’s political class was on full display. The emcee joked that while Suthers had agreed to come and endure good-natured jokes about his comb-over, the previous year Bach had been invited and offered a different response. “It was two words,” he said, “and the second one was ‘you.’”
Despite Bach’s sandpapery reputation, many who used to spar with him are willing to give the former mayor credit today. Suthers says Bach’s extreme focus on the budget helped right the city financially, and his efforts helped set the stage for a revival of the airport. But most of all, what the leaders of Colorado Springs seem most thankful for is that one man’s turmoil begat another man’s harmony.
“Steve was the ultimate change agent and they usually have a short shelf life,” Bennett says. “If it weren’t for the lights going out, we might not have had Steve. And if it weren’t for Steve we might not have John.”
Meeting raises worries
Long anticipated Trump-Putin meeting raises worries
Russia hawks and national security experts worry talk of friendship, unclear agenda might make Trump too eager to please.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
President Donald Trump plans to sit down with Vladimir Putin next week, pursuing warmer relations with the Russian leader, despite multiple investigations into his campaign’s alleged ties to the Kremlin.
The expected meeting at the annual G-20 summit in Hamburg, confirmed Thursday by national security adviser H.R. McMaster, will be the first for Trump and Putin after more than a year of intense scrutiny of their relationship. The two men have spoken on the phone twice since Trump took office.
It is unclear what messages Trump might deliver to Putin at a time of high tension between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s reported interference in the 2016 election and its military presence in Ukraine and Syria.
But many national security experts and Russia hawks inside the Trump administration are concerned that a president who has spoken for months about the prospect of a friendship with Putin might be too eager to please his strong-willed Russian counterpart.
Although Trump administration officials have condemned Putin’s behavior in several areas, from repression of domestic dissent to cyber-intrusions of U.S. voting systems, White House officials suggested Thursday that Trump had no particular plan for his meeting with Putin, a meticulously well-prepared former KGB agent.
“There’s no specific agenda. It’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about,” McMaster told reporters.
The White House did not detail the exact venue for the conversation. But National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn told reporters at a White House briefing with McMaster that Trump would have formal sit-downs—or “bilateral” meetings — with the leaders of the top nations represented at the annual gathering, including Russia.
Cohn added those meetings would likely not have a “formal agenda in advance.”
Experts in Russia-U.S. relations said that could create an imbalance when Trump arrives to meet a Russian president who has spent his entire life fixated on the competition between the two countries.
“Putin will come to this meeting with an agenda. He comes to these meetings prepared,” said Thomas Graham, managing director at Kissinger Associates and a former George W. Bush White House aide handling Russia.
Graham’s boss, former secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who has served as an intermediary between U.S. presidents and world leaders, met with Putin in Moscow on Thursday.
A sit-down with Putin would underscore Trump’s strong desire to befriend the Russian president, even at the risk of headlines sure to spotlight the multiple investigations into ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (Trump and the White House have denied any Russian influence over his 2016 campaign.)
While it would be hard for Trump to avoid some contact with Putin at the summit of world leaders, some U.S. officials believe he should limit any encounter with the Russian to a more casual, impromptu chat known in diplomatic terms a “pull-aside.”
“Trump has talked for months about meeting Putin. Other people in the administration are hesitant,” Graham said.
Trump White House aides are said to be particularly wary of any encounter with Kremlin officials after they were embarrassed by last month’s visit to the Oval Office by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a key figure in the Trump-Russia investigations. The White House had not planned to release photos of the visit and was surprised when a Russian state news services released photos from an official Russian photographer at the meeting, showing Trump laughing with Lavrov and Kislyak a day after he had fired FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, though, appears undaunted in pursuit of what he has said would be a useful partnership with Russia against Islamic terrorism.
“This is a president who in my view is still committed to try and improve relations with Russia. He feels very strongly about that,” said Dmitri Simes, the Russian-born president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest in Washington.
Experts believe Putin remains eager to improve relations with the U.S., even as Russia has lashed out at Washington in recent weeks for what it calls hysteria over Moscow’s well-documented interference in the 2016 election.
Simes and others called it unlikely that any contact between the leaders will achieve policy breakthroughs, especially given the Trump administration’s unclear policy approach toward Russia.
“Trump has not developed positions to offer to his associates and tell them, ‘This is the policy, this is what you need to do,’” Simes said. “And in the absence of such specific guidance coming from the president, it’s difficult for an administration to develop a coherent approach.”
On Thursday, McMaster said Trump had directed his national security team to “confront Russia’s destabilizing behavior” in places like the Balkans; to “deter conflict”; and to “foster areas of cooperation.” But he offered few specifics beyond that on pressing issues like Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s support for the Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, whom Trump warned this week against what he called a planned chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians.
Russia hawks and national security experts worry talk of friendship, unclear agenda might make Trump too eager to please.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
President Donald Trump plans to sit down with Vladimir Putin next week, pursuing warmer relations with the Russian leader, despite multiple investigations into his campaign’s alleged ties to the Kremlin.
The expected meeting at the annual G-20 summit in Hamburg, confirmed Thursday by national security adviser H.R. McMaster, will be the first for Trump and Putin after more than a year of intense scrutiny of their relationship. The two men have spoken on the phone twice since Trump took office.
It is unclear what messages Trump might deliver to Putin at a time of high tension between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s reported interference in the 2016 election and its military presence in Ukraine and Syria.
But many national security experts and Russia hawks inside the Trump administration are concerned that a president who has spoken for months about the prospect of a friendship with Putin might be too eager to please his strong-willed Russian counterpart.
Although Trump administration officials have condemned Putin’s behavior in several areas, from repression of domestic dissent to cyber-intrusions of U.S. voting systems, White House officials suggested Thursday that Trump had no particular plan for his meeting with Putin, a meticulously well-prepared former KGB agent.
“There’s no specific agenda. It’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about,” McMaster told reporters.
The White House did not detail the exact venue for the conversation. But National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn told reporters at a White House briefing with McMaster that Trump would have formal sit-downs—or “bilateral” meetings — with the leaders of the top nations represented at the annual gathering, including Russia.
Cohn added those meetings would likely not have a “formal agenda in advance.”
Experts in Russia-U.S. relations said that could create an imbalance when Trump arrives to meet a Russian president who has spent his entire life fixated on the competition between the two countries.
“Putin will come to this meeting with an agenda. He comes to these meetings prepared,” said Thomas Graham, managing director at Kissinger Associates and a former George W. Bush White House aide handling Russia.
Graham’s boss, former secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who has served as an intermediary between U.S. presidents and world leaders, met with Putin in Moscow on Thursday.
A sit-down with Putin would underscore Trump’s strong desire to befriend the Russian president, even at the risk of headlines sure to spotlight the multiple investigations into ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (Trump and the White House have denied any Russian influence over his 2016 campaign.)
While it would be hard for Trump to avoid some contact with Putin at the summit of world leaders, some U.S. officials believe he should limit any encounter with the Russian to a more casual, impromptu chat known in diplomatic terms a “pull-aside.”
“Trump has talked for months about meeting Putin. Other people in the administration are hesitant,” Graham said.
Trump White House aides are said to be particularly wary of any encounter with Kremlin officials after they were embarrassed by last month’s visit to the Oval Office by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a key figure in the Trump-Russia investigations. The White House had not planned to release photos of the visit and was surprised when a Russian state news services released photos from an official Russian photographer at the meeting, showing Trump laughing with Lavrov and Kislyak a day after he had fired FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, though, appears undaunted in pursuit of what he has said would be a useful partnership with Russia against Islamic terrorism.
“This is a president who in my view is still committed to try and improve relations with Russia. He feels very strongly about that,” said Dmitri Simes, the Russian-born president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest in Washington.
Experts believe Putin remains eager to improve relations with the U.S., even as Russia has lashed out at Washington in recent weeks for what it calls hysteria over Moscow’s well-documented interference in the 2016 election.
Simes and others called it unlikely that any contact between the leaders will achieve policy breakthroughs, especially given the Trump administration’s unclear policy approach toward Russia.
“Trump has not developed positions to offer to his associates and tell them, ‘This is the policy, this is what you need to do,’” Simes said. “And in the absence of such specific guidance coming from the president, it’s difficult for an administration to develop a coherent approach.”
On Thursday, McMaster said Trump had directed his national security team to “confront Russia’s destabilizing behavior” in places like the Balkans; to “deter conflict”; and to “foster areas of cooperation.” But he offered few specifics beyond that on pressing issues like Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s support for the Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, whom Trump warned this week against what he called a planned chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians.
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