Why Stormy Daniels Is Different
In the recent history of political sex scandals, Donald Trump’s alleged paramour stands out. Here’s how.
By HINDA MANDELL
Donald Trump so far has weathered accusations and hot mic admissions of sexual assault. But even as the president denies Stormy Daniels’ account of their alleged affair more than a decade ago, calling it “FAKE NEWS,” her claims have stayed in the media’s eye for weeks now. Her appearance Sunday on “60 Minutes” was the highest-rated episode of the CBS News magazine show in a decade. Among the 19 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct or claimed to have had affairs with him, why has Daniels’ story broken through? And what makes this political sex scandal different from others before it?
Women who have had consensual sex with married male politicians usually play a limited set of assigned roles: In our national consciousness, they could be sex kittens (Ashley Dupré), gooey-eyed love birds (Rielle Hunter) or social climbers (Sydney Leathers).
Stormy Daniels is something new. Never before was such a woman an independent businessperson who, before her scandal, had already made a name for herself and cultivated fans of her work. (Before her alleged tête-à-tête with Trump in 2006, Daniels was already an award-winning adult film performer.) Nor has any such woman ever told her story so unapologetically. Daniels readily admits to having sex with Trump—even to asking him to pull down his pants so she could spank him with a magazine bearing his face on its cover. Nor does Daniels make excuses. She did not have sex with Trump because she felt beholden to a man in power; she did it because, in her recent admission on “60 Minutes,” “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to his room alone.” (You don’t have to be a porn star to find that assertion believable and relatable.)
In fact, what makes Daniels so different is a lot like what makes Trump different—she doesn’t seem ashamed. After all, she’s a sex professional, and has no qualms talking about the bedroom; there’s no fig leaf of decency to protect. It’s no surprise, then, that she would monetize the experience once this revelation had entered the public sphere. Daniels might not bring down Trump in the way that other women in political sex scandals have, but she is rewriting the standard sex scandal script—and happily profiting along the way. She’s owning it.
Other women caught up in political sex scandals have knowingly consented to affairs with married politicians and admitted to those exploits. But Daniels makes no effort to protect her onetime sex partner. In fact, she is bullish in her public display of antagonism, seemingly because Trump’s associates allegedly threatened her and her family to stay quiet about the affair. And she doesn’t sugarcoat her description of the 2006 interaction. In her “60 Minutes” interview, Daniels unflinchingly answered Anderson Cooper’s questions, coming across as clear-eyed and matter-of-fact. Was she attracted to Trump? No. Not at all? No. Did she want to have sex with him? Nope.
It’s clear Daniels is no Ashley Dupré, an aspiring pop singer unaccustomed to an eviscerating media spotlight who in 2008 became better known for her after-hours dalliances with then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. When Spitzer resigned over his “private failings,” Dupré was an unknown in the music industry (though she did have a MySpace account offering a taste of her songs). Once the scandal broke, Dupré’s inexperience with notoriety overwhelmed her. The only interview she granted in the immediate fallout was to the New York Times. “I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,” she said. In contrast, Daniels not only decided to face head-on the notoriety that scandal laid at her feet, launching a “Make America Horny Again Tour” at strip clubs across the country; she has also made clear that while people are going to label her as they see fit, she will tell her story as she sees fit. Daniels has proven smart, cool-headed and even funny in her clap-backs against Twitter trolls. When one man used Twitter to describe Daniels as a “scank,” for instance, she corrected his spelling.
Nor is Daniels much like Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer for then-presidential candidate John Edwards who had a baby with him in 2008. Hunter once described being “madly in love” with the then-married Edwards before admitting that she “behaved badly” by having the affair. Daniels says she held no romantic feelings for Trump during their brief intimacy, and she now confidently taunts him, 12 years later. “He knows I’m telling the truth,” she told Cooper on “60 Minutes.” There’s no “mea culpa” in Daniels’ telling of events—not even a courtesy apology to Melania Trump, who was four months postpartum with her and Trump’s infant son when he had the affair with Daniels. It’s Trump who should apologize, Daniels insinuates—not she.
Daniels also sets herself apart from Leathers, the Indiana woman who used her illicit sexting exchanges with Anthony Weiner on the eve of his New York City mayoral race to catapult herself into the public eye in 2013, and then launched a career in the adult film industry. (The skin flick Weiner and Me marked Leathers’ debut as an adult film actress.) Don’t let the porn connection fool you: Leathers readily admits that in her initial social media interactions with Weiner, she “had him on a pedestal” and was flattered by the attention he heaped upon her. The two of them never even met in person, only online and on the phone. While Leathers developed romantic feelings for Weiner at the start of their interactions, she ultimately used her experience with him to cultivate a degree of celebrity status she hadn’t previously had.
Daniels is proving adept at handling media coverage, too. She understands spectacle—how to orchestrate it; which attorney can help magnify it; the fact that desire, capitalism and sex sell. The lead-up to the “60 Minutes” interview—with reams of news coverage devoted to speculating about the March 25 air date—was a pageant in itself, with rumors that Trump’s team was threatening a lawsuit to prevent the episode from airing.
Daniels also knows the power of her voice to throw the president off-kilter and cut through his egocentricity. When Trump talked incessantly about himself at the start of their rendezvous, according to Daniels, she asked: “Does this normally work for you?” She did not interpret his braggadocio as alluring foreplay. She added on “60 Minutes:” “I don’t think anyone’s ever spoken to him like that, especially, you know, a young woman who looked like me.” After all, even considering Trump’s playboy persona, we can reasonably assume that Daniels, who has starred in more than 150 adult films, was the more sexually experienced of the two. Trump seemed disarmed by her assertiveness. “You’re smart and beautiful and a woman to be reckoned with,” he said during their tryst, according to Daniels on “60 Minutes.” He had no idea how those words would come back to, well, spank him.
There’s no doubt Daniels is milking the publicity from this scandal and that she’s leveraging the attention for professional gain. But as she said directly in the interview, she makes no apologies for that: “Yes, I’m getting more job offers now, but tell me one person who would turn down a job offer making more than they’ve been making, doing the same thing that they’ve always done?”
Daniels is blunt and unashamed. She matches Trump’s talk and raises him without bluffing. And she knows it’s all ratings gold. After all, why shouldn’t Daniels reap the benefits of telling her version of events, instead of playing the part of a woman on the side with a muted voice? If Stormy Daniels is going to be talked about, analyzed and outed in a media and entertainment world dominated by men, then she’s making sure she gets her fair share of the action.
March 29, 2018
Pull ads...
Advertisers pull ads from Fox’s Ingraham after her jab at Parkland student
By CRISTIANO LIMA
A growing number of companies will heed calls from a survivor of the Florida high school shooting to drop their advertisements on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program after the host mocked the student on Twitter.
At least five said they would cease buying ads on the show. Nutrish, celebrity cook Rachael Ray’s dog food company, announced on Thursday that it was “in the process of removing ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.” TripAdvisor, the American travel website, told POLITICO that it had “made a decision to stop advertising on that program.”
“We believe strongly in the values of our company, especially the one that says, ‘We are better together,’” a TripAdvisor spokesperson said in an email. “We also believe Americans can disagree while still being agreeable, and that the free exchange of ideas within a community, in a peaceful manner, is the cornerstone of our democracy.”
The spokesperson added: “We do not, however, condone the inappropriate comments made by this broadcaster. In our view, these statements focused on a high school student, cross the line of decency.”
Wayfair, the online home-goods store, said the Fox News host’s comments were “not consistent with our values” in announcing that it would also pull ads from the show. A spokesperson for Nestle confirmed in an email that the company had “no plans to buy ads on the show in the future,” and Expedia also said that it would follow suit in cutting promotional ties with the program.
The decisions came in response to an online plea from David Hogg, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for the company to cease its promotions on the show.
Ingraham on Wednesday shared a report on Twitter that Hogg’s college application had been rejected by certain schools. “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it,” the Fox News host wrote.
Hogg responded by listing several of Ingraham’s top advertisers — Nutrish, Sleep Number, AT&T, Allstate, Esurance, Bayer Liberty Mutual, Arby’s, TripAdvisor, Nestle, Wayfair, Rocket Mortgage by Quickens Loans, and Hulu — and calling for a boycott of the program.
“I’m so sorry to everyone that @IngrahamAngle has ever tried to hurt we are here for you and we love you,” Hogg tweeted on Thursday.
Representatives for the other companies listed by Hogg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ingraham on Thursday issued an apology via Twitter for the remarks.
“Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA — including David Hogg,” she said. “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.”
Ingraham added that Hogg was “welcome to come on my show anytime for a productive discussion.”
Hogg and other Parkland students have faced backlash from conservative commentators, who have criticized their lobbying for gun control legislation in response to the deadly shooting last month in which 17 were killed and several others wounded.
The attack has sparked a wave of protests. Over the weekend, Hogg and other students helped organize the March for Our Lives in protest of gun violence.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
A growing number of companies will heed calls from a survivor of the Florida high school shooting to drop their advertisements on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program after the host mocked the student on Twitter.
At least five said they would cease buying ads on the show. Nutrish, celebrity cook Rachael Ray’s dog food company, announced on Thursday that it was “in the process of removing ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.” TripAdvisor, the American travel website, told POLITICO that it had “made a decision to stop advertising on that program.”
“We believe strongly in the values of our company, especially the one that says, ‘We are better together,’” a TripAdvisor spokesperson said in an email. “We also believe Americans can disagree while still being agreeable, and that the free exchange of ideas within a community, in a peaceful manner, is the cornerstone of our democracy.”
The spokesperson added: “We do not, however, condone the inappropriate comments made by this broadcaster. In our view, these statements focused on a high school student, cross the line of decency.”
Wayfair, the online home-goods store, said the Fox News host’s comments were “not consistent with our values” in announcing that it would also pull ads from the show. A spokesperson for Nestle confirmed in an email that the company had “no plans to buy ads on the show in the future,” and Expedia also said that it would follow suit in cutting promotional ties with the program.
The decisions came in response to an online plea from David Hogg, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for the company to cease its promotions on the show.
Ingraham on Wednesday shared a report on Twitter that Hogg’s college application had been rejected by certain schools. “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it,” the Fox News host wrote.
Hogg responded by listing several of Ingraham’s top advertisers — Nutrish, Sleep Number, AT&T, Allstate, Esurance, Bayer Liberty Mutual, Arby’s, TripAdvisor, Nestle, Wayfair, Rocket Mortgage by Quickens Loans, and Hulu — and calling for a boycott of the program.
“I’m so sorry to everyone that @IngrahamAngle has ever tried to hurt we are here for you and we love you,” Hogg tweeted on Thursday.
Representatives for the other companies listed by Hogg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ingraham on Thursday issued an apology via Twitter for the remarks.
“Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA — including David Hogg,” she said. “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.”
Ingraham added that Hogg was “welcome to come on my show anytime for a productive discussion.”
Hogg and other Parkland students have faced backlash from conservative commentators, who have criticized their lobbying for gun control legislation in response to the deadly shooting last month in which 17 were killed and several others wounded.
The attack has sparked a wave of protests. Over the weekend, Hogg and other students helped organize the March for Our Lives in protest of gun violence.
Contradicting his secretaries of state and defense.....
Trump wants ‘out’ of Syria ‘very soon,’ contradicting top officials
'We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,' the president said Thursday, a shift from his top officials' recent comments.
By NAHAL TOOSI and MICHAEL CROWLEY
President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States will end its military presence in Syria “very soon”—contradicting his secretaries of state and defense, who have said U.S. troops should stay in the Arab country for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s declaration was just the latest instance in which the president has publicly undercut or defied his foreign policy team, to the frustration and confusion of U.S. officials and America’s allies.
Speaking in Ohio Thursday, Trump boasted that U.S. is winning its battle against the Islamic State terrorist group, and vowed that once the fight is finished, American troops will leave Syria. The Pentagon has acknowledged a presence of about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them Special Forces working closely with Kurdish and Arab militias against ISIS, which has lost nearly all its captured territory in the country over the past year.
“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” the president said during an event in Ohio. “Let the other people take care of it now.”
“We got to get back to our country where we belong, where we want to be,” he added.
Trump’s view runs contrary to the crux of a detailed speech on Syria by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump has since fired, as well as multiple comments by Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Both men have argued that the U.S. must remain involved in the country—not only to prevent ISIS's return but as part of a larger battle of influence underway there among multiple nations including Russia and Iran, which have backed the regime of Syrian president Bashar Assad.
In January, Tillerson told an audience in California that the U.S. "will maintain a military presence in Syria focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge."
"We cannot make the same mistakes that were made in 2011 when a premature departure from Iraq allowed al-Qaeda in Iraq to survive and eventually morph into ISIS," Tillerson added.
As a candidate, Trump often made the same point—blaming then-President Barack Obama for the scourge of ISIS on the grounds that Obama had been too hasty in withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
But Tillerson also expressed broader goals, including preventing Iranian-backed militia groups from taking over Syrian territory, and maintaining influence over any potential peace settlement for the country’s civil war. Israel strongly supports a continued U.S. challenge to Iranian influence within the country.
Tillerson’s Syria policy was developed with the consultation and blessing of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has repeatedly said the Pentagon's mission in Syria will continue—not only to keep ISIS from regenerating but to influence peace negotiations there. “We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has traction,” Mattis said in November, a reference to peace talks that have occurred sporadically for several years in the Swiss city.
In January, Mattis told reporters that more diplomats, under military protection, would be headed to the country for stabilization and rebuilding efforts.
CIA director Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has tapped to succeeed Tillerson, has also hinted that the U.S. mission in Syria should extend beyond the fight against ISIS. Asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" earlier this month whether the U.S. mission in Syria should "change to counter Iran and its proxies," Pompeo declined to comment on policy, but complained that the Obama administration had given Iran "a free pass" inside Syria and said that "we're working diligently to find the right approach to counter the incredible spread of Iranian hegemony throughout the Middle East."
Similarly, Trump's incoming national security adviser, John Bolton, has argued that the "U.S.-led coalition... needs to thwart Iran’s ambitions as ISIS falls" in Syria—although in a July 2017 opinion essay he also wrote that the U.S. "has carried too much of the burden for too long" in Syria.
Syria has been riven by a civil war that began in spring 2011. Rebel groups have been fighting to overthrow Assad, who has been backed by Russia and Iran. The Islamic State exploited the chaos to grab large amounts of territory in Syria and Iraq, leading the U.S. to resume military operations in Iraq and carry out strikes against the group in Syria.
Today, the battle space has grown highly complicated, involving not only Syrians, Kurds Iranians and Russians but more recently Turkish forces who are battling the Kurds.
A White House spokeswoman had no immediate comment. The Pentagon referred POLITICO to the White House. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We got to get back to our country where we belong, where we want to be,” he said.
'We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,' the president said Thursday, a shift from his top officials' recent comments.
By NAHAL TOOSI and MICHAEL CROWLEY
President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States will end its military presence in Syria “very soon”—contradicting his secretaries of state and defense, who have said U.S. troops should stay in the Arab country for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s declaration was just the latest instance in which the president has publicly undercut or defied his foreign policy team, to the frustration and confusion of U.S. officials and America’s allies.
Speaking in Ohio Thursday, Trump boasted that U.S. is winning its battle against the Islamic State terrorist group, and vowed that once the fight is finished, American troops will leave Syria. The Pentagon has acknowledged a presence of about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them Special Forces working closely with Kurdish and Arab militias against ISIS, which has lost nearly all its captured territory in the country over the past year.
“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” the president said during an event in Ohio. “Let the other people take care of it now.”
“We got to get back to our country where we belong, where we want to be,” he added.
Trump’s view runs contrary to the crux of a detailed speech on Syria by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump has since fired, as well as multiple comments by Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Both men have argued that the U.S. must remain involved in the country—not only to prevent ISIS's return but as part of a larger battle of influence underway there among multiple nations including Russia and Iran, which have backed the regime of Syrian president Bashar Assad.
In January, Tillerson told an audience in California that the U.S. "will maintain a military presence in Syria focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge."
"We cannot make the same mistakes that were made in 2011 when a premature departure from Iraq allowed al-Qaeda in Iraq to survive and eventually morph into ISIS," Tillerson added.
As a candidate, Trump often made the same point—blaming then-President Barack Obama for the scourge of ISIS on the grounds that Obama had been too hasty in withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
But Tillerson also expressed broader goals, including preventing Iranian-backed militia groups from taking over Syrian territory, and maintaining influence over any potential peace settlement for the country’s civil war. Israel strongly supports a continued U.S. challenge to Iranian influence within the country.
Tillerson’s Syria policy was developed with the consultation and blessing of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has repeatedly said the Pentagon's mission in Syria will continue—not only to keep ISIS from regenerating but to influence peace negotiations there. “We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has traction,” Mattis said in November, a reference to peace talks that have occurred sporadically for several years in the Swiss city.
In January, Mattis told reporters that more diplomats, under military protection, would be headed to the country for stabilization and rebuilding efforts.
CIA director Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has tapped to succeeed Tillerson, has also hinted that the U.S. mission in Syria should extend beyond the fight against ISIS. Asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" earlier this month whether the U.S. mission in Syria should "change to counter Iran and its proxies," Pompeo declined to comment on policy, but complained that the Obama administration had given Iran "a free pass" inside Syria and said that "we're working diligently to find the right approach to counter the incredible spread of Iranian hegemony throughout the Middle East."
Similarly, Trump's incoming national security adviser, John Bolton, has argued that the "U.S.-led coalition... needs to thwart Iran’s ambitions as ISIS falls" in Syria—although in a July 2017 opinion essay he also wrote that the U.S. "has carried too much of the burden for too long" in Syria.
Syria has been riven by a civil war that began in spring 2011. Rebel groups have been fighting to overthrow Assad, who has been backed by Russia and Iran. The Islamic State exploited the chaos to grab large amounts of territory in Syria and Iraq, leading the U.S. to resume military operations in Iraq and carry out strikes against the group in Syria.
Today, the battle space has grown highly complicated, involving not only Syrians, Kurds Iranians and Russians but more recently Turkish forces who are battling the Kurds.
A White House spokeswoman had no immediate comment. The Pentagon referred POLITICO to the White House. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We got to get back to our country where we belong, where we want to be,” he said.
Dumb and Crazy...
Trump packing government with Fox News stars and loyal companions
The president, newly confident in the job, is putting high value on personal chemistry as he restocks his Cabinet.
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM
Personal chemistry and Fox News panache can take you a long way with President Donald Trump.
That may have once meant handwritten notes and surprise phone calls to praise a performance. But now, for some, it means positions of power at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
A weeks-long administration shake-up, which on Wednesday saw the ouster of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, has been marked by the elevation of figures who enjoy warm personal chemistry with Trump or are regular defenders of the president on his favorite television network — or both.
“Now that he’s been in the job for over a year and has his sea legs, he feels much more confident to bring in people that he likes and that he trusts,” said Ron Bonjean, who served as a communications adviser to Trump’s transition team and helped guide Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch through confirmation process. “Some personnel choices don’t have as much experience as previous administration officials have had, but that’s because Trump feels comfortable with them, likes them and thinks that they can do the job and is willing to take a chance on them.”
Trump’s selection Wednesday of White House physician Ronny Jackson to lead the VA was just the latest example. Jackson has never led a large organization, but he enjoys a warm relationship with Trump and famously defended the president’s health at length in the White House briefing room, saying he had “incredibly good genes.”
His nomination follows Trump’s selection of CNBC contributor Larry Kudlow to be his top economic adviser, Fox News pundit and former UN ambassador John Bolton as his national security adviser, and CIA director Mike Pompeo, who regularly travelled to the White House to deliver the daily briefing in person, to be secretary of state. Among the finalists for the VA nod was Pete Hegseth, another prominent Fox News pundit.
The moves show Trump is seizing on his natural inclination to surround himself with those he’s already comfortable with, even if their qualifications appear lacking. He has, for example, floated his personal pilot to lead the Federal Aviation Administration and placed his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a real estate executive, in charge of forging peace in the Middle East.
“I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want,” Trump quipped recently after removing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The television personalities bring another skill Trump values: brevity. The ability to tick through need-to-know points in a straightforward way — delivering soundbites, essentially — works well on Fox & Friends and is effective in the Oval Office. Trump has bristled at aides who have taken a more pedantic approach, like H.R. McMaster, the ousted national security adviser.
Trump is fond of utilizing aides whose positions do not usually involve television appearances as regular surrogates. The legislative affairs director, Marc Short, has become something of a regular on cable news and Sunday shows.
“The cherry on top is these guys are good communicators,” said one former White House official. “He sees the importance of the ability of officials to communicate publicly in 2018. It has grown into an outsized importance.”
“If he had his way he would have a Cabinet full of people who, when the situation called for it, he could send them on TV and trust them to do a good job out there,” the former official added.
Trump’s affinity for the familiar certainly has pitfalls. While Kudlow and Bolton do not require Senate confirmation, Pompeo and Jackson will. Already, Jackson seems to be attracting wariness from senators about his experience.
“I look forward to meeting Admiral Jackson and learning more about him,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a tepid statement Wednesday evening.
“I look forward to meeting Admiral Jackson soon and seeing if he is up to the job,” echoed Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the top Democrat on the committee.
The president, newly confident in the job, is putting high value on personal chemistry as he restocks his Cabinet.
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM
Personal chemistry and Fox News panache can take you a long way with President Donald Trump.
That may have once meant handwritten notes and surprise phone calls to praise a performance. But now, for some, it means positions of power at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
A weeks-long administration shake-up, which on Wednesday saw the ouster of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, has been marked by the elevation of figures who enjoy warm personal chemistry with Trump or are regular defenders of the president on his favorite television network — or both.
“Now that he’s been in the job for over a year and has his sea legs, he feels much more confident to bring in people that he likes and that he trusts,” said Ron Bonjean, who served as a communications adviser to Trump’s transition team and helped guide Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch through confirmation process. “Some personnel choices don’t have as much experience as previous administration officials have had, but that’s because Trump feels comfortable with them, likes them and thinks that they can do the job and is willing to take a chance on them.”
Trump’s selection Wednesday of White House physician Ronny Jackson to lead the VA was just the latest example. Jackson has never led a large organization, but he enjoys a warm relationship with Trump and famously defended the president’s health at length in the White House briefing room, saying he had “incredibly good genes.”
His nomination follows Trump’s selection of CNBC contributor Larry Kudlow to be his top economic adviser, Fox News pundit and former UN ambassador John Bolton as his national security adviser, and CIA director Mike Pompeo, who regularly travelled to the White House to deliver the daily briefing in person, to be secretary of state. Among the finalists for the VA nod was Pete Hegseth, another prominent Fox News pundit.
The moves show Trump is seizing on his natural inclination to surround himself with those he’s already comfortable with, even if their qualifications appear lacking. He has, for example, floated his personal pilot to lead the Federal Aviation Administration and placed his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a real estate executive, in charge of forging peace in the Middle East.
“I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want,” Trump quipped recently after removing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The television personalities bring another skill Trump values: brevity. The ability to tick through need-to-know points in a straightforward way — delivering soundbites, essentially — works well on Fox & Friends and is effective in the Oval Office. Trump has bristled at aides who have taken a more pedantic approach, like H.R. McMaster, the ousted national security adviser.
Trump is fond of utilizing aides whose positions do not usually involve television appearances as regular surrogates. The legislative affairs director, Marc Short, has become something of a regular on cable news and Sunday shows.
“The cherry on top is these guys are good communicators,” said one former White House official. “He sees the importance of the ability of officials to communicate publicly in 2018. It has grown into an outsized importance.”
“If he had his way he would have a Cabinet full of people who, when the situation called for it, he could send them on TV and trust them to do a good job out there,” the former official added.
Trump’s affinity for the familiar certainly has pitfalls. While Kudlow and Bolton do not require Senate confirmation, Pompeo and Jackson will. Already, Jackson seems to be attracting wariness from senators about his experience.
“I look forward to meeting Admiral Jackson and learning more about him,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a tepid statement Wednesday evening.
“I look forward to meeting Admiral Jackson soon and seeing if he is up to the job,” echoed Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the top Democrat on the committee.
"Lets go crazy!!!"
After being pent up for days, Trump lets ’er rip
The president goes way off script during an infrastructure speech in Ohio.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
He predicted that the U.S. would pull out of Syria “like, very soon.” He said President Barack Obama left him a “gift” of judicial vacancies. And he praised actress Roseanne Barr for the success of her rebooted show, exclaiming, “Look at her ratings!”
After staying out of public sight for four days, President Donald Trump on Thursday traveled to Ohio to boost his infrastructure proposal. But the event smacked of the campaign rallies that give the president a mood boost and allow him to reconnect with the core supporters crucial to maintaining control of Congress in the November midterms.
The president barely stayed on script, hitting on immigration, Obamacare, North Korea, NASA, veterans and a slew of other topics, as he returned to campaign form, even as his White House is roiled by unprecedented turnover and an intensifying Russia probe from special counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump delivered the speech at a training site for members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which was intended to highlight efforts to address issues in U.S. infrastructure.
“In recent years, Americans have watched as Washington spent trillions and trillions of dollars building up foreign countries,” Trump told the crowd, “while allowing our own country’s infrastructure to fall into a state of total disrepair.”
Speaking before thousands of supporters in Richfield, Trump veered into familiar riffs, bemoaning the “fake news” media, lashing out at his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, and touting the successes of the massive GOP tax reform package. But the president also broke significant new ground, threatening to put a pause on the newly reached trade deal with South Korea to use as a bargaining chip in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“I may hold it up until after a deal is made with North Korea,” Trump floated Thursday. His administration recently unveiled the agreement, struck in principle by U.S. and South Korean negotiators earlier this month. The announcement marked Trump’s first successful conversion on efforts to revamp major international trade deals, an issue he made central to his 2016 presidential campaign and his early tenure in the White House.
The president, who shocked the international community by agreeing to meet directly with Kim earlier this month, voiced optimism that a peaceful compromise could be reached with the North Korean leader while dangling the possibility that the U.S. will withdraw from discussions altogether. “If it’s no good, we’re walking,” he said of the talks. “And if it’s good, we will embrace it.”
Trump also detoured for an extended stretch into military efforts in Syria, forecasting that he would pull U.S. troops out of the region in the near future. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” he said.
Just a day after announcing on Twitter that he would replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin with his presidential physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, Trump said the decision to dismiss the Obama holdover came out of frustration with the efficiency of care for veterans.
“We’re going to have real choice,” Trump said. “That’s why I made some changes — because I wasn’t happy with the speed with which our veterans were taken care of. I wasn’t happy with it.”
Trump’s firing of Shulkin on social media ended weeks of speculation that the official was on his way out, as unease reportedly crept in the West Wing about the possibility of further staffing changes. The dismissal came just days after White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Fox News that Trump had “confidence” in Shulkin and that the agency chief had “done some great things at the VA” — making him the latest administration official to receive praise from the West Wing shortly before their firing.
As White House officials have dealt with a spree of high-profile departures — the exits of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and economic adviser Gary Cohn — Trump’s lawyers inside and outside of the West Wing have continued to grapple with developments in Mueller’s probe and legal actions from adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
While White House officials have said the president denies Daniels’ claim that she had an affair with the president in 2006, Trump remained silent on the controversy during the event in Ohio.
The president, a former reality-TV host and an avid fan of cable television, found time in the speech to lavish praise on actress Roseanne Barr, whose Trump-friendly reboot of her iconic comedy drew over 18 million views recently in its debut.
“Even look at Roseanne, I called her yesterday. Look at her ratings! Look at her ratings!” Trump said, confirming reports he had reached out to the actress.
He added: “They were unbelievable. Over 18 million people. And it was about us. They haven’t figured it out. The fake news hasn’t quite figured it out yet. They have not figured it out. So that was great. And they haven’t figured it out. But they will, and when they do, they’ll become much less fake.”
The president goes way off script during an infrastructure speech in Ohio.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
He predicted that the U.S. would pull out of Syria “like, very soon.” He said President Barack Obama left him a “gift” of judicial vacancies. And he praised actress Roseanne Barr for the success of her rebooted show, exclaiming, “Look at her ratings!”
After staying out of public sight for four days, President Donald Trump on Thursday traveled to Ohio to boost his infrastructure proposal. But the event smacked of the campaign rallies that give the president a mood boost and allow him to reconnect with the core supporters crucial to maintaining control of Congress in the November midterms.
The president barely stayed on script, hitting on immigration, Obamacare, North Korea, NASA, veterans and a slew of other topics, as he returned to campaign form, even as his White House is roiled by unprecedented turnover and an intensifying Russia probe from special counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump delivered the speech at a training site for members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which was intended to highlight efforts to address issues in U.S. infrastructure.
“In recent years, Americans have watched as Washington spent trillions and trillions of dollars building up foreign countries,” Trump told the crowd, “while allowing our own country’s infrastructure to fall into a state of total disrepair.”
Speaking before thousands of supporters in Richfield, Trump veered into familiar riffs, bemoaning the “fake news” media, lashing out at his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, and touting the successes of the massive GOP tax reform package. But the president also broke significant new ground, threatening to put a pause on the newly reached trade deal with South Korea to use as a bargaining chip in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“I may hold it up until after a deal is made with North Korea,” Trump floated Thursday. His administration recently unveiled the agreement, struck in principle by U.S. and South Korean negotiators earlier this month. The announcement marked Trump’s first successful conversion on efforts to revamp major international trade deals, an issue he made central to his 2016 presidential campaign and his early tenure in the White House.
The president, who shocked the international community by agreeing to meet directly with Kim earlier this month, voiced optimism that a peaceful compromise could be reached with the North Korean leader while dangling the possibility that the U.S. will withdraw from discussions altogether. “If it’s no good, we’re walking,” he said of the talks. “And if it’s good, we will embrace it.”
Trump also detoured for an extended stretch into military efforts in Syria, forecasting that he would pull U.S. troops out of the region in the near future. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” he said.
Just a day after announcing on Twitter that he would replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin with his presidential physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, Trump said the decision to dismiss the Obama holdover came out of frustration with the efficiency of care for veterans.
“We’re going to have real choice,” Trump said. “That’s why I made some changes — because I wasn’t happy with the speed with which our veterans were taken care of. I wasn’t happy with it.”
Trump’s firing of Shulkin on social media ended weeks of speculation that the official was on his way out, as unease reportedly crept in the West Wing about the possibility of further staffing changes. The dismissal came just days after White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Fox News that Trump had “confidence” in Shulkin and that the agency chief had “done some great things at the VA” — making him the latest administration official to receive praise from the West Wing shortly before their firing.
As White House officials have dealt with a spree of high-profile departures — the exits of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and economic adviser Gary Cohn — Trump’s lawyers inside and outside of the West Wing have continued to grapple with developments in Mueller’s probe and legal actions from adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
While White House officials have said the president denies Daniels’ claim that she had an affair with the president in 2006, Trump remained silent on the controversy during the event in Ohio.
The president, a former reality-TV host and an avid fan of cable television, found time in the speech to lavish praise on actress Roseanne Barr, whose Trump-friendly reboot of her iconic comedy drew over 18 million views recently in its debut.
“Even look at Roseanne, I called her yesterday. Look at her ratings! Look at her ratings!” Trump said, confirming reports he had reached out to the actress.
He added: “They were unbelievable. Over 18 million people. And it was about us. They haven’t figured it out. The fake news hasn’t quite figured it out yet. They have not figured it out. So that was great. And they haven’t figured it out. But they will, and when they do, they’ll become much less fake.”
No longer muzzled
No longer muzzled, Shulkin takes on Trump’s White House
The fired Veterans Affairs secretary claims he was politically knifed: ‘It should not be this hard to serve your country.’
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and LOUIS NELSON
Ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is going down swinging.
Instead of disappearing into obscurity like others who were summarily fired by President Donald Trump, Shulkin is using his dismissal as an opportunity to step into the spotlight. Freed from the constraints of serving in the Trump administration, Shulkin is publicly — and loudly — raising red flags about what he sees as a sinister plot to privatize veterans’ health care.
Within hours of Trump’s announcement via Twitter that he is replacing Shulkin with White House physician Ronny Jackson, the newly unseated secretary had published an op-ed in The New York Times and conducted an interview with NPR.
Shulkin is flipping the script on an unspoken rule in Washington that fired Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials should keep their grievances to themselves out of respect for the president. But Trump’s unconventional presidency, which has spit out a string of jilted ex-staffers, is challenging that long-standing practice.
Former Trump administration officials are quick to anonymously lambaste the president and his team to reporters. And a small number have started doing it on the record.
Former chief strategist Steve Bannon infuriated Trump after his critical on-the-record comments in Michael Wolff’s recent book came to light. Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman went on the reality show “Big Brother“ after getting fired, where she repeatedly turned on her colleagues in the White House.
In contrast, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was also fired via Twitter, has said little so far about his own disagreements with Trump, only hinting at his frustrations in farewell remarks to State Department staff in which he called Washington a “mean-spirited town.”
Shulkin, for his part, blamed his ouster on “the ambitions of people who want to put VA health care in the hands of the private sector,” something he opposes, lamenting that a political power struggle over his department made it tougher to do the work of running and improving the VA.
“They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” Shulkin wrote in his New York Times op-ed, published shortly after midnight on Thursday. “As I prepare to leave government, I am struck by a recurring thought: It should not be this hard to serve your country.”
Shulkin’s firing on Wednesday came after weeks of speculation that he would be removed as VA secretary, the latest in a string of personnel changes that has included the ouster of Tillerson, economic adviser Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Shulkin was the lone holdover from the Obama administration to continue serving under Trump, having led the Veterans Health Administration for two years prior to his confirmation as VA secretary.
Shulkin, according to aides, lost Trump’s confidence and infuriated senior administration officials, who were shocked when Shulkin told reporters he had the White House’s blessing to purge his department of his internal critics. Even as they batted down rumors that Trump would fire other senior members of his administration, White House aides had long ago stopped pushing back on stories saying Shulkin was on thin ice with the president.
Trump announced Shulkin’s firing on Twitter, writing, “I am thankful for Dr. David Shulkin’s service to our country and to our GREAT VETERANS!”
Shulkin had come under criticism in recent months after a VA Inspector General’s report accused him of improperly accepting tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and using his staff at the VA to arrange a sightseeing tour of Denmark and England. Shulkin repaid the VA for the alleged misconduct and hinted in his op-ed that he had been the victim of a political knifing.
“I am a physician, not a politician. I came to government with an understanding that Washington can be ugly, but I assumed that I could avoid all of the ugliness by staying true to my values,” he wrote. “I have been falsely accused of things by people who wanted me out of the way.”
The former VA secretary laid out in his op-ed his argument against the privatization of health care for the nation’s veterans, a goal he said exists within the Trump administration. The private sector, Shulkin said, is “ill-prepared” to deal with health care for veterans, who are numerous and have specific needs different from those of the general population. The VA, on the other hand, has an understanding of the health problems faced by veterans and has done “groundbreaking research” that, taken together, cannot be easily replicated by the private health care system.
“I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach,” Shulkin wrote. “That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.”
In the interview with NPR, Shulkin lobbed even more pointed criticisms at the administration, alleging that he wasn’t permitted to defend himself in the aftermath of reports about his trip to Europe.
“There was nothing improper about this trip, and I was not allowed to put up an official statement or to even respond to this by the White House,” he said. “I think this was really just being used in a political context to try to make sure that I wasn't as effective as a leader moving forward."
And he referenced reports that White House political appointees were working against him from inside his own department.
"We've gotten so much done, but in the last few months, it really has changed,” Shulkin said. “Not from Congress, but from these internal political appointees that were trying to politicize VA and trying to make sure our progress stopped. It's been very difficult."
The fired Veterans Affairs secretary claims he was politically knifed: ‘It should not be this hard to serve your country.’
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and LOUIS NELSON
Ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is going down swinging.
Instead of disappearing into obscurity like others who were summarily fired by President Donald Trump, Shulkin is using his dismissal as an opportunity to step into the spotlight. Freed from the constraints of serving in the Trump administration, Shulkin is publicly — and loudly — raising red flags about what he sees as a sinister plot to privatize veterans’ health care.
Within hours of Trump’s announcement via Twitter that he is replacing Shulkin with White House physician Ronny Jackson, the newly unseated secretary had published an op-ed in The New York Times and conducted an interview with NPR.
Shulkin is flipping the script on an unspoken rule in Washington that fired Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials should keep their grievances to themselves out of respect for the president. But Trump’s unconventional presidency, which has spit out a string of jilted ex-staffers, is challenging that long-standing practice.
Former Trump administration officials are quick to anonymously lambaste the president and his team to reporters. And a small number have started doing it on the record.
Former chief strategist Steve Bannon infuriated Trump after his critical on-the-record comments in Michael Wolff’s recent book came to light. Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman went on the reality show “Big Brother“ after getting fired, where she repeatedly turned on her colleagues in the White House.
In contrast, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was also fired via Twitter, has said little so far about his own disagreements with Trump, only hinting at his frustrations in farewell remarks to State Department staff in which he called Washington a “mean-spirited town.”
Shulkin, for his part, blamed his ouster on “the ambitions of people who want to put VA health care in the hands of the private sector,” something he opposes, lamenting that a political power struggle over his department made it tougher to do the work of running and improving the VA.
“They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” Shulkin wrote in his New York Times op-ed, published shortly after midnight on Thursday. “As I prepare to leave government, I am struck by a recurring thought: It should not be this hard to serve your country.”
Shulkin’s firing on Wednesday came after weeks of speculation that he would be removed as VA secretary, the latest in a string of personnel changes that has included the ouster of Tillerson, economic adviser Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Shulkin was the lone holdover from the Obama administration to continue serving under Trump, having led the Veterans Health Administration for two years prior to his confirmation as VA secretary.
Shulkin, according to aides, lost Trump’s confidence and infuriated senior administration officials, who were shocked when Shulkin told reporters he had the White House’s blessing to purge his department of his internal critics. Even as they batted down rumors that Trump would fire other senior members of his administration, White House aides had long ago stopped pushing back on stories saying Shulkin was on thin ice with the president.
Trump announced Shulkin’s firing on Twitter, writing, “I am thankful for Dr. David Shulkin’s service to our country and to our GREAT VETERANS!”
Shulkin had come under criticism in recent months after a VA Inspector General’s report accused him of improperly accepting tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and using his staff at the VA to arrange a sightseeing tour of Denmark and England. Shulkin repaid the VA for the alleged misconduct and hinted in his op-ed that he had been the victim of a political knifing.
“I am a physician, not a politician. I came to government with an understanding that Washington can be ugly, but I assumed that I could avoid all of the ugliness by staying true to my values,” he wrote. “I have been falsely accused of things by people who wanted me out of the way.”
The former VA secretary laid out in his op-ed his argument against the privatization of health care for the nation’s veterans, a goal he said exists within the Trump administration. The private sector, Shulkin said, is “ill-prepared” to deal with health care for veterans, who are numerous and have specific needs different from those of the general population. The VA, on the other hand, has an understanding of the health problems faced by veterans and has done “groundbreaking research” that, taken together, cannot be easily replicated by the private health care system.
“I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach,” Shulkin wrote. “That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.”
In the interview with NPR, Shulkin lobbed even more pointed criticisms at the administration, alleging that he wasn’t permitted to defend himself in the aftermath of reports about his trip to Europe.
“There was nothing improper about this trip, and I was not allowed to put up an official statement or to even respond to this by the White House,” he said. “I think this was really just being used in a political context to try to make sure that I wasn't as effective as a leader moving forward."
And he referenced reports that White House political appointees were working against him from inside his own department.
"We've gotten so much done, but in the last few months, it really has changed,” Shulkin said. “Not from Congress, but from these internal political appointees that were trying to politicize VA and trying to make sure our progress stopped. It's been very difficult."
Never mind...
Never mind about John Bolton. Trump's ego could force a North Korea deal anyway
By Michael Desch
Many people are understandably alarmed by President Trump's appointment of unrepentant George W. Bush-era hawk John Bolton as his new National Security Adviser to replace General H.R. McMaster, who is unceremoniously marching off into the sunset on the heels of his predecessor, General Michael Flynn.
Is Donald Trump recanting his recanting on the Iraq War and belatedly throwing his lot in with George W. Bush and his neoconservative war council?
In 2003, Bolton rode in the vanguard of the war party, pushing to topple Saddam Hussein on the specious grounds that Iraq was pursuing nuclear and chemical weapons and in cahoots with al Qaeda. Unchastened by the Iraq debacle and the exposure of the bogus rationales for the war, an out-of-power Bolton has sniped at the Obama administration's Iran nuclear agreement and beat the drums for war to denuclearize North Korea.
While putting Bolton back in power may signal the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for Iran, I am less worried, ironically, about the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. Indeed, I can see a way that the President's ego, combined with his penchant for ignoring his advisers, could advance a diplomatic solution to the tinderbox straddling both sides of the 38th Parallel even while they drive the last nail in the coffin of the Iran nuclear deal.
This would be a shame, given that the JCPOA has broad international support among our allies and other important powers such as Russia and China. Like most arms control agreements, it is not perfect, but most of its supposed defects involve things like Iranian meddling in other countries, support for terrorist organizations, or development of ballistic missiles which were not covered by the original agreement.
Most knowledgeable observers inside and outside the United States concede, even if grudgingly, that Iran has abided by the narrow terms of the agreement itself.
So why would President Trump discard a good agreement with Iran and pursue what is likely to be a far more flawed one with North Korea? Such an approach makes little strategic sense, but strategy has little to do with how the President thinks about the world. Rather, our Art-of-the-Deal President operates primarily on a personal level.
While he hates former President Obama's Iran deal, primarily because he, himself, did not cut it, I could imagine him reaching a far worse deal with North Korea which he would love, warts and all, because it was his.
To be sure, there are also more credible reasons for him to pursue a diplomatic, rather than military, solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. It has become apparent in recent months that, despite the President's badgering of his military advisers for a plan to pre-emptively knock out the Hermit Kingdom's budding nuclear arsenal, the best he can get out of them are plans to give Pyongyang a bloody nose through symbolic strikes, hoping that will scare Kim into surrendering his arsenal.
Nor can America's military planners assure the President that even a reasonably successful first strike on Kim's nuclear arsenal would prevent a catastrophic conventional war that would kill hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians. This realization that their capitol Seoul and millions of their citizens are within range of tens of thousands of North Korean artillery pieces has led our South Korean allies to push hard for jaw-jaw rather than war-war, to borrow Winston Churchill's famous phrase.
China is joined at the hip with North Korea in a dysfunctional marriage of inconvenience, in which the Middle Kingdom provides its wayward younger brother with most of its food and energy supplies to avoid having an American ally on its border and preserve the last shred of its increasingly threadbare international Communist legitimacy. So it would also welcome a deal that ends the slow-motion crisis between Washington and Pyongyang.
Finally, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's flurry of diplomacy with the South and hasty train trip to visit his patrons in Beijing could signal that North Korea's foremost Dennis Rodman fan may also want to play Let's Make a Deal.
Predicting what President Trump will likely do is as fraught an endeavor as divining the murky palace politics of "little rocket man's" regime. But assuming that ego trumps strategy in Washington these days, the desire to cut a North Korean nuclear deal makes sense of some of the recent puzzling moves from the President, particularly the indecent alacrity with which he accepted Kim's olive branch delivered via Seoul a couple of weeks ago.
Incoming Trump National Security Adviser Bolton will surely not want to play along with this diplomatic Kabuki dance, which is unlikely to roll back North Korea's nuclear program. Indeed, most analysts think that in exchange for an easing of the crippling economic sanctions, the best President Trump is likely to get is a "freeze" on additional North Korean missile tests. This is hardly a great deal from Bolton's global regime change perspective or even compared with the JCPOA.
But if I am right that Trump's ego will trump Bolton's hardline strategic agenda, any flaws in an agreement with North Korea may be irrelevant.
Ironically, this might be one instance in which the President's well-documented penchant for bypassing his advisers may favor diplomacy. Indeed, a cynic might wonder whether Bolton's appointment was in part Trump's effort to protect his right flank as he pursues a historic, if flawed, North Korean nuclear "deal."
By Michael Desch
Many people are understandably alarmed by President Trump's appointment of unrepentant George W. Bush-era hawk John Bolton as his new National Security Adviser to replace General H.R. McMaster, who is unceremoniously marching off into the sunset on the heels of his predecessor, General Michael Flynn.
Is Donald Trump recanting his recanting on the Iraq War and belatedly throwing his lot in with George W. Bush and his neoconservative war council?
In 2003, Bolton rode in the vanguard of the war party, pushing to topple Saddam Hussein on the specious grounds that Iraq was pursuing nuclear and chemical weapons and in cahoots with al Qaeda. Unchastened by the Iraq debacle and the exposure of the bogus rationales for the war, an out-of-power Bolton has sniped at the Obama administration's Iran nuclear agreement and beat the drums for war to denuclearize North Korea.
While putting Bolton back in power may signal the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for Iran, I am less worried, ironically, about the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. Indeed, I can see a way that the President's ego, combined with his penchant for ignoring his advisers, could advance a diplomatic solution to the tinderbox straddling both sides of the 38th Parallel even while they drive the last nail in the coffin of the Iran nuclear deal.
This would be a shame, given that the JCPOA has broad international support among our allies and other important powers such as Russia and China. Like most arms control agreements, it is not perfect, but most of its supposed defects involve things like Iranian meddling in other countries, support for terrorist organizations, or development of ballistic missiles which were not covered by the original agreement.
Most knowledgeable observers inside and outside the United States concede, even if grudgingly, that Iran has abided by the narrow terms of the agreement itself.
So why would President Trump discard a good agreement with Iran and pursue what is likely to be a far more flawed one with North Korea? Such an approach makes little strategic sense, but strategy has little to do with how the President thinks about the world. Rather, our Art-of-the-Deal President operates primarily on a personal level.
While he hates former President Obama's Iran deal, primarily because he, himself, did not cut it, I could imagine him reaching a far worse deal with North Korea which he would love, warts and all, because it was his.
To be sure, there are also more credible reasons for him to pursue a diplomatic, rather than military, solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. It has become apparent in recent months that, despite the President's badgering of his military advisers for a plan to pre-emptively knock out the Hermit Kingdom's budding nuclear arsenal, the best he can get out of them are plans to give Pyongyang a bloody nose through symbolic strikes, hoping that will scare Kim into surrendering his arsenal.
Nor can America's military planners assure the President that even a reasonably successful first strike on Kim's nuclear arsenal would prevent a catastrophic conventional war that would kill hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians. This realization that their capitol Seoul and millions of their citizens are within range of tens of thousands of North Korean artillery pieces has led our South Korean allies to push hard for jaw-jaw rather than war-war, to borrow Winston Churchill's famous phrase.
China is joined at the hip with North Korea in a dysfunctional marriage of inconvenience, in which the Middle Kingdom provides its wayward younger brother with most of its food and energy supplies to avoid having an American ally on its border and preserve the last shred of its increasingly threadbare international Communist legitimacy. So it would also welcome a deal that ends the slow-motion crisis between Washington and Pyongyang.
Finally, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's flurry of diplomacy with the South and hasty train trip to visit his patrons in Beijing could signal that North Korea's foremost Dennis Rodman fan may also want to play Let's Make a Deal.
Predicting what President Trump will likely do is as fraught an endeavor as divining the murky palace politics of "little rocket man's" regime. But assuming that ego trumps strategy in Washington these days, the desire to cut a North Korean nuclear deal makes sense of some of the recent puzzling moves from the President, particularly the indecent alacrity with which he accepted Kim's olive branch delivered via Seoul a couple of weeks ago.
Incoming Trump National Security Adviser Bolton will surely not want to play along with this diplomatic Kabuki dance, which is unlikely to roll back North Korea's nuclear program. Indeed, most analysts think that in exchange for an easing of the crippling economic sanctions, the best President Trump is likely to get is a "freeze" on additional North Korean missile tests. This is hardly a great deal from Bolton's global regime change perspective or even compared with the JCPOA.
But if I am right that Trump's ego will trump Bolton's hardline strategic agenda, any flaws in an agreement with North Korea may be irrelevant.
Ironically, this might be one instance in which the President's well-documented penchant for bypassing his advisers may favor diplomacy. Indeed, a cynic might wonder whether Bolton's appointment was in part Trump's effort to protect his right flank as he pursues a historic, if flawed, North Korean nuclear "deal."
FBI to probe into Kushner's ties?
House Democrats call for FBI to probe into Kushner's ties to Saudi crown prince
By Dan Merica
Six House Democrats are calling on FBI Director Christopher Wray to investigate whether President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House aide Jared Kushner leaked classified information to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
The call comes after The Intercept, citing three sources, reported that the Saudi prince -- known casually by his initials, MBS -- told confidantes after their meeting last year that Kushner had discussed Saudi leaders who are disloyal to the crown prince.
"We request the FBI open an immediate investigation to determine if these reports are accurate and to explore the extent to which information and sources may have been comprised," reads the letter from Democratic Reps. Ted Lieu, Gerald Connolly, Donald Beyer, Pramila Jaypal, Peter Welch and Ruben Gallego.
The letter notes that the "integrity of classified information" falls within the purview of the FBI but that "while the President has the authority to declassify and share information, the President's advisers do not."
According to The Intercept, one person "who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers" told the publication that MBS bragged to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that Kushner was "in his pocket." The publication added that the information on the Saudi royals not loyal to him was contained within the President's Daily Brief, a document presented to the President every day that Kushner lost access to earlier this year when near security clearance rules were instituted by chief of staff John Kelly.
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner's lawyers, denied the initial report.
"Some questions by the media are so obviously false and ridiculous that they merit no response. This is one," he said.
Mirijanian said the allegations at the basis of the letter have "been debunked as false many times."
"But that does not stop some congressional Democrats from seeking to revive it for purely partisan reasons," Mirijanian said. "Add this to the pile of frivolous actions some in Congress have taken instead of conducting real business for Americans."
Multiple White House officials declined to comment on the new letter to Wray, Trump's pick to lead the FBI.
Kushner, the White House aide tasked with leading negations in the Middle East on a host of issues, has fostered a close relationship with MBS for months, White House officials have said. Early in Trump's presidency, Kushner correctly viewed MBS was ascendant, a view validated when the prince's 82-year-old father, King Salman, handed over some power to the prince.
Kushner, in an effort to deepen that bond, took an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia in October, where he met directly with the crown prince.
Democrats close the letter with a direct appeal to Wray: "We urge the department to investigate these allegations, and we appreciate your attention to this matter."
By Dan Merica
Six House Democrats are calling on FBI Director Christopher Wray to investigate whether President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House aide Jared Kushner leaked classified information to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
The call comes after The Intercept, citing three sources, reported that the Saudi prince -- known casually by his initials, MBS -- told confidantes after their meeting last year that Kushner had discussed Saudi leaders who are disloyal to the crown prince.
"We request the FBI open an immediate investigation to determine if these reports are accurate and to explore the extent to which information and sources may have been comprised," reads the letter from Democratic Reps. Ted Lieu, Gerald Connolly, Donald Beyer, Pramila Jaypal, Peter Welch and Ruben Gallego.
The letter notes that the "integrity of classified information" falls within the purview of the FBI but that "while the President has the authority to declassify and share information, the President's advisers do not."
According to The Intercept, one person "who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers" told the publication that MBS bragged to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that Kushner was "in his pocket." The publication added that the information on the Saudi royals not loyal to him was contained within the President's Daily Brief, a document presented to the President every day that Kushner lost access to earlier this year when near security clearance rules were instituted by chief of staff John Kelly.
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner's lawyers, denied the initial report.
"Some questions by the media are so obviously false and ridiculous that they merit no response. This is one," he said.
Mirijanian said the allegations at the basis of the letter have "been debunked as false many times."
"But that does not stop some congressional Democrats from seeking to revive it for purely partisan reasons," Mirijanian said. "Add this to the pile of frivolous actions some in Congress have taken instead of conducting real business for Americans."
Multiple White House officials declined to comment on the new letter to Wray, Trump's pick to lead the FBI.
Kushner, the White House aide tasked with leading negations in the Middle East on a host of issues, has fostered a close relationship with MBS for months, White House officials have said. Early in Trump's presidency, Kushner correctly viewed MBS was ascendant, a view validated when the prince's 82-year-old father, King Salman, handed over some power to the prince.
Kushner, in an effort to deepen that bond, took an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia in October, where he met directly with the crown prince.
Democrats close the letter with a direct appeal to Wray: "We urge the department to investigate these allegations, and we appreciate your attention to this matter."
Blew the whistle
Why I blew the whistle on the Rick Perry meeting
By Simon Edelman
I was fired from my job as Department of Energy chief creative officer for releasing public domain photos of a meeting between Rick Perry, secretary of energy, and Robert Murray, CEO of Ohio-based Murray Energy, a large US coal company. There was no classified information present, I didn't engage with either of them and I didn't interrupt their conversation.
The pictures showed Murray, who donated $300,000 to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration, give Perry an "action plan." Murray's company has previously lobbied the Trump administration to end new federal public health protections for greenhouse gas emissions and smog pollution, loosen mine safety rules, and cut the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency by "at least half."
Perry and Murray shook hands, hugged and agreed to get it done. Then they kept everything that happened that day a secret.
If this raises a few flags for you, then you understand the predicament I was in when I was still employed at DOE in March 2017. I thought about it and decided to release the photos and the story to the public, after which I was placed on leave and then fired. My personal laptop was seized (though it was recently returned to me), and I was subjected to intimidation tactics from DOE staff.
Some of the policies Murray's company has advocated for have been faithfully executed without research, thoughtful public comment periods or policy input from public health professionals. President Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate that cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions globally, and his administration gave notice of repealing the landmark Clean Power Plan, which reduced greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants nationwide. The Trump administration attempted to delay, but was eventually forced to proceed due to lawsuits, clean air protections against smog pollution. The President also nominated a coal company consultant to oversee national mine safety and began cutting EPA scientists and other career agency staffers in droves.
Additionally, during this time, the rapidly growing clean energy industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people was also relegated to a footnote through cuts to solar and wind energy research and shifts in focus to fossil fuel development. Perry also tried, unsuccessfully, to manipulate the energy market by attempting to force electricity customers to pay billions of extra dollars to prop up uneconomic coal plants that were ready for retirement. Not surprisingly, the news reports and industry analysts found that the coal plants that would benefit the most from Perry's manipulation attempt would be ones supplied by Murray's coal mines.
But that's not even the worst of it. At that same meeting, Andrew Wheeler, the nominee for the number two position at the Environmental Protection Agency, was present. Prior to his nomination, Wheeler spent much of his career as a mining lobbyist, where he worked for Murray and other mining interests in Washington, fighting to shape clean air and water protections in his clients' favor.
In addition to Wheeler's past relationship with Murray, it's also been reported that he proactively fundraised last year for two senators on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This committee is responsible for determining Wheeler's fitness for the EPA and voting to bring his nomination to the Senate floor, making Wheeler's confirmation out of committee along partisan lines last month a potential conflict of interest.
If he is confirmed by the entire Senate, he will likely vigorously try to prop up the coal industry in the same ways Perry has, despite the fact the coal industry has been in a tailspin for the past decade. The United States has rapidly been transitioning to cleaner, cheaper resources like solar, wind and energy efficiency, while coal plants are being retired due to their costs and pollution.
With full knowledge of these market realities, however, Wheeler, Murray and the Trump administration are adamant on using taxpayer funds to create rules to prop them up -- and for releasing some photos that highlighted this fact, I was let go.
I showed the public what I felt they were entitled to see and now believe we need to do more to hold the Trump administration accountable. We cannot turn back time and undo a meeting that's already been done, but Congress does have an opportunity to limit the extent to which fossil fuel billionaires and D.C. lobbyists influences our government's policies.
Some good first steps would be delving into the governmental access given to coal, oil and fracked gas executives and rejecting the nomination of Wheeler when it comes to the floor of the Senate for a final vote.
Rick Perry fired me for exposing the truth about how energy policy was being made under the Trump administration. Now it's up to Congress to hold him and this administration accountable.
By Simon Edelman
I was fired from my job as Department of Energy chief creative officer for releasing public domain photos of a meeting between Rick Perry, secretary of energy, and Robert Murray, CEO of Ohio-based Murray Energy, a large US coal company. There was no classified information present, I didn't engage with either of them and I didn't interrupt their conversation.
The pictures showed Murray, who donated $300,000 to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration, give Perry an "action plan." Murray's company has previously lobbied the Trump administration to end new federal public health protections for greenhouse gas emissions and smog pollution, loosen mine safety rules, and cut the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency by "at least half."
Perry and Murray shook hands, hugged and agreed to get it done. Then they kept everything that happened that day a secret.
If this raises a few flags for you, then you understand the predicament I was in when I was still employed at DOE in March 2017. I thought about it and decided to release the photos and the story to the public, after which I was placed on leave and then fired. My personal laptop was seized (though it was recently returned to me), and I was subjected to intimidation tactics from DOE staff.
Some of the policies Murray's company has advocated for have been faithfully executed without research, thoughtful public comment periods or policy input from public health professionals. President Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate that cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions globally, and his administration gave notice of repealing the landmark Clean Power Plan, which reduced greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants nationwide. The Trump administration attempted to delay, but was eventually forced to proceed due to lawsuits, clean air protections against smog pollution. The President also nominated a coal company consultant to oversee national mine safety and began cutting EPA scientists and other career agency staffers in droves.
Additionally, during this time, the rapidly growing clean energy industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people was also relegated to a footnote through cuts to solar and wind energy research and shifts in focus to fossil fuel development. Perry also tried, unsuccessfully, to manipulate the energy market by attempting to force electricity customers to pay billions of extra dollars to prop up uneconomic coal plants that were ready for retirement. Not surprisingly, the news reports and industry analysts found that the coal plants that would benefit the most from Perry's manipulation attempt would be ones supplied by Murray's coal mines.
But that's not even the worst of it. At that same meeting, Andrew Wheeler, the nominee for the number two position at the Environmental Protection Agency, was present. Prior to his nomination, Wheeler spent much of his career as a mining lobbyist, where he worked for Murray and other mining interests in Washington, fighting to shape clean air and water protections in his clients' favor.
In addition to Wheeler's past relationship with Murray, it's also been reported that he proactively fundraised last year for two senators on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This committee is responsible for determining Wheeler's fitness for the EPA and voting to bring his nomination to the Senate floor, making Wheeler's confirmation out of committee along partisan lines last month a potential conflict of interest.
If he is confirmed by the entire Senate, he will likely vigorously try to prop up the coal industry in the same ways Perry has, despite the fact the coal industry has been in a tailspin for the past decade. The United States has rapidly been transitioning to cleaner, cheaper resources like solar, wind and energy efficiency, while coal plants are being retired due to their costs and pollution.
With full knowledge of these market realities, however, Wheeler, Murray and the Trump administration are adamant on using taxpayer funds to create rules to prop them up -- and for releasing some photos that highlighted this fact, I was let go.
I showed the public what I felt they were entitled to see and now believe we need to do more to hold the Trump administration accountable. We cannot turn back time and undo a meeting that's already been done, but Congress does have an opportunity to limit the extent to which fossil fuel billionaires and D.C. lobbyists influences our government's policies.
Some good first steps would be delving into the governmental access given to coal, oil and fracked gas executives and rejecting the nomination of Wheeler when it comes to the floor of the Senate for a final vote.
Rick Perry fired me for exposing the truth about how energy policy was being made under the Trump administration. Now it's up to Congress to hold him and this administration accountable.
NGC 2023 in the Horsehead's Shadow
Carved by a bright young star in Orion's dusty molecular clouds, NGC 2023 is often overlooked in favor of the nearby dramatic silhouette of the Horsehead Nebula. In its own right it is seen as a beautiful star forming emission and reflection nebula though, a mere 1500 light-years distant. Surprisingly colorful and complex filaments are detailed in this rare NGC 2023 portrait. Scattered points of emission are also from the region's Herbig-Haro objects, associated with the energetic jets from newborn stars. The sharp telescopic view spans about 10 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 2023. Off the right edge of the frame lies the more familiar cosmic Horsehead.
Hog Farms
Life for Residents Near Hog Farms Just Got Much, Much Worse
It just became much easier for large livestock operations to pollute near people’s homes.
TOM PHILPOTT
In the midst of last week’s, um, stormy news cycle, the meat industry quietly scored a pair of legislative coups, both of which bolster corporate power to impose the downsides of factory-scale animal farming on communities.
One victory will affect people who live near these large operations. In North Carolina alone, 160,000 people reside within a half mile of vast open cesspools full of manure from thousands of confined hogs. If you lived in such conditions, you’d probably want to know what pollutants you and your family were breathing from the foul-smelling air wafting from these operations.
Folded into the omnibus spending bill signed by President Donald Trump last week is a rider that will prevent such knowledge from reaching public view. It’s based on a bill called the “Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act” (get it? FARM), which proposed to free most livestock operations from having to report the air-borne toxins emitted from the manure they accumulate. These gases, which include ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, can trigger ill health effects in neighboring communities, including eye irritation, chronic lung disease, and olfactory neuron loss. The pork, beef, and chicken trade groups all hotly supported the measure, which is now the law of the land.
The Center for Progressive Reform’s Laurie Ristino has the backstory. Since the late 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency has been concerned about air pollution from these concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. But the agency has never come up with a plan for monitoring their emissions—a saga laid bare by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General scathing 2017 report, as well as by this 2017 ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The passage of the FARM rider in the omnibus bill preserves the know-nothing status quo. Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, says the provision amounts to a “missed opportunity to get a handle on what some of these facilities are releasing—which means communities nearby do not even know what they are being exposed to.” And if federal agencies can’t measure the air-borne pollutants wafting off of CAFOS, they also can’t force the industry to cut emissions, Lovera adds. By ending the effort to collect data, the provision lets the big meat companies “argue that the EPA doesn’t have enough data to come up with regulations.”
Meanwhile, in Kansas, the chicken industry scored a victory in the state legislature with the signing into law of State Senate Bill 405 last week, which loosens restrictions on the size and placement of large-scale livestock facilities.
Under the previous state code, chicken CAFOs with more than 125,000 birds had to be sited at least 4,000 feet—about three quarters of a mile—from any residence. Now, facilities with as many as 333,000 birds can be constructed just a quarter-mile from people’s homes, potentially exposing them to polluted air and water.
As Leah Douglas notes on FERN’s Ag Insider, the bill is widely seen as a legislative response to the plight of the giant meatpacker Tyson, which last year abandoned a plan to open a massive, poultry-processing complex in the state after much pushback from communities there.
Loosening regulations on chicken CAFOs makes Kansas more attractive to big poultry packers like Tyson in the future. Tyson’s now-stalled proposal to place a plant in the northwestern Kansas town of Tonganoxie would have had the capacity to slaughter 1.25 million bird per week and required as many as 400 new chicken-raising CAFOs within a 50-mile radius, reports the trade journal Meat+Poultry. The new, less stringent rules will make such a build-out less cumbersome.
The agribusiness lobby promoted the bill as tool for generating “new growth opportunities within the agricultural industry,” as the Kansas Farm Bureau put it in a note to members. “Kansas Farm Bureau believes the provisions in SB 405 will attract new agricultural business by clarifying where these facilities fit in the current regulatory environment,” the group stated.
But to grow their flocks, chicken packers rely almost exclusively on quasi-independent farmers to build and maintain the facilities and grow out birds under contract. As a 2014 USDA study showed, contract poultry farmers on average make about $11.50 per hour in income, after accounting for operating expenses and interest on loans required to build and maintain the facilities. (More on the vexed economics of contract poultry farming here.)
Meanwhile, Tyson has rolled out plans for a very similar plant in Tennessee, egged on in part by $34 million in tax abatements and other incentives. Last year, the Tennessee legislature passed a law forbidding the state’s department of environment to regulate CAFOs “more stringently than federal law requires.”
It just became much easier for large livestock operations to pollute near people’s homes.
TOM PHILPOTT
In the midst of last week’s, um, stormy news cycle, the meat industry quietly scored a pair of legislative coups, both of which bolster corporate power to impose the downsides of factory-scale animal farming on communities.
One victory will affect people who live near these large operations. In North Carolina alone, 160,000 people reside within a half mile of vast open cesspools full of manure from thousands of confined hogs. If you lived in such conditions, you’d probably want to know what pollutants you and your family were breathing from the foul-smelling air wafting from these operations.
Folded into the omnibus spending bill signed by President Donald Trump last week is a rider that will prevent such knowledge from reaching public view. It’s based on a bill called the “Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act” (get it? FARM), which proposed to free most livestock operations from having to report the air-borne toxins emitted from the manure they accumulate. These gases, which include ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, can trigger ill health effects in neighboring communities, including eye irritation, chronic lung disease, and olfactory neuron loss. The pork, beef, and chicken trade groups all hotly supported the measure, which is now the law of the land.
The Center for Progressive Reform’s Laurie Ristino has the backstory. Since the late 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency has been concerned about air pollution from these concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. But the agency has never come up with a plan for monitoring their emissions—a saga laid bare by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General scathing 2017 report, as well as by this 2017 ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The passage of the FARM rider in the omnibus bill preserves the know-nothing status quo. Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, says the provision amounts to a “missed opportunity to get a handle on what some of these facilities are releasing—which means communities nearby do not even know what they are being exposed to.” And if federal agencies can’t measure the air-borne pollutants wafting off of CAFOS, they also can’t force the industry to cut emissions, Lovera adds. By ending the effort to collect data, the provision lets the big meat companies “argue that the EPA doesn’t have enough data to come up with regulations.”
Meanwhile, in Kansas, the chicken industry scored a victory in the state legislature with the signing into law of State Senate Bill 405 last week, which loosens restrictions on the size and placement of large-scale livestock facilities.
Under the previous state code, chicken CAFOs with more than 125,000 birds had to be sited at least 4,000 feet—about three quarters of a mile—from any residence. Now, facilities with as many as 333,000 birds can be constructed just a quarter-mile from people’s homes, potentially exposing them to polluted air and water.
As Leah Douglas notes on FERN’s Ag Insider, the bill is widely seen as a legislative response to the plight of the giant meatpacker Tyson, which last year abandoned a plan to open a massive, poultry-processing complex in the state after much pushback from communities there.
Loosening regulations on chicken CAFOs makes Kansas more attractive to big poultry packers like Tyson in the future. Tyson’s now-stalled proposal to place a plant in the northwestern Kansas town of Tonganoxie would have had the capacity to slaughter 1.25 million bird per week and required as many as 400 new chicken-raising CAFOs within a 50-mile radius, reports the trade journal Meat+Poultry. The new, less stringent rules will make such a build-out less cumbersome.
The agribusiness lobby promoted the bill as tool for generating “new growth opportunities within the agricultural industry,” as the Kansas Farm Bureau put it in a note to members. “Kansas Farm Bureau believes the provisions in SB 405 will attract new agricultural business by clarifying where these facilities fit in the current regulatory environment,” the group stated.
But to grow their flocks, chicken packers rely almost exclusively on quasi-independent farmers to build and maintain the facilities and grow out birds under contract. As a 2014 USDA study showed, contract poultry farmers on average make about $11.50 per hour in income, after accounting for operating expenses and interest on loans required to build and maintain the facilities. (More on the vexed economics of contract poultry farming here.)
Meanwhile, Tyson has rolled out plans for a very similar plant in Tennessee, egged on in part by $34 million in tax abatements and other incentives. Last year, the Tennessee legislature passed a law forbidding the state’s department of environment to regulate CAFOs “more stringently than federal law requires.”
Wow.. Shows stupidity..
Conservatives Are Now Mocking David Hogg for Getting Rejected by Some Colleges
Oh, and they’re also comparing the high school senior to Hitler.
INAE OH
The student leaders demanding action on gun control in the wake of last month’s Parkland, Florida, shooting have been the focus of intense attacks on the right, many of whom have promoted baseless conspiracy theories and mocking memes to undermine the students’ messages.
But this week took an especially vitriolic turn when conservatives seized upon a new video interview featuring David Hogg, in which the 17-year-old from Marjory Stoneman Douglas discusses having recently learned that he was rejected by several California colleges, including UCLA.
In the video posted by TMZ on Tuesday, Hogg appears gracious as he reflects on the string of rejection letters. He acknowledges the disappointment but says that his mind’s been focused on the movement.
The most eloquent part of the interview comes when Hogg is asked if he was at all surprised by the rejections considering his newfound national prominence. “I’m not surprised at all, in all honesty,” he says in the video. “I think there’s a lot of amazing people that don’t get into college, not only [who] do things that I do, but because their voices just aren’t heard in the tsunami of people that apply to colleges in such an impacted school system here in America.”
That, however, hasn’t stopped conservatives from mocking Hogg. Fox News host Laura Ingraham went as far as to deride Hogg for the “totally predictable” rejections in light of Hogg’s GPA and SAT scores.
The conservative site The Blaze wrote about the video to claim Hogg’s unhappiness these days “has more to do with the fact that he hasn’t been granted admission into preferred colleges than it does with the fact that 17 of his school peers were gunned down in February’s mass school killing.”
Meanwhile, a Minnesota lawmaker has been under fire for comparing Hogg to Hitler Youth—a malicious attack also embraced by the far-right news sites InfoWars and Breitbart.
Hogg later responded to Ingraham’s tweet with a call for advertisers to boycott her show.
Oh, and they’re also comparing the high school senior to Hitler.
INAE OH
The student leaders demanding action on gun control in the wake of last month’s Parkland, Florida, shooting have been the focus of intense attacks on the right, many of whom have promoted baseless conspiracy theories and mocking memes to undermine the students’ messages.
But this week took an especially vitriolic turn when conservatives seized upon a new video interview featuring David Hogg, in which the 17-year-old from Marjory Stoneman Douglas discusses having recently learned that he was rejected by several California colleges, including UCLA.
In the video posted by TMZ on Tuesday, Hogg appears gracious as he reflects on the string of rejection letters. He acknowledges the disappointment but says that his mind’s been focused on the movement.
The most eloquent part of the interview comes when Hogg is asked if he was at all surprised by the rejections considering his newfound national prominence. “I’m not surprised at all, in all honesty,” he says in the video. “I think there’s a lot of amazing people that don’t get into college, not only [who] do things that I do, but because their voices just aren’t heard in the tsunami of people that apply to colleges in such an impacted school system here in America.”
That, however, hasn’t stopped conservatives from mocking Hogg. Fox News host Laura Ingraham went as far as to deride Hogg for the “totally predictable” rejections in light of Hogg’s GPA and SAT scores.
The conservative site The Blaze wrote about the video to claim Hogg’s unhappiness these days “has more to do with the fact that he hasn’t been granted admission into preferred colleges than it does with the fact that 17 of his school peers were gunned down in February’s mass school killing.”
Meanwhile, a Minnesota lawmaker has been under fire for comparing Hogg to Hitler Youth—a malicious attack also embraced by the far-right news sites InfoWars and Breitbart.
Hogg later responded to Ingraham’s tweet with a call for advertisers to boycott her show.
Talking Points
Leaked Memo: EPA Gives Its Employees Talking Points on How to Downplay Climate Science
Number 5: Suggest that humans are only responsible “in some manner.”
ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday evening sent employees a list of eight approved talking points on climate change from its Office of Public Affairs―guidelines that promote a message of uncertainty about climate science and gloss over proposed cuts to key adaptation programs.
An internal email obtained by HuffPost―forwarded to employees by Joel Scheraga, a career staffer who served under President Barack Obama―directs communications directors and regional office public affairs directors to note that the EPA “promotes science that helps inform states, municipalities and tribes on how to plan for and respond to extreme events and environmental emergencies” and “works with state, local, and tribal government to improve infrastructure to protect against the consequences of climate change and natural disasters.”
But beyond those benign statements acknowledging the threats climate change poses are talking points boiled down from the sort of climate misinformation EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has long trumpeted.
“Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner,” one point reads. “The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”
The other states: “While there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.”
The email was sent under the subject line: “Consistent Messages on Climate Adaptation.”
In a statement to HuffPost, the EPA confirmed the memo and said the agency’s “work on climate adaptation continues under the leadership of Dr. Scheraga.”
The delivery of the talking points comes a week after Pruitt announced plans to restrict the agency’s use of science in writing environmental rules, barring the use of research unless the raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry to scrutinize. That directive would disqualify huge amounts of public health research conducted on the condition that subjects’ personal information will remain private. Two former top EPA officials called the move an “attack on science” in a New York Times op-ed published Monday.
Last year, the EPA reassigned the four staffers in the policy office who worked on climate adaptation, shuttered its program on climate adaptation and proposed eliminating funding for programs that deal with rising seas and warming temperatures.
Pruitt personally oversaw efforts to scrub climate change from EPA websites, and staunchly defended President Donald Trump’s decision last June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. In October, Pruitt proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, the only major federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency had also suggested zeroing out funding for most of its major climate and regional science grant programs, only to see Congress reject most of the cuts in the budget bill passed last week.
The assertions made in the new EPA talking points are not rooted in science. Ninety-seven percent of peer-reviewed research agrees with the conclusion that emissions from burning fossil fuels, deforestation and industrial farming are enshrouding the planet in heat-trapping gases, and are the primary causes of rising planetary temperatures. A research review published in November 2016 found significant flaws in the methodologies, assumptions or analyses used by the 3 percent of scientists who concluded otherwise.
But for the past three decades, a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign funded primarily by oil, gas and coal interests has fueled political debate over the integrity of the scientific consensus.
“Administrator Pruitt encourages an open, transparent debate on climate science,” the final point states.
Here’s the full email (emphasis theirs):
Dear Colleagues:
During the recent meeting of our Cross-EPA Work Group on Climate Adaptation, several individuals suggested it would be helpful to develop consistent messages about EPA’s climate adaptation efforts that could be used across all Program and Regional Offices. I’m pleased to report that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) has developed a set of talking points about climate change that include several related to climate adaptation. These talking points were distributed today by Nancy Grantham (OPA) to the Communications Directors and the Regional Public Affairs Directors.
The following are the talking points distributed by OPA. I have highlighted those relating specifically to our adaptation work.
Best regards,
Joel
Joel D. Scheraga, Ph.D
Senior Advisor for Climate Adaptation
Office of Policy
Number 5: Suggest that humans are only responsible “in some manner.”
ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday evening sent employees a list of eight approved talking points on climate change from its Office of Public Affairs―guidelines that promote a message of uncertainty about climate science and gloss over proposed cuts to key adaptation programs.
An internal email obtained by HuffPost―forwarded to employees by Joel Scheraga, a career staffer who served under President Barack Obama―directs communications directors and regional office public affairs directors to note that the EPA “promotes science that helps inform states, municipalities and tribes on how to plan for and respond to extreme events and environmental emergencies” and “works with state, local, and tribal government to improve infrastructure to protect against the consequences of climate change and natural disasters.”
But beyond those benign statements acknowledging the threats climate change poses are talking points boiled down from the sort of climate misinformation EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has long trumpeted.
“Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner,” one point reads. “The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”
The other states: “While there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.”
The email was sent under the subject line: “Consistent Messages on Climate Adaptation.”
In a statement to HuffPost, the EPA confirmed the memo and said the agency’s “work on climate adaptation continues under the leadership of Dr. Scheraga.”
The delivery of the talking points comes a week after Pruitt announced plans to restrict the agency’s use of science in writing environmental rules, barring the use of research unless the raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry to scrutinize. That directive would disqualify huge amounts of public health research conducted on the condition that subjects’ personal information will remain private. Two former top EPA officials called the move an “attack on science” in a New York Times op-ed published Monday.
Last year, the EPA reassigned the four staffers in the policy office who worked on climate adaptation, shuttered its program on climate adaptation and proposed eliminating funding for programs that deal with rising seas and warming temperatures.
Pruitt personally oversaw efforts to scrub climate change from EPA websites, and staunchly defended President Donald Trump’s decision last June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. In October, Pruitt proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, the only major federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency had also suggested zeroing out funding for most of its major climate and regional science grant programs, only to see Congress reject most of the cuts in the budget bill passed last week.
The assertions made in the new EPA talking points are not rooted in science. Ninety-seven percent of peer-reviewed research agrees with the conclusion that emissions from burning fossil fuels, deforestation and industrial farming are enshrouding the planet in heat-trapping gases, and are the primary causes of rising planetary temperatures. A research review published in November 2016 found significant flaws in the methodologies, assumptions or analyses used by the 3 percent of scientists who concluded otherwise.
But for the past three decades, a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign funded primarily by oil, gas and coal interests has fueled political debate over the integrity of the scientific consensus.
“Administrator Pruitt encourages an open, transparent debate on climate science,” the final point states.
Here’s the full email (emphasis theirs):
Dear Colleagues:
During the recent meeting of our Cross-EPA Work Group on Climate Adaptation, several individuals suggested it would be helpful to develop consistent messages about EPA’s climate adaptation efforts that could be used across all Program and Regional Offices. I’m pleased to report that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) has developed a set of talking points about climate change that include several related to climate adaptation. These talking points were distributed today by Nancy Grantham (OPA) to the Communications Directors and the Regional Public Affairs Directors.
The following are the talking points distributed by OPA. I have highlighted those relating specifically to our adaptation work.
- EPA recognizes the challenges that communities face in adapting to a changing climate.
- EPA works with state, local, and tribal governments to improve infrastructure to protect against the consequences of climate change and natural disasters.
- EPA also promotes science that helps inform states, municipalities, and tribes on how to plan for and respond to extreme events and environmental emergencies.
- Moving forward, EPA will continue to advance its climate adaptation efforts, and has reconvened the cross-EPA Adaptation Working Group in support of those efforts.
- Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.
- While there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.
- As a key regulatory voice, it is important for the Agency to strive for a better understanding of these gaps given their potential significant influence on our country’s domestic economic viability
- Administrator Pruitt encourages an open, transparent debate on climate science.
Best regards,
Joel
Joel D. Scheraga, Ph.D
Senior Advisor for Climate Adaptation
Office of Policy
Letting Payday Lenders Off
Democrats Call Out Trump’s Consumer Watchdog for Letting Payday Lenders Off the Hook
The CFPB has dropped lawsuits and investigations, and is changing rules that curb abusive loans.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
Ever since President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the financial watchdog—dreamed up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and created in the wake of the financial crisis—has taken a loosened approach to regulating payday lenders. In recent months, the CFPB has announced plans to reconsider an Obama-era rule that sought to curb predatory practices by these lenders, and quietly closed investigations and scrapped lawsuits aimed at payday lenders around the country.
On Tuesday, 43 Senate Democrats sent a letter to the agency criticizing Mulvaney for his lax approach to payday lenders, calling it “antithetical” to the CFPB’s consumer protection mission.
The payday lending rule, the senators note in their letter, was created by the agency after five years of research and public comment collection. Polling has also found that the vast majority of Americans support the CFPB’s restrictions on payday lenders. The Democratic senators noted that they’ve learned that the CFPB is granting waivers to companies allowing them to delay compliance with the Obama-era payday rule, and also that the CFPB “may be offering the payday loan industry an opportunity to undermine the rule entirely. We view these actions as further efforts to undermine the implementation of this important consumer protection rule.”
The senators also say in the letter that they are “troubled” by the CFPB’s pattern of dropping enforcement actions against payday lenders. They highlight a closed case against four payday lenders in Kansas that had been accused of charging interest rates as high as 950 percent.
Mulvaney’s actions have also spurred accusations that he has conflicts of interest when it comes to payday lending. During his tenure as a congressman from South Carolina between 2011 and 2017, Mulvaney received more than $60,000 in campaign donations from payday lenders and sponsored several bills to loosen their supervision. Mulvaney has denied that these past contributions from payday lenders pose a conflict for his leadership of the CFPB.
The CFPB has dropped lawsuits and investigations, and is changing rules that curb abusive loans.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
Ever since President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the financial watchdog—dreamed up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and created in the wake of the financial crisis—has taken a loosened approach to regulating payday lenders. In recent months, the CFPB has announced plans to reconsider an Obama-era rule that sought to curb predatory practices by these lenders, and quietly closed investigations and scrapped lawsuits aimed at payday lenders around the country.
On Tuesday, 43 Senate Democrats sent a letter to the agency criticizing Mulvaney for his lax approach to payday lenders, calling it “antithetical” to the CFPB’s consumer protection mission.
The payday lending rule, the senators note in their letter, was created by the agency after five years of research and public comment collection. Polling has also found that the vast majority of Americans support the CFPB’s restrictions on payday lenders. The Democratic senators noted that they’ve learned that the CFPB is granting waivers to companies allowing them to delay compliance with the Obama-era payday rule, and also that the CFPB “may be offering the payday loan industry an opportunity to undermine the rule entirely. We view these actions as further efforts to undermine the implementation of this important consumer protection rule.”
The senators also say in the letter that they are “troubled” by the CFPB’s pattern of dropping enforcement actions against payday lenders. They highlight a closed case against four payday lenders in Kansas that had been accused of charging interest rates as high as 950 percent.
Mulvaney’s actions have also spurred accusations that he has conflicts of interest when it comes to payday lending. During his tenure as a congressman from South Carolina between 2011 and 2017, Mulvaney received more than $60,000 in campaign donations from payday lenders and sponsored several bills to loosen their supervision. Mulvaney has denied that these past contributions from payday lenders pose a conflict for his leadership of the CFPB.
Can’t Stand Each Other
Why Devin Nunes and His Local Paper Suddenly Can’t Stand Each Other
Inside his war of words with the Fresno Bee.
BRYAN SCHATZ
For nearly two decades, Rep. Devin Nunes had enjoyed an amiable relationship with the Fresno Bee, the largest local paper near his district in California’s Central Valley. That ended on January 25, when the Bee’s editorial board published an eviscerating editorial about the veteran Republican congressman. Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had been accusing the FBI of allegedly abusing a secret surveillance program in order to target the Trump campaign and undermine his presidency. Democrats said Nunes was attempting to discredit his own committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes claimed that a soon-to-be declassified four-page memo he’d written would prove everything.
The Bee‘s editorial board wasn’t buying it. Its piece titled “Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s Stooge, Attacks FBI” opened with this no-holds-barred lead:
What, pray tell, does Rep. Devin Nunes think he’s doing by waving around a secret memo attacking the FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency? He certainly isn’t representing his Central Valley constituents or Californians, who care much more about health care, jobs and, yes, protecting Dreamers than about the latest conspiracy theory. Instead, he’s doing dirty work for House Republican leaders trying to protect President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation.
It was the first public rift between the Bee‘s editorial board and the veteran Tulare County Republican. The Bee‘s editorial page had stayed silent eight months earlier when Nunes made headlines with his “midnight run” to the White House, when he purportedly read classified documents and then held a solo press conference the next morning to repeat the Trump administration’s claims that the Obama administration may have illegally spied on its transition team. The much-hyped Nunes memo, however, marked a turning point. “This was not something we took lightly. It was very seriously thought out,” says Gail Marshall, the Bee‘s editorial page editor. “We wanted to get his attention and the attention of the people on this direction he’s going. And I think it succeeded in that.”
In response, Nunes has lashed out at the Bee—including the reporters whose work is separate from its editorial page. In an interview with Bee reporter Rory Appleton on February 22, Nunes called the paper “a joke” and a “left-wing rag.” Nunes fumed when Appleton asked him if he would be holding any public forums or town halls during the 2018 election cycle. “You know—it’s actually sad,” he said. “I actually feel bad for the people who work at the Bee.”
National outlets reported on the unexpectedly harsh January editorial, and emails, letters, and phone calls from around the country started pouring into the Bee. “We expected a lot of pushback,” says Marshall, but the overwhelming majority, she says, blasted Nunes, not the paper. A few days after Nunes went public with his memo, the Bee published a 13-letter sample of what they’d been receiving. Eric Hanson of Minneapolis asked, “Is Devin Nunes really as stupid as he is behaving?” In an appeal to voters in the district, John Mapes of Eugene, Oregon, wrote, “You elected Nunes and you need to fix this mess.”
The few critical letters the Bee received didn’t support Nunes so much as they railed against his perceived enemies, Marshall says. Targets included “the media, the Democrats, the evil dark state—always going back to some other evil villain, but not jumping up and saying, ‘Here’s my experience with Congressman Nunes. Here’s how he helped us.'”
Since its first critical editorial ran, the Bee‘s editorial page has continued to call out Nunes not only for his role in gumming up the Trump-Russia investigation, but also for his lackluster record. Nunes is considered a champion of water rights in his heavily agricultural district, but he has delivered few tangible results. Since 2013, only two of his bills have become law, and neither was related to water. In his interview with Appleton, he struggled to detail any major accomplishments during his 15 years in office. “We’re still talking about needing storage, needing to move water. By now, we should have dams with his name on them,” says Marshall. “He’s been at this a long time. I and a lot of other people don’t see a lot of great results coming from it.”
Marshall thinks that Nunes is increasingly “afraid of talking to his constituent press, his constituents, and of meeting with people.” He reportedly hasn’t held a town hall since 2010. His constituents, Marshall says, “wanted to talk to their congressman, and he was having none of it. He was getting more and more distant from us, more and more partisan, and more and more allied to his Washington duties, and less interested in us,” Marshall says.
Nunes and the Bee didn’t always have such a combative relationship. For more than 20 years, the Bee‘s reporting on him has been straightforward and its editorial board has recommended him for reelection “time after time,” says Marshall. In 1996, at just 23 years old, Nunes unseated a long-time incumbent on a community college board. “Who doesn’t love a young upstart college student who is eager to get into politics and have his voice heard?” notes Marshall. In 1998, Nunes tried to run for Congress, but the elections office said he was too young. He challenged the decision, and a judge ruled in his favor after he noted that he would be 25 by election day. (He lost in the primary.) In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him to be California’s director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture. He was elected to Congress in 2003 and quickly gained a reputation as an up-and-coming young Republican. In the early years, Marshall says, Nunes was “very personable, very willing to talk to everybody; he was visible in the district. He gave us no reason to be very upset with him.”
The relationship first started to sour in 2010 when Nunes got in a tiff with a Bee reporter who covered Dream Act advocates who picketed in front of his Visalia office during a Christmas open house. Nunes accused the demonstrators of “bringing [the Bee] with them,” says Marshall. Afterward, “Nunes didn’t speak to the reporter for a year.” (Nunes’ office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Bee’s editorial page continued to recommend Nunes for reelection throughout this time, including in 2016. Then, in March 2017, Nunes took offense at a piece written by veteran Bee reporter Lewis Griswold, who had been covering him since his political career began in the late ’90s. After Nunes made his late-night dash to the White House in January, Griswold went to the congressman’s neighborhood to find out how his neighbors and friends felt about the sudden blitz of negative attention he was receiving. The people Griswold spoke with were critical of the coverage and supportive of Nunes. “Devin is a fine person,” one told him. “He’s a person who stands behind what he says,” said another.
It was a slightly puffy local-angle piece, but Nunes’ people saw it differently. “They got really furious,” Marshall recalls. Nunes’ chief of staff told Griswold that he had no right to speak with people who live near Nunes and his family, and that his office would never speak to the Bee again. “We’ve had poor communication with him ever since,” says Marshall.
Meanwhile, Nunes had created his own alternative news site, The California Republican. It resembled a local conservative news site, propagating GOP-friendly stories, but fine print at the bottom of the page read, “Paid for by the Devin Nunes Campaign Committee.” The site’s short-lived but fiery Twitter feed made digs at immigrants and LGBT people, suggested male privilege doesn’t exist, and retweeted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones before abruptly going dark in mid-February.
For Nunes, the stakes are higher now than ever before. For the first time in his career, he is facing a serious Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Fresno prosecutor Andrew Janz. Janz raised more than $100,000 in the days after Nunes made his memo public, and he is reportedly on track to raise $1 million this quarter. He’s noticed the change of tone in the Bee‘s op-ed pages. “When the Fresno Bee ran that editorial, it was a big deal,” Janz said in February. “It had always supported him before.”
It’s hard to tell what kind of impact the Nunes-Bee split will have on the election. While it may be a sign that the political winds are shifting in his traditionally Republican district, it probably doesn’t trouble his base. “A lot of Congressman Nunes’ supporters probably aren’t big Bee fans,” says Tom Holyoke, a professor of political science at Fresno State University. “I think for a lot of Republicans in that district, talk radio and stuff on the internet has become their go-to source of news rather than the Bee. The Bee has done as good of a job as it could have done in trying to maintain an even keel politically, leaning neither left nor right, but Nunes’ district has become more conservative. [The Bee] fell out of line with a lot of Republicans there, but I think it was the district that shifted rather than the paper.”
On that last point, Marshall agrees: “We didn’t change. He changed.”
Inside his war of words with the Fresno Bee.
BRYAN SCHATZ
For nearly two decades, Rep. Devin Nunes had enjoyed an amiable relationship with the Fresno Bee, the largest local paper near his district in California’s Central Valley. That ended on January 25, when the Bee’s editorial board published an eviscerating editorial about the veteran Republican congressman. Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had been accusing the FBI of allegedly abusing a secret surveillance program in order to target the Trump campaign and undermine his presidency. Democrats said Nunes was attempting to discredit his own committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes claimed that a soon-to-be declassified four-page memo he’d written would prove everything.
The Bee‘s editorial board wasn’t buying it. Its piece titled “Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s Stooge, Attacks FBI” opened with this no-holds-barred lead:
What, pray tell, does Rep. Devin Nunes think he’s doing by waving around a secret memo attacking the FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency? He certainly isn’t representing his Central Valley constituents or Californians, who care much more about health care, jobs and, yes, protecting Dreamers than about the latest conspiracy theory. Instead, he’s doing dirty work for House Republican leaders trying to protect President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation.
It was the first public rift between the Bee‘s editorial board and the veteran Tulare County Republican. The Bee‘s editorial page had stayed silent eight months earlier when Nunes made headlines with his “midnight run” to the White House, when he purportedly read classified documents and then held a solo press conference the next morning to repeat the Trump administration’s claims that the Obama administration may have illegally spied on its transition team. The much-hyped Nunes memo, however, marked a turning point. “This was not something we took lightly. It was very seriously thought out,” says Gail Marshall, the Bee‘s editorial page editor. “We wanted to get his attention and the attention of the people on this direction he’s going. And I think it succeeded in that.”
In response, Nunes has lashed out at the Bee—including the reporters whose work is separate from its editorial page. In an interview with Bee reporter Rory Appleton on February 22, Nunes called the paper “a joke” and a “left-wing rag.” Nunes fumed when Appleton asked him if he would be holding any public forums or town halls during the 2018 election cycle. “You know—it’s actually sad,” he said. “I actually feel bad for the people who work at the Bee.”
National outlets reported on the unexpectedly harsh January editorial, and emails, letters, and phone calls from around the country started pouring into the Bee. “We expected a lot of pushback,” says Marshall, but the overwhelming majority, she says, blasted Nunes, not the paper. A few days after Nunes went public with his memo, the Bee published a 13-letter sample of what they’d been receiving. Eric Hanson of Minneapolis asked, “Is Devin Nunes really as stupid as he is behaving?” In an appeal to voters in the district, John Mapes of Eugene, Oregon, wrote, “You elected Nunes and you need to fix this mess.”
The few critical letters the Bee received didn’t support Nunes so much as they railed against his perceived enemies, Marshall says. Targets included “the media, the Democrats, the evil dark state—always going back to some other evil villain, but not jumping up and saying, ‘Here’s my experience with Congressman Nunes. Here’s how he helped us.'”
Since its first critical editorial ran, the Bee‘s editorial page has continued to call out Nunes not only for his role in gumming up the Trump-Russia investigation, but also for his lackluster record. Nunes is considered a champion of water rights in his heavily agricultural district, but he has delivered few tangible results. Since 2013, only two of his bills have become law, and neither was related to water. In his interview with Appleton, he struggled to detail any major accomplishments during his 15 years in office. “We’re still talking about needing storage, needing to move water. By now, we should have dams with his name on them,” says Marshall. “He’s been at this a long time. I and a lot of other people don’t see a lot of great results coming from it.”
Marshall thinks that Nunes is increasingly “afraid of talking to his constituent press, his constituents, and of meeting with people.” He reportedly hasn’t held a town hall since 2010. His constituents, Marshall says, “wanted to talk to their congressman, and he was having none of it. He was getting more and more distant from us, more and more partisan, and more and more allied to his Washington duties, and less interested in us,” Marshall says.
Nunes and the Bee didn’t always have such a combative relationship. For more than 20 years, the Bee‘s reporting on him has been straightforward and its editorial board has recommended him for reelection “time after time,” says Marshall. In 1996, at just 23 years old, Nunes unseated a long-time incumbent on a community college board. “Who doesn’t love a young upstart college student who is eager to get into politics and have his voice heard?” notes Marshall. In 1998, Nunes tried to run for Congress, but the elections office said he was too young. He challenged the decision, and a judge ruled in his favor after he noted that he would be 25 by election day. (He lost in the primary.) In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him to be California’s director of rural development for the Department of Agriculture. He was elected to Congress in 2003 and quickly gained a reputation as an up-and-coming young Republican. In the early years, Marshall says, Nunes was “very personable, very willing to talk to everybody; he was visible in the district. He gave us no reason to be very upset with him.”
The relationship first started to sour in 2010 when Nunes got in a tiff with a Bee reporter who covered Dream Act advocates who picketed in front of his Visalia office during a Christmas open house. Nunes accused the demonstrators of “bringing [the Bee] with them,” says Marshall. Afterward, “Nunes didn’t speak to the reporter for a year.” (Nunes’ office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Bee’s editorial page continued to recommend Nunes for reelection throughout this time, including in 2016. Then, in March 2017, Nunes took offense at a piece written by veteran Bee reporter Lewis Griswold, who had been covering him since his political career began in the late ’90s. After Nunes made his late-night dash to the White House in January, Griswold went to the congressman’s neighborhood to find out how his neighbors and friends felt about the sudden blitz of negative attention he was receiving. The people Griswold spoke with were critical of the coverage and supportive of Nunes. “Devin is a fine person,” one told him. “He’s a person who stands behind what he says,” said another.
It was a slightly puffy local-angle piece, but Nunes’ people saw it differently. “They got really furious,” Marshall recalls. Nunes’ chief of staff told Griswold that he had no right to speak with people who live near Nunes and his family, and that his office would never speak to the Bee again. “We’ve had poor communication with him ever since,” says Marshall.
Meanwhile, Nunes had created his own alternative news site, The California Republican. It resembled a local conservative news site, propagating GOP-friendly stories, but fine print at the bottom of the page read, “Paid for by the Devin Nunes Campaign Committee.” The site’s short-lived but fiery Twitter feed made digs at immigrants and LGBT people, suggested male privilege doesn’t exist, and retweeted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones before abruptly going dark in mid-February.
For Nunes, the stakes are higher now than ever before. For the first time in his career, he is facing a serious Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Fresno prosecutor Andrew Janz. Janz raised more than $100,000 in the days after Nunes made his memo public, and he is reportedly on track to raise $1 million this quarter. He’s noticed the change of tone in the Bee‘s op-ed pages. “When the Fresno Bee ran that editorial, it was a big deal,” Janz said in February. “It had always supported him before.”
It’s hard to tell what kind of impact the Nunes-Bee split will have on the election. While it may be a sign that the political winds are shifting in his traditionally Republican district, it probably doesn’t trouble his base. “A lot of Congressman Nunes’ supporters probably aren’t big Bee fans,” says Tom Holyoke, a professor of political science at Fresno State University. “I think for a lot of Republicans in that district, talk radio and stuff on the internet has become their go-to source of news rather than the Bee. The Bee has done as good of a job as it could have done in trying to maintain an even keel politically, leaning neither left nor right, but Nunes’ district has become more conservative. [The Bee] fell out of line with a lot of Republicans there, but I think it was the district that shifted rather than the paper.”
On that last point, Marshall agrees: “We didn’t change. He changed.”
Powering the Democrats
How Veterans Are Powering the Democrats’ 2018 Hopes
From Staten Island to San Diego suburbs, millennials with military résumés are making GOP districts competitive.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
“Ma’am,” said the soldier in suit slacks and a collar-popped pea coat, “my name is Max Rose, and I’m running for Congress as a Democrat.”
The woman behind the glass front door in the semi-suburban neighborhood on Staten Island in this state’s Republican-leaning 11th Congressional District looked him over. She asked what he was “all about.”
“Sure, sure—here’s a little information,” he said, showing her his “walk card.” On one side was a picture of Rose smiling while sitting at a table wearing a tie. “A Healthcare Expert with Solutions,” it said. “An Economic Champion.” On the other, though, was an image of him in his military fatigues, a long, black M4 carbine assault rifle hanging off his shoulder. This side had different language: “Combat Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army,” “the courage to lead.” This was the side Rose presented to her first.
The door opened a little.
“I’m the first post-9/11 combat veteran to run for office in New York City history,” Rose said.
The door opened a little more.
“I’m a Staten Islander,” he continued. “I deployed to Afghanistan about five years ago. I was an infantry platoon leader.” He said he was a Purple Heart recipient. Bronze Star, too. “And now we’re fighting this fight,” Rose said.
The door opened all the way.
Rose, a 5-foot-6 power pack with an upbeat, shoulders-back gait, is near the forefront of a surge of a certain sort of candidate in the 2018 election cycle. Veterans who are Democrats are vying for Congress in numbers not seen in decades. With Honor, a “cross-partisan” organization that aims to “help elect principled next-generation veterans in order to solve our biggest problems and fix a Congress that is dysfunctional,” counts approximately 300 veterans who have run for Congress during this cycle—roughly half of whom chose to serve after, and in many cases because of, September 11, 2001. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the spike is stark—“a substantial increase,” With Honor co-founder and CEO Rye Barcott told me, “from any prior cycle” in modern memory. While the perception might exist that most veterans lean Republican, some 51 percent of the veterans who are or have been 2018 candidates, based on With Honor’s tally, are actually Democrats. And some are proving to be competitive in places once considered safe GOP districts. Witness Conor Lamb’s win in western Pennsylvania earlier this month. Polling suggests former Army Ranger Jason Crow could do the same in Colorado’s 6th District in the suburbs of Denver. Backed by members of Congress like Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and organizations like VoteVets and New Politics, this roster of aspirants is a key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterms, party strategists believe.
It is not a coincidence that this wave of veterans is hitting at a moment when a five-time draft-deferring president occupies the White House and toxic partisanship has ground Capitol Hill to a virtual halt. The candidates are presenting themselves both as a moral rebuke to what they see as Donald Trump’s self-promoting divisiveness and also as a practical solution to the failure of the nation’s highest legislative body to get anything done. In short, the reputation of the national institution with by far the highest approval rating, the military, is being offered as an antidote to the woes of a schismatic president and a Congress whose approval ratings have never been worse.
“They’re all people who served the country without worrying about who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican—let’s just get the damn thing done,” longtime national Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said in an interview. “In this Washington, in this divisive, chaotic cycle, you have these people who’ve proven they can rise above party and actually accomplish a mission.”
And out on the campaign trail, many of them have versions of Max Rose’s experience with opening doors, I heard in conversations with a dozen of these kinds of candidates.
Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor running in New Jersey’s Republican-leaning but open 11th District, sees it when she stops in at diners. It usually happens with older men. “I’ll go up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mikie Sherrill and I’m running for Congress,‘” she told me, and she’ll gauge mostly disinterest. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you know, I was a Navy helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor,’ and then I kind of start to walk away—and they go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’”
In California’s 50th District, made up mostly of San Diego suburbs and held by embattled GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, Josh Butner gets it when he introduces himself as a former Navy SEAL—who’s a Democrat. “That usually gets the conversation started,” he said. “They say something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, we need more Democrats like you.’ We need more people willing to put the country ahead of political parties. We need more folks willing to work with the other side.’”
Here in New York’s 11th, Rose is running in the most concentrated pocket of Trump Country in a very blue city. All of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, it’s the only congressional district in the president’s hometown that voted for him. On Staten Island, voting rolls show five Democrats for every three Republicans, but its elected officials (state and local) are split in favor of the GOP. Whiter and more socially conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island is home to firefighters, police officers, teachers and people who take the ferry to Manhattan. Five miles from the heart of the city, the people here have a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, according to Kevin Elkins, a lifelong Staten Islander and Rose’s campaign manager, boiling down to: “Screw the system, because they screwed us.” In that way, it resembles the country as a whole—and explains why 56.9 percent of Staten Island voters picked Trump.
Rose, 31, has a handful of opponents in the Democratic primary in June, but he’s the well-funded favorite. Come November, he would face Dan Donovan, the current Republican representative, or GOP challenger Michael Grimm, the former representative who is coming off seven months in prison for tax evasion but who retains local support—if not Washington’s blessing. With endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Women’s Equality Party and NARAL Pro-Choice America, plus Moulton, retired Air Force colonel and California Representative Ted Lieu and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Rose is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of Democrats considered to have a chance at flipping a red district. Even so, Roll Call still labels the 11th as “likely Republican.” So does University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. And the Cook Political Report calls it a Republican “lean.”
***
Rose was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a medical laboratory executive and a professor of social work. He went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he wrestled briefly and was a history major with a favorite professor who specialized in the psychology of political leaders. After Wesleyan, he went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and public policy. And after LSE … he enlisted in the Army. Why? I asked him this over a late steak dinner at a Staten Island tavern called Jody’s Club Forest. We were drinking Bud Light poured out of a plastic pitcher into half-pint juice glasses. He answered my question by asking another. “If not me,” he said, “who?” In April 2013, the Stryker he was riding in got blown up by an IED. The first words he says in his first campaign video: “I don’t remember the bomb going off …”
There used to be far more Max Roses in Congress. In the 1970s, according to Jeremy Teigen, a political scientist at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of Why Veterans Run, approximately three-quarters of the members of Congress were veterans—led by the “Greatest Generation” of World War II. But the number of veterans in Congress has been going down basically ever since. The percentage of veterans in Congress is now 19—near a historic low. This downward trend has been evident as well in other prominent political arenas. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, was the first since World War II in which neither major party nominee was a veteran. The 2016 presidential election was the second.
Whether it’s causation or correlation, many of the candidates I talked to for this story pointed to the reality that the extent of the partisanship in Washington has gotten worse as veterans on the Hill have disappeared.
Available data suggest that being a veteran in fact doesn’t help win elections. “If you think about it,” Teigen told me, “if that were true, we’d have 535 veterans on Capitol Hill. Parties would nominate no one else.” A comprehensive study of congressional races from 2000 to 2014 showed a military background has no “systematic, measurable effect,” Teigen notes in his book. Furthermore, he writes, “Democratic veterans actually do a little worse than comparable nonveteran Democrats”—a function, perhaps, of Democratic veterans seeming to run more in longer-shot districts.
But this year’s candidates say this time’s different, because so much else is so different, too.
Trump is the president, and this new generation of service members has emerged from the battlefield with deep reservations about the direction the country is heading. They might be frustrated by the (ongoing) outcomes of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not embarrassed by their service. On the contrary, they believe, it’s what distinguishes them, and what has prepared them for this moment. From the victories of Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard in 2012 to Seth Moulton’s surprising triumph on the North Shore of Massachusetts in 2014 to his handpicked current class of endorsees—“Seth Moulton’s kind of a North Star for a lot of these guys,” said Anson Kaye, a prominent media strategist who’s working for Rose—these young veterans are hammering home their message of service above self, country above party, concluding their résumés and experiences hold special appeal for voters who have grown exasperated with scorched-earth, hyperpartisan politicking. Rose isn’t the only candidate who’s used his or her time in the service as a campaign pillar and as a cornerstone in a video pitch. Amy McGrath, a retired F-18 pilot in the Marines and a Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s 6th District, created buzz with hers last summer. Butner released one just a couple of weeks back. “Out here,” he says at the start, “there’s no time for bickering or special-interest politics. Working together is a matter of life and death.” Says Moulton in one of his own on behalf of his Serve America PAC: “For a new politics, we need to elect new leaders.”
“What we’re hearing from a lot of the candidates who are veterans who are running for office this year is that they are answering the call to continue to serve their communities in a different way because of concerns that they have—some of which include the president’s actions and all the dysfunction that they see in our nation’s capital,” said Ben Ray Lujan, the New Mexico congressman and DCCC chair.
Talking to them, I heard some altruism. I also heard no small amount of irritation.
“I am so angry at what the politicians are doing to our country up there,” said Dan McCready, 34, who’s running in North Carolina’s 9th District, held by a Republican since 1963. “The lack of courage, the lack of American values up there …”
“Our current political system—and certainly Donald Trump and what he’s doing—doesn’t really represent the country that we fought for,” Crow told me from Colorado.
Dan Feehan was in college at Georgetown on September 11. He could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon. “Because of that, I made the decision to serve,” he explained. “That certainly drove the urgency of that moment.” Now he’s running in Minnesota’s 1st, in the southern part of the state—in a bid to replace Democrat Tim Walz, who’s running for governor. “The feeling of uncertainty, the feeling of what’s going to happen next—there’s a similarity there.”
“By the very nature of what we were taught to do in the military, which is to solve problems, act quickly, build teams, engage in chaotic environments, sort out problems, understand what you can fix—I mean, that’s what we do,” said Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran running in the 21st district in Texas, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio and has been in Republican hands since 1979. “No kidding it takes veterans to step forward.”
Based on research done by the Lugar Center and by West Point scholar and New America fellow Isaiah Wilson III, there is evidence that veterans in Congress actually do act in a more bipartisan way. Barcott and fellow Marine Jake Wood wrote last fall in Time that “lawmakers who have served in the military often have a special sense of duty and an uncommon ability to reach across party lines and get things done.” Retired U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Tom Daschle, a Republican from Indiana and a Democrat from South Dakota, respectively, expressed similar sentiments in U.S. News & World Report: “We have come to believe that one solution to the partisan crisis in national security policy is to elect to Congress more veterans committed to bipartisanship.”
McCready agrees. “I led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq during the surge of 2007 and 2008,” the North Carolina candidate told me. “And I had folks in my platoon from all over the country. We never cared where you came from. We never cared about who your parents were or the color of your skin. The last thing we cared about, actually, was whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. Because we all wore the same color of uniform. And that’s really what the military teaches you. It’s that we’re all on the same team, you don’t leave a person behind, and we all have a job to do that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s what’s missing right now in Washington.”
Rose, for his part, in the two days we spent together on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, was a nonpartisan turret-turner with his frank talk.
The Republican Party as a whole, he said, “has wholly abandoned the middle class and the working class,” with “this fallacy, this laughingstock, of trickle-down economics, which they have bought into yet again.”
Rose, though, chastised his own party as well—for abandoning the working class, too, and for taking for granted other segments of its traditional coalition.
“The African-American population is a great example,” he told me at Jody’s. “You raise money, you raise money, you raise money—and then you show up about 30 days prior to an election and you say, ‘Well, let’s talk about turning out the vote.’ There’s zero trust. There’s zero relationships. If anyone’s sick and tired of it, it’s many, many leaders in that community.”
Still, he said, “you’ve got to choose a side in this game, and I’m a proud Democrat. But I want Democrats to be Democrats again.” Which means? “It means that if you’re telling me you think government has a role for this country, then say it. … Be bold about it. If you think that the working class has been gypped, then say it. And tell me how you’re going to fix it.”
He ticked off his list: Massive public works initiatives like the interstate projects of the past. Twenty-first-century smart grids. A widespread national effort to address the opioid scourge—a pressing issue in Staten Island, as in so many places around the country—a la the response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Something akin to the Apollo project in the tech and health care spaces.
“And that active role for government is not just tax cuts for rich people and corporations,” Rose said. “It’s not just cutting Social Security and Medicaid and figuring out ways we can restrict legal immigration. There’s far more of a role for government. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”
***
The night before, Rose had been at a fundraiser in Manhattan, late. He was on the ferry as the clock approached 1 a.m. I met him in the lobby of his Staten Island apartment building at 6:15. Then, in a near-zero-visibility mixture of icy rain and fat flakes of snow, we crossed the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn to a subway station, where he shook scores of hands and at one point helped a woman with a toddler in a stroller descend a set of stairs, and then we went to a breakfast back on Staten Island for an organization for people with disabilities, where he worked the room, from table to table. Later, he laced up his sand-tan combat boots to do a round of door-knocking in a nor’easter.
“I’m the guy that showed up in the snow. I can’t be all bad,” he said through another glass door, showing his card.
“Thank you for your service,” this woman said.
“We gotta change politics!” Rose told her. “It’s a mess in D.C.”
And now, finally, it was warm, in a house for an evening fundraiser. “Tired yet?” I asked him. He gave me a look, New York for c’mon. On tables were finger sandwiches and mixed nuts and shrimp, Heinekens and Perrier and pinot noir. On the wall was a picture of the hosts with Bill Clinton. On the shelves were books by James Carville (Had Enough?) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power). A woman rang a little bell. It was time for Rose to talk. He still had on his combat boots.
“I’ve been a politician for 176 days,” Rose said.
People laughed.
“But I’ve been a soldier for eight years,” he continued. And the mood was serious again. “I led a combat outpost in Afghanistan. And when I tell people that, they imagine Fort Knox or something. It was just some sandbags, 30 U.S. soldiers, about 60 Afghan National Army soldiers, and a mission. And those soldiers came from everywhere—all across the country, gay, straight, Hispanic, African-American, white. Dreamers. Citizens. None of that mattered, though, because we had a mission to accomplish. And when my vehicle hit an IED in Afghanistan, they got to work. They called the nine-line medevac. They pulled 360-degree security. They got me out of there. I’ll owe them for the rest of my life. You know, a fascinating thing happened to me when I was medevacced to Kandahar Air Force Base. A two-star general comes up to my hospital bed, he looks down at me, and he says, ‘Son, five years ago, you’d be dead.’ And then he walks away.”
More laughter.
“You can laugh at that,” Rose said with a smile. “I was pretty shocked—that’s how generals comfort you. But you know what? He was right. For too long, Strykers had been called Kevlar coffins. … And after far too many soldiers died, Congress finally got their act together. They put the right people in a room, they gave them resources, they put partisanship aside, and they said, ‘Solve the damn problem!’ That used to be the story of this country. I am only alive today because that’s what Congress is actually capable of.”
He let that thought sit for a bit.
“So,” Rose said, “I think that we need to go back to that.”
From Staten Island to San Diego suburbs, millennials with military résumés are making GOP districts competitive.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
“Ma’am,” said the soldier in suit slacks and a collar-popped pea coat, “my name is Max Rose, and I’m running for Congress as a Democrat.”
The woman behind the glass front door in the semi-suburban neighborhood on Staten Island in this state’s Republican-leaning 11th Congressional District looked him over. She asked what he was “all about.”
“Sure, sure—here’s a little information,” he said, showing her his “walk card.” On one side was a picture of Rose smiling while sitting at a table wearing a tie. “A Healthcare Expert with Solutions,” it said. “An Economic Champion.” On the other, though, was an image of him in his military fatigues, a long, black M4 carbine assault rifle hanging off his shoulder. This side had different language: “Combat Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army,” “the courage to lead.” This was the side Rose presented to her first.
The door opened a little.
“I’m the first post-9/11 combat veteran to run for office in New York City history,” Rose said.
The door opened a little more.
“I’m a Staten Islander,” he continued. “I deployed to Afghanistan about five years ago. I was an infantry platoon leader.” He said he was a Purple Heart recipient. Bronze Star, too. “And now we’re fighting this fight,” Rose said.
The door opened all the way.
Rose, a 5-foot-6 power pack with an upbeat, shoulders-back gait, is near the forefront of a surge of a certain sort of candidate in the 2018 election cycle. Veterans who are Democrats are vying for Congress in numbers not seen in decades. With Honor, a “cross-partisan” organization that aims to “help elect principled next-generation veterans in order to solve our biggest problems and fix a Congress that is dysfunctional,” counts approximately 300 veterans who have run for Congress during this cycle—roughly half of whom chose to serve after, and in many cases because of, September 11, 2001. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the spike is stark—“a substantial increase,” With Honor co-founder and CEO Rye Barcott told me, “from any prior cycle” in modern memory. While the perception might exist that most veterans lean Republican, some 51 percent of the veterans who are or have been 2018 candidates, based on With Honor’s tally, are actually Democrats. And some are proving to be competitive in places once considered safe GOP districts. Witness Conor Lamb’s win in western Pennsylvania earlier this month. Polling suggests former Army Ranger Jason Crow could do the same in Colorado’s 6th District in the suburbs of Denver. Backed by members of Congress like Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and organizations like VoteVets and New Politics, this roster of aspirants is a key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterms, party strategists believe.
It is not a coincidence that this wave of veterans is hitting at a moment when a five-time draft-deferring president occupies the White House and toxic partisanship has ground Capitol Hill to a virtual halt. The candidates are presenting themselves both as a moral rebuke to what they see as Donald Trump’s self-promoting divisiveness and also as a practical solution to the failure of the nation’s highest legislative body to get anything done. In short, the reputation of the national institution with by far the highest approval rating, the military, is being offered as an antidote to the woes of a schismatic president and a Congress whose approval ratings have never been worse.
“They’re all people who served the country without worrying about who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican—let’s just get the damn thing done,” longtime national Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said in an interview. “In this Washington, in this divisive, chaotic cycle, you have these people who’ve proven they can rise above party and actually accomplish a mission.”
And out on the campaign trail, many of them have versions of Max Rose’s experience with opening doors, I heard in conversations with a dozen of these kinds of candidates.
Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor running in New Jersey’s Republican-leaning but open 11th District, sees it when she stops in at diners. It usually happens with older men. “I’ll go up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mikie Sherrill and I’m running for Congress,‘” she told me, and she’ll gauge mostly disinterest. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you know, I was a Navy helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor,’ and then I kind of start to walk away—and they go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’”
In California’s 50th District, made up mostly of San Diego suburbs and held by embattled GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, Josh Butner gets it when he introduces himself as a former Navy SEAL—who’s a Democrat. “That usually gets the conversation started,” he said. “They say something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, we need more Democrats like you.’ We need more people willing to put the country ahead of political parties. We need more folks willing to work with the other side.’”
Here in New York’s 11th, Rose is running in the most concentrated pocket of Trump Country in a very blue city. All of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, it’s the only congressional district in the president’s hometown that voted for him. On Staten Island, voting rolls show five Democrats for every three Republicans, but its elected officials (state and local) are split in favor of the GOP. Whiter and more socially conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island is home to firefighters, police officers, teachers and people who take the ferry to Manhattan. Five miles from the heart of the city, the people here have a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, according to Kevin Elkins, a lifelong Staten Islander and Rose’s campaign manager, boiling down to: “Screw the system, because they screwed us.” In that way, it resembles the country as a whole—and explains why 56.9 percent of Staten Island voters picked Trump.
Rose, 31, has a handful of opponents in the Democratic primary in June, but he’s the well-funded favorite. Come November, he would face Dan Donovan, the current Republican representative, or GOP challenger Michael Grimm, the former representative who is coming off seven months in prison for tax evasion but who retains local support—if not Washington’s blessing. With endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Women’s Equality Party and NARAL Pro-Choice America, plus Moulton, retired Air Force colonel and California Representative Ted Lieu and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Rose is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of Democrats considered to have a chance at flipping a red district. Even so, Roll Call still labels the 11th as “likely Republican.” So does University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. And the Cook Political Report calls it a Republican “lean.”
***
Rose was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a medical laboratory executive and a professor of social work. He went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he wrestled briefly and was a history major with a favorite professor who specialized in the psychology of political leaders. After Wesleyan, he went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and public policy. And after LSE … he enlisted in the Army. Why? I asked him this over a late steak dinner at a Staten Island tavern called Jody’s Club Forest. We were drinking Bud Light poured out of a plastic pitcher into half-pint juice glasses. He answered my question by asking another. “If not me,” he said, “who?” In April 2013, the Stryker he was riding in got blown up by an IED. The first words he says in his first campaign video: “I don’t remember the bomb going off …”
There used to be far more Max Roses in Congress. In the 1970s, according to Jeremy Teigen, a political scientist at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of Why Veterans Run, approximately three-quarters of the members of Congress were veterans—led by the “Greatest Generation” of World War II. But the number of veterans in Congress has been going down basically ever since. The percentage of veterans in Congress is now 19—near a historic low. This downward trend has been evident as well in other prominent political arenas. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, was the first since World War II in which neither major party nominee was a veteran. The 2016 presidential election was the second.
Whether it’s causation or correlation, many of the candidates I talked to for this story pointed to the reality that the extent of the partisanship in Washington has gotten worse as veterans on the Hill have disappeared.
Available data suggest that being a veteran in fact doesn’t help win elections. “If you think about it,” Teigen told me, “if that were true, we’d have 535 veterans on Capitol Hill. Parties would nominate no one else.” A comprehensive study of congressional races from 2000 to 2014 showed a military background has no “systematic, measurable effect,” Teigen notes in his book. Furthermore, he writes, “Democratic veterans actually do a little worse than comparable nonveteran Democrats”—a function, perhaps, of Democratic veterans seeming to run more in longer-shot districts.
But this year’s candidates say this time’s different, because so much else is so different, too.
Trump is the president, and this new generation of service members has emerged from the battlefield with deep reservations about the direction the country is heading. They might be frustrated by the (ongoing) outcomes of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not embarrassed by their service. On the contrary, they believe, it’s what distinguishes them, and what has prepared them for this moment. From the victories of Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard in 2012 to Seth Moulton’s surprising triumph on the North Shore of Massachusetts in 2014 to his handpicked current class of endorsees—“Seth Moulton’s kind of a North Star for a lot of these guys,” said Anson Kaye, a prominent media strategist who’s working for Rose—these young veterans are hammering home their message of service above self, country above party, concluding their résumés and experiences hold special appeal for voters who have grown exasperated with scorched-earth, hyperpartisan politicking. Rose isn’t the only candidate who’s used his or her time in the service as a campaign pillar and as a cornerstone in a video pitch. Amy McGrath, a retired F-18 pilot in the Marines and a Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s 6th District, created buzz with hers last summer. Butner released one just a couple of weeks back. “Out here,” he says at the start, “there’s no time for bickering or special-interest politics. Working together is a matter of life and death.” Says Moulton in one of his own on behalf of his Serve America PAC: “For a new politics, we need to elect new leaders.”
“What we’re hearing from a lot of the candidates who are veterans who are running for office this year is that they are answering the call to continue to serve their communities in a different way because of concerns that they have—some of which include the president’s actions and all the dysfunction that they see in our nation’s capital,” said Ben Ray Lujan, the New Mexico congressman and DCCC chair.
Talking to them, I heard some altruism. I also heard no small amount of irritation.
“I am so angry at what the politicians are doing to our country up there,” said Dan McCready, 34, who’s running in North Carolina’s 9th District, held by a Republican since 1963. “The lack of courage, the lack of American values up there …”
“Our current political system—and certainly Donald Trump and what he’s doing—doesn’t really represent the country that we fought for,” Crow told me from Colorado.
Dan Feehan was in college at Georgetown on September 11. He could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon. “Because of that, I made the decision to serve,” he explained. “That certainly drove the urgency of that moment.” Now he’s running in Minnesota’s 1st, in the southern part of the state—in a bid to replace Democrat Tim Walz, who’s running for governor. “The feeling of uncertainty, the feeling of what’s going to happen next—there’s a similarity there.”
“By the very nature of what we were taught to do in the military, which is to solve problems, act quickly, build teams, engage in chaotic environments, sort out problems, understand what you can fix—I mean, that’s what we do,” said Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran running in the 21st district in Texas, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio and has been in Republican hands since 1979. “No kidding it takes veterans to step forward.”
Based on research done by the Lugar Center and by West Point scholar and New America fellow Isaiah Wilson III, there is evidence that veterans in Congress actually do act in a more bipartisan way. Barcott and fellow Marine Jake Wood wrote last fall in Time that “lawmakers who have served in the military often have a special sense of duty and an uncommon ability to reach across party lines and get things done.” Retired U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Tom Daschle, a Republican from Indiana and a Democrat from South Dakota, respectively, expressed similar sentiments in U.S. News & World Report: “We have come to believe that one solution to the partisan crisis in national security policy is to elect to Congress more veterans committed to bipartisanship.”
McCready agrees. “I led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq during the surge of 2007 and 2008,” the North Carolina candidate told me. “And I had folks in my platoon from all over the country. We never cared where you came from. We never cared about who your parents were or the color of your skin. The last thing we cared about, actually, was whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. Because we all wore the same color of uniform. And that’s really what the military teaches you. It’s that we’re all on the same team, you don’t leave a person behind, and we all have a job to do that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s what’s missing right now in Washington.”
Rose, for his part, in the two days we spent together on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, was a nonpartisan turret-turner with his frank talk.
The Republican Party as a whole, he said, “has wholly abandoned the middle class and the working class,” with “this fallacy, this laughingstock, of trickle-down economics, which they have bought into yet again.”
Rose, though, chastised his own party as well—for abandoning the working class, too, and for taking for granted other segments of its traditional coalition.
“The African-American population is a great example,” he told me at Jody’s. “You raise money, you raise money, you raise money—and then you show up about 30 days prior to an election and you say, ‘Well, let’s talk about turning out the vote.’ There’s zero trust. There’s zero relationships. If anyone’s sick and tired of it, it’s many, many leaders in that community.”
Still, he said, “you’ve got to choose a side in this game, and I’m a proud Democrat. But I want Democrats to be Democrats again.” Which means? “It means that if you’re telling me you think government has a role for this country, then say it. … Be bold about it. If you think that the working class has been gypped, then say it. And tell me how you’re going to fix it.”
He ticked off his list: Massive public works initiatives like the interstate projects of the past. Twenty-first-century smart grids. A widespread national effort to address the opioid scourge—a pressing issue in Staten Island, as in so many places around the country—a la the response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Something akin to the Apollo project in the tech and health care spaces.
“And that active role for government is not just tax cuts for rich people and corporations,” Rose said. “It’s not just cutting Social Security and Medicaid and figuring out ways we can restrict legal immigration. There’s far more of a role for government. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”
***
The night before, Rose had been at a fundraiser in Manhattan, late. He was on the ferry as the clock approached 1 a.m. I met him in the lobby of his Staten Island apartment building at 6:15. Then, in a near-zero-visibility mixture of icy rain and fat flakes of snow, we crossed the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn to a subway station, where he shook scores of hands and at one point helped a woman with a toddler in a stroller descend a set of stairs, and then we went to a breakfast back on Staten Island for an organization for people with disabilities, where he worked the room, from table to table. Later, he laced up his sand-tan combat boots to do a round of door-knocking in a nor’easter.
“I’m the guy that showed up in the snow. I can’t be all bad,” he said through another glass door, showing his card.
“Thank you for your service,” this woman said.
“We gotta change politics!” Rose told her. “It’s a mess in D.C.”
And now, finally, it was warm, in a house for an evening fundraiser. “Tired yet?” I asked him. He gave me a look, New York for c’mon. On tables were finger sandwiches and mixed nuts and shrimp, Heinekens and Perrier and pinot noir. On the wall was a picture of the hosts with Bill Clinton. On the shelves were books by James Carville (Had Enough?) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power). A woman rang a little bell. It was time for Rose to talk. He still had on his combat boots.
“I’ve been a politician for 176 days,” Rose said.
People laughed.
“But I’ve been a soldier for eight years,” he continued. And the mood was serious again. “I led a combat outpost in Afghanistan. And when I tell people that, they imagine Fort Knox or something. It was just some sandbags, 30 U.S. soldiers, about 60 Afghan National Army soldiers, and a mission. And those soldiers came from everywhere—all across the country, gay, straight, Hispanic, African-American, white. Dreamers. Citizens. None of that mattered, though, because we had a mission to accomplish. And when my vehicle hit an IED in Afghanistan, they got to work. They called the nine-line medevac. They pulled 360-degree security. They got me out of there. I’ll owe them for the rest of my life. You know, a fascinating thing happened to me when I was medevacced to Kandahar Air Force Base. A two-star general comes up to my hospital bed, he looks down at me, and he says, ‘Son, five years ago, you’d be dead.’ And then he walks away.”
More laughter.
“You can laugh at that,” Rose said with a smile. “I was pretty shocked—that’s how generals comfort you. But you know what? He was right. For too long, Strykers had been called Kevlar coffins. … And after far too many soldiers died, Congress finally got their act together. They put the right people in a room, they gave them resources, they put partisanship aside, and they said, ‘Solve the damn problem!’ That used to be the story of this country. I am only alive today because that’s what Congress is actually capable of.”
He let that thought sit for a bit.
“So,” Rose said, “I think that we need to go back to that.”
Partisan redistricting
Justices cast doubt on partisan redistricting
But it was unclear after oral arguments in a key case whether there are five votes to strike it down.
By STEVEN SHEPARD
The Supreme Court on Wednesday grappled with a case with the potential to reorder the country’s political landscape: How much gerrymandering is too much gerrymandering?
Republicans who sued to overturn the congressional district lines that Maryland implemented after the 2010 census map found allies in the court’s four liberal justices, who expressed sympathy for their claims during oral arguments.
What’s less clear is whether those four can recruit another justice to their side — the most likely targets would be Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy, typically the high court’s swing vote on election law cases. Both asked tough questions, but neither tipped his hand.
At issue was Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, represented for 20 years by a Republican. After the 2010 census, Democrats in the state legislature and the then-Democratic governor redrew the district lines to move large numbers of Democratic voters into the district. Democratic Rep. John Delaney won the seat in 2012 and was reelected twice after.
A ruling against the map could fundamentally alter the redistricting process in the 37 states where the legislature draws the lines, limiting the parties’ ability to create maps to their advantage. But even if the court strikes down the map, the justices on Wednesday made clear they are still wrestling with whether the case could result in clear guidelines for partisan gerrymandering in the future.
Justice Elena Kagan said the court doesn’t need to dictate firm standards for redistricting to know that “this case is too much” — in other words, that Maryland’s map goes too far in partisan gerrymandering. She pointed to statements from then-Gov. Martin O’Malley and other Democrats that the sole purpose in drawing the districts the way they were configured was to increase the party’s advantage in the congressional delegation.
“From the governor to Congressman [Steny] Hoyer, people were very clear about what they were trying to do here, which is to create another Democratic district,” said Kagan.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed. Questioning Maryland Solicitor General Steven Sullivan, she said the Republican plaintiffs had presented “some pretty damning” evidence to suggest lawmakers were driven by politics.
“You have your own governor saying that he felt ‘duty-bound’ to make sure that his party won,” she said.
And Justice Stephen Breyer said the map “seems like a pretty clear violation of the Constitution — in some form.” He asked whether there was “a practical remedy” for fixing it but suggested the court should do something about what he repeatedly called “extreme gerrymandering.”
The court’s conservative justices, on the other hand, appeared unwilling to strike down the Maryland map.
“I really don’t see how any legislature will ever be able to redistrict” if the Republican plaintiffs are successful, Justice Samuel Alito told Michael Kimberly, the plaintiffs’ attorney. “This court said time and again that you can’t take all partisan advantage out of redistricting.”
And Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out during the hourlong hearing that Maryland voters approved the map in a referendum at the ballot box. Ballot Question 5 in 2012 passed with more than 64 percent of the vote.
Sullivan seized on Gorsuch’s favorable line of questioning, calling a potential ruling against the map “a blow against democracy.”
Early in the oral argument, Roberts suggested the voters who brought suit against the map didn’t need an injunction to halt this year’s elections because “elections have already been held [under the lines] in 2012, 2014 and 2016. … The elections of 2012, 2014 and 2016 suggest you’re not going to be irreparably harmed this time” if the 2018 elections go forward.
Later in the hearing, though, Roberts questioned Sullivan about the shape of the district — which runs from the panhandle of Western Maryland to Potomac, a wealthy Washington suburb. He said the district “doesn’t seem to have any internal logic” to its shape.
“I mean, both have farms,” Roberts joked, adding that the farms in western Maryland “are real farms.”
Kennedy, at the outset, pressed Kimberly about the disruption to Maryland’s elections this year if the court strikes down the map. The state’s primary is in late June.
That concern was shared by the court’s liberal justices, too.
“I think it’s much too late, even if you are successful, for there to be any change to the 2018 election,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said early in the hearing.
But later in the hearing, Kennedy expressed reservations about the map, agreeing that the state’s partisan intent was clear.
The Maryland case, Benisek v. Lamone, is one of two redistricting cases before the high court this term. The other challenges the Republican-drawn state legislative map in Wisconsin. The Supreme Court heard that case last fall but has not issued a ruling.
Breyer, during the oral arguments Wednesday, proposed combining that case with Maryland and a third case — a lower court struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on the grounds that it was an improper partisan gerrymander. But the Supreme Court has set aside that ruling for now and allowed the 2018 elections to take place under the current map.
“They all have slight variations, obviously,” Breyer said. But he argued — more to his colleagues on the bench than to the attorneys before the court Wednesday — for hearing all three together to examine the legal arguments and develop a clear standard.
In this case, Breyer said, the court has evidence in the form of statements by lawmakers and the governor that they drew the map to achieve partisan advantage. But future mapmakers won’t be so open about their intentions, and the court should set guidelines, he said.
“The people who do the gerrymandering,” Breyer said, “are not stupid.”
But it was unclear after oral arguments in a key case whether there are five votes to strike it down.
By STEVEN SHEPARD
The Supreme Court on Wednesday grappled with a case with the potential to reorder the country’s political landscape: How much gerrymandering is too much gerrymandering?
Republicans who sued to overturn the congressional district lines that Maryland implemented after the 2010 census map found allies in the court’s four liberal justices, who expressed sympathy for their claims during oral arguments.
What’s less clear is whether those four can recruit another justice to their side — the most likely targets would be Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy, typically the high court’s swing vote on election law cases. Both asked tough questions, but neither tipped his hand.
At issue was Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, represented for 20 years by a Republican. After the 2010 census, Democrats in the state legislature and the then-Democratic governor redrew the district lines to move large numbers of Democratic voters into the district. Democratic Rep. John Delaney won the seat in 2012 and was reelected twice after.
A ruling against the map could fundamentally alter the redistricting process in the 37 states where the legislature draws the lines, limiting the parties’ ability to create maps to their advantage. But even if the court strikes down the map, the justices on Wednesday made clear they are still wrestling with whether the case could result in clear guidelines for partisan gerrymandering in the future.
Justice Elena Kagan said the court doesn’t need to dictate firm standards for redistricting to know that “this case is too much” — in other words, that Maryland’s map goes too far in partisan gerrymandering. She pointed to statements from then-Gov. Martin O’Malley and other Democrats that the sole purpose in drawing the districts the way they were configured was to increase the party’s advantage in the congressional delegation.
“From the governor to Congressman [Steny] Hoyer, people were very clear about what they were trying to do here, which is to create another Democratic district,” said Kagan.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed. Questioning Maryland Solicitor General Steven Sullivan, she said the Republican plaintiffs had presented “some pretty damning” evidence to suggest lawmakers were driven by politics.
“You have your own governor saying that he felt ‘duty-bound’ to make sure that his party won,” she said.
And Justice Stephen Breyer said the map “seems like a pretty clear violation of the Constitution — in some form.” He asked whether there was “a practical remedy” for fixing it but suggested the court should do something about what he repeatedly called “extreme gerrymandering.”
The court’s conservative justices, on the other hand, appeared unwilling to strike down the Maryland map.
“I really don’t see how any legislature will ever be able to redistrict” if the Republican plaintiffs are successful, Justice Samuel Alito told Michael Kimberly, the plaintiffs’ attorney. “This court said time and again that you can’t take all partisan advantage out of redistricting.”
And Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out during the hourlong hearing that Maryland voters approved the map in a referendum at the ballot box. Ballot Question 5 in 2012 passed with more than 64 percent of the vote.
Sullivan seized on Gorsuch’s favorable line of questioning, calling a potential ruling against the map “a blow against democracy.”
Early in the oral argument, Roberts suggested the voters who brought suit against the map didn’t need an injunction to halt this year’s elections because “elections have already been held [under the lines] in 2012, 2014 and 2016. … The elections of 2012, 2014 and 2016 suggest you’re not going to be irreparably harmed this time” if the 2018 elections go forward.
Later in the hearing, though, Roberts questioned Sullivan about the shape of the district — which runs from the panhandle of Western Maryland to Potomac, a wealthy Washington suburb. He said the district “doesn’t seem to have any internal logic” to its shape.
“I mean, both have farms,” Roberts joked, adding that the farms in western Maryland “are real farms.”
Kennedy, at the outset, pressed Kimberly about the disruption to Maryland’s elections this year if the court strikes down the map. The state’s primary is in late June.
That concern was shared by the court’s liberal justices, too.
“I think it’s much too late, even if you are successful, for there to be any change to the 2018 election,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said early in the hearing.
But later in the hearing, Kennedy expressed reservations about the map, agreeing that the state’s partisan intent was clear.
The Maryland case, Benisek v. Lamone, is one of two redistricting cases before the high court this term. The other challenges the Republican-drawn state legislative map in Wisconsin. The Supreme Court heard that case last fall but has not issued a ruling.
Breyer, during the oral arguments Wednesday, proposed combining that case with Maryland and a third case — a lower court struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on the grounds that it was an improper partisan gerrymander. But the Supreme Court has set aside that ruling for now and allowed the 2018 elections to take place under the current map.
“They all have slight variations, obviously,” Breyer said. But he argued — more to his colleagues on the bench than to the attorneys before the court Wednesday — for hearing all three together to examine the legal arguments and develop a clear standard.
In this case, Breyer said, the court has evidence in the form of statements by lawmakers and the governor that they drew the map to achieve partisan advantage. But future mapmakers won’t be so open about their intentions, and the court should set guidelines, he said.
“The people who do the gerrymandering,” Breyer said, “are not stupid.”
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