Donald Trump and narcissism: What's behind his big ego?

Narcissists don't accept any criticism. They consider themselves infallible. That sounds suspiciously like Donald Trump. Behind such a big mouth is often a very troubled person, says therapist Bärbel Wardetzki.

Remote diagnosing is a controversial practice among psychologists. But for a while now, many in the field have been concerned about US President Donald Trump's seemingly dire mental state. In February last year, a letter written by 33 psychiatrists and psychologists was published in The New York Times. They warned of the risks the US president poses. In "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", a book published in October, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts describe the president's severe personality disorder. The most frequent diagnosis in the book is narcissistic personality disorder.

Read more: New book paints strange picture of Trump family ties
Bärbel Wardetzki is a psychotherapist in Germany who has written several books about narcissism. In an interview with DW, she explains what narcissism is.

 DW: Am I a narcissist if I like myself?

Bärbel Wardetzki: No, the term narcissism is not easy to define. I see narcissism as a way of dealing with the world. It ranges from positive narcissism to pathological narcissism. People who say "I like myself" simply have high self-esteem. They do not experience self-doubt but they are still able to structure their inner life, help and comfort themselves. They are aware of their capabilities and limits. Actually, many people view this attitude as negative narcissism but it is actually positive. A narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a deeply disturbed sense of self-esteem that is compensated for by creating a larger-than-life image of oneself.

What about negative narcissism? Does US President Donald Trump suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder?

It is difficult to diagnose Trump as I do not actually know him and can only interpret his behavior. Maybe he suffers from a completely different personality disorder but the narcissistic aspect is what catches the eye. He's a prime example of narcissism. His behavior and way of dealing with others by simply dividing the world into good and evil is typical of this disorder.

What type of behavior do psychologists associate with a narcissistic personality disorder?

There are several criteria that must be met before one can speak of a disorder. Criticism is met with anger as it is associated with shame and humiliation. People with this disorder are manipulative. Relationships with others are exploited for personal gain. Another factor is overblown self-esteem. The person feels unique and great. Those who have a personality disorder constantly fantasize about infinite success, power, beauty, brilliance and idealized love. They make great demands on themselves and others. They constantly expect attention and admiration. Furthermore, narcissists lack empathy. This point however, is a topic of contention at the moment. People with a personality disorder can show empathy but not in the sense of compassion, which means feeling for others. Last but not least, people with a narcissistic personality disorder are extremely envious of others.

You say that a narcissistic personality disorder is based on low self-esteem. So if Trump brags about having a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong Un, does he actually fear having a smaller one?

Exactly. "I am not good enough" is the underlying fear in this disorder and it can be an existential fear. People who develop narcissistic structures often do not even know who they are. They have often been manipulated as children who had to live up to a specific image. They draw their self-esteem from external accomplishments: power, big cars or important positions. But all this conceals an emotionally neglected child who was never given the attention it actually needed.

What's the best way to deal with a narcissist like Trump?

Well, that's the million dollar question. When dealing with people like that, your own self-esteem is challenged. After all, they can quickly make you feel worthless and miserable and no longer the person you are. It is important to learn to take a stand against them, to raise your voice and not be intimidated. And to leave when the relationship becomes too destructive. Which, unfortunately, we cannot do in this case.

Bärbel Wardetzski is a psychotherapist and the author of the book "Narzissmus, Verführung und Macht in Politik und Gesellschaft" ("Narcissism, seduction and power in politics and society")
The interview was conducted by Julia Vergin.

The danger of absolute thinking is absolutely clear

Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi

is a postgraduate student in psychology at the University of Reading in the UK.

Think of the most happy and well-adjusted person you know – what can you say about their thinking style? Are they dogmatic, with an all-or-nothing outlook on the world? Do they place totally rigid demands on themselves and those around them? When confronted with stresses and misfortunes, are they apt to magnify and fixate on them? In short, do they have an absolutist thinking style? 
‘Absolutism’ refers to ideas, phrases and words that denote totality, either in magnitude or probability. Absolutist thoughts are unqualified by nuance and overlook the complexity of a given subject.

There are generally two forms of absolutism; ‘dichotomous thinking’ and ‘categorical imperatives’. Dichotomous thinking – also referred to as ‘black-and-white’ or ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking – describes a binary outlook, where things in life are either ‘this’ or ‘that’, and nothing in between. Categorical imperatives are completely rigid demands that people place on themselves and others. The term is borrowed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological moral philosophy, which is grounded in an obligation- and rules-based ethical code.

In our research – and in clinical psychology more broadly – absolutist thinking is viewed as an unhealthy thinking style that disrupts emotion-regulation and hinders people from achieving their goals. Yet we all, to varying extents, are disposed to it – why is this? Primarily, because it’s much easier than dealing with the true complexities of life. The term cognitive miser, first introduced by the American psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984, describes how humans seek the simplest and least effortful ways of thinking. Nuance and complexity is expensive – it takes up precious time and energy – so wherever possible we try to cut corners. This is why we have biases and prejudices, and form habits. It’s why the study of heuristics (intuitive ‘gut-feeling’ judgments) is so useful in behavioural economics and political science.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch; the time and energy saved through absolutist thinking has a cost. In order to successfully navigate through life, we need to appreciate nuance, understand complexity and embrace flexibility. When we succumb to absolutist thinking for the most important matters in our lives – such as our goals, relationships and self-esteem – the consequences are disastrous.

In a recent research article in Clinical Psychological Science, I and my collaborator, the neuroscientist Tom Johnstone at the University of Reading in the UK, examined the prevalence of absolutist thinking in the natural language of more than 6,400 online members in various mental-health chat groups. From the outset, we predicted that those with depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation would have a more absolutist outlook, and that this would manifest in their style of language. Compared with 19 different online control chat groups on topics from cancer to parenting, the prevalence of absolutist words was approximately 50 per cent greater in depression and anxiety groups, and approximately 80 per cent greater in the suicidal-ideation group.

Previously, the best-known linguistic markers for mental-health disorders had been an excessive use of first-person singular pronouns such as ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’, with a reduced use of second- and third-person pronouns. This pattern of pronoun use reflects the isolation and self-focus common in depression. Negative-emotion words are also a strong linguistic marker for mental-health disorders, however researchers have reported that pronouns are actually more reliable in identifying depression. We find that the prevalence of absolutist words is a better marker than both pronouns and negative-emotion words. They produced bigger differences between mental-health and control groups compared with pronouns, and they tracked the mental-health groups better than negative-emotion words. Paradoxically, negative-emotion words were more prevalent in anxiety and depression groups than in the suicidal-ideation group.

How do we know that a greater use of absolutist words actually reflects absolutist thinking, and is not simply a result of extreme emotions and psychological distress? In a second study, we calculated the prevalence of absolutist words in mental-health conditions known to be linked to absolutist thinking (borderline personality disorder and eating disorder) with mental-health groups not linked to absolutist thinking (post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia). All groups are shown to have the same levels of psychological distress, but only the groups known to be linked to absolutist thinking had elevated levels of absolutist words. This confirms that a greater use of absolutist words is specific to absolutist thinking, and not to psychological distress per se.

Despite the correlations, nothing yet suggests that absolutism causes depression. In a third study, we examined groups whose participants believe that they have recovered from a depressive episode, and write positive, encouraging posts about their recovery. We found that positive-emotion words were elevated by approximately 70 per cent, yet they continued to use a high prevalence of absolutist words, significantly greater than control groups and much closer to anxiety and depression levels. Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it might play a role in causing depressive episodes.

These findings support the recent ‘third wave’ therapies that have entered clinical psychology. The most well-known of these is ‘mindfulness’, but they all advocate a flexible outlook, acceptance, and freedom from attachments. An early exponent of mindfulness is the noted psychologist John Teasdale, whose lab has produced a litany of empirical data to support its efficacy. In a landmark 2001 study, Teasdale and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge found that an ‘absolutist, dichotomous thinking style’ predicted future depressive relapse.

Many argue that the world is a harsh place, and that it is the stresses and misfortunes in life that make people depressed, not their thinking style. Wrong! Countless people suffer misfortunes and do not get depressed or anxious, while others seemingly suffer no misfortune at all, and are blighted with depression and anxiety. The Stoic philosopher (and former slave) Epictetus opined that ‘men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them’. A sentiment that is totally, completely and absolutely correct.

Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?

He disdains the rule of law. He’s trampling norms of presidential behavior. And he’s bringing vital institutions down with him.
Jack Goldsmith

 Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” James Madison wrote in one of the Federalist Papers during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. He was right, but he never could have imagined Donald Trump.

At this point in the singular Trump presidency, we can begin to assess its impact on American democracy. The news thus far is not all bad. The Constitution’s checks and balances have largely stopped Trump from breaking the law. And while he has hurt his own administration, his successors likely won’t repeat his self-destructive antics. The prognosis for the rest of our democratic culture is grimmer, however. Trump’s bizarre behavior has coarsened politics and induced harmful norm-breaking by the institutions he has attacked. These changes will be harder to undo.

Trump, in short, is wielding a Soprano touch on American institutions. “I’m fucking King Midas in reverse here,” Tony Soprano once told his therapist. “Everything I touch turns to shit.”

The Framers of the Constitution wanted to create a powerful, independent executive branch, but they didn’t want to stoke fears that the new United States would replicate the monarchy from which it had just separated. Confident that George Washington would be the first chief executive and would use his power responsibly, they established an unstructured office with ambiguous authorities. Article II vests the president with “executive Power,” but it doesn’t define the term, and it gives the president only a few rather modest enumerated powers.

These vague constitutional contours allowed the presidency to grow, in response to changes in society and the world, into a gargantuan institution that the Framers never could have foreseen. The president’s control over the bully pulpit, federal law enforcement, and the national-security establishment has made the office the dominant force in American government and a danger to constitutional liberties. The flexible structure of the office has meant that it is defined largely by the person who occupies it—his character, competence, and leadership skills. Great presidents, such as Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, exercised power wisely (though controversially) to lead the nation through crisis. But Richard Nixon debased the office and betrayed the Constitution and our laws, while others, like Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, allowed the executive branch to become engulfed in corruption and scandal.

This was the background to the near-hysterical worries when Trump became president. During the campaign, he pledged to act in illegal ways; expressed illiberal attitudes toward freedom of speech, religion, and the press; attacked immigrants and minorities; tolerated, and even incited, thuggery at his rallies. The man who on January 20, 2017, took a constitutional oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” seemed disdainful of the rule of law and almost certain to abuse his power. “He is unlikely to be contained by norms and customs, or even by laws and the Constitution,” wrote Peter Wehner, a circumspect Republican commentator, in The New York Times the day after Trump’s inauguration. Wehner captured, in an understated way, prevalent fears about Trump’s presidency.

Thus far, however, Trump has been almost entirely blocked from violating laws or the Constitution. The courts, the press, the bureaucracy, civil society, and even Congress have together robustly enforced the rule of law.
Trump’s initial executive order on immigration—a temporary ban on entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries that were not obvious sources of terrorist activity inside the United States—was widely seen as his first step toward authoritarianism. Issued seven days into his presidency, the ban was sloppily written, barely vetted inside the executive branch, legally overbroad, and incompetently rolled out. The administration gave the people subject to the ban’s edicts no notice, which led to bedlam at airports. Many observers believed the immigration order indulged the “symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest,” as Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution put it at the time.

A crucial moment occurred during the week after Trump issued the order. Civil-society groups such as the ACLU quickly filed habeas corpus petitions asking federal courts to enjoin the order in various ways, which they did. For several days, it was unclear whether border agents were complying with the injunctions, and rumors that Trump or his Department of Homeland Security had ordered them not to filled the news. When a federal district-court judge in Seattle named James Robart halted the entire immigration order nationwide in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, February 3, Twitter and the cable shows were aquiver for several hours with the possibility that Trump would defy the court.

“What would happen if the administration were to simply ignore this court order and continue to deny people entry?,” MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid asked her guests on All In. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who had brought the case against Trump, treated the question as a live possibility. “I don’t want to be overly dramatic, Joy,” he said, “but you would have a constitutional crisis.”

The hardest question in American constitutional law was suddenly raised: Why does a president, who controls what Alexander Hamilton described as “the sword of the community,” abide by a judicial decision he abhors?

Trump wouldn’t have been the first president to flout a court order. Six weeks into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln defied a ruling by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that the president lacked the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and Franklin Roosevelt threatened to ignore the Supreme Court in a World War II case involving Nazi saboteurs. But during the next few decades, judicial authority solidified. Though many worried that Nixon would disobey the Supreme Court in 1974 when it ordered him to turn over his incriminating tapes to a special prosecutor, Nixon famously acquiesced. Would Trump?

We can imagine that he didn’t want to. We can imagine him ranting deliriously after Robart issued his decision. But at 10:05 p.m., the White House put out a statement declaring that the Justice Department would seek to stay the “outrageous order,” which meant that the executive branch would pursue review in higher courts. And 10 hours later, at 8:12 a.m., the incensed chief executive tweeted the first of many attacks against Robart. “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!,” Trump wrote. He would appeal, rather than defy, Robart’s injunction.

We don’t know why Trump acquiesced. Perhaps his staff convinced him that ignoring the ruling would spark resignations in the White House and the Justice Department, as well as congressional reprisal, which would jeopardize his two-week-old presidency. Whatever the reason, the most powerful man in the world complied with the edict of a little-known federal trial judge on an issue at the top of his agenda. The Constitution held.

The still-unfolding Russia investigation is a second context in which checks and balances have worked well thus far. The possibility that the president’s inner circle might have colluded with our fiercest adversary to sway the 2016 election, or might have other inappropriate ties to Russian interests, is the most serious instance of potential presidential malfeasance since Watergate. In trying to influence the investigation, Trump has acted much like Nixon did. He has pressured his senior intelligence and law-enforcement officials to help clear his name and fired the original lead investigator, FBI Director James Comey. Unlike Nixon, Trump has also publicly attacked just about everyone involved in investigating him. And yet every institution has stood firm.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made his boss furious by following the Justice Department’s rules and recusing himself from the matter because of his involvement in the Trump campaign. Many feared that the FBI’s investigation would flounder when Trump fired Comey. But the opposite happened. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another Trump appointee, angered the president but also followed the rules in appointing a special counsel, the esteemed former FBI director Robert Mueller, to investigate the matter. Mueller has assembled a formidable squad of prosecutors and investigators and impaneled a grand jury.

Trump has sharply criticized Sessions’s and Mueller’s roles in the Russia investigation, raising concerns that he might fire one or both. (As of press time, he had not done so.) But such a step would not take the heat off him any more than canning Comey did. Firing Mueller in particular would be almost exactly like Nixon’s infamous order to dismiss the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and it would invite the same heightened suspicion and blowback as befell Nixon. Justice Department leaders would face pressure to appoint a new and undeniably independent special counsel, who would have every incentive to replicate Mueller’s aggressive investigation.

The Republican-controlled Congress would also likely act. Many believe Congress hasn’t done enough to stand up to Trump. But in the context of facing a Republican president in his honeymoon first year, it has been remarkably tough. This summer, by large bipartisan majorities, it passed a law imposing sanctions on Russia that Trump abhorred and that curbed his power. Congress has also shown backbone in investigating the Trump campaign’s connection to Russian election meddling.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been conducting a “notoriously bipartisan” investigation, as The Washington Post put it. Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared to be in Trump’s pocket and trying to delegitimize the committee’s investigation. But the press uncovered his shenanigans, Nunes stepped aside, and the House has since been pursuing the matter more seriously. Republican senators also rose to Sessions’s defense when Trump openly attacked him, and they have signaled strong support for Mueller. These efforts reflect unusual Republican distrust of a Republican president, and would surely ramp up if Trump fired Sessions or Mueller.

A symbiotic relationship between the bureaucracy and the press has also exposed abuses and illegalities. National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s lies about his Russian contacts were leaked and reported, and forced his resignation. When The New York Times published a leaked draft of an executive order that would have restored CIA authority for black sites and enhanced interrogation, the outcry in Congress and elsewhere killed the order. Trump and his family have not yet been brought to heel on their business conflicts of interest. Checks have been weakest here, but that is mainly because the Constitution and laws are ambiguous on such conflicts, and are not designed for judicial enforcement. Nonetheless, several imaginative lawsuits have been filed against Trump and his associates, and the press has done a good job of bringing conflicts to light.

In these and other ways, actors inside and outside the executive branch have so far stymied Trump’s tendencies toward lawlessness. One might even say that in the first year of his presidency, Trump has invigorated constitutional checks and balances, and the nation’s appreciation for them.

Trump has been less constrained by norms, the nonlegal principles of appropriate behavior that presidents and other officials tacitly accept and that typically structure their actions. Norms, not laws, create the expectation that a president will take regular intelligence briefings, pay public respect to our allies, and not fire the FBI director for declining to pledge his loyalty. There is no canonical list of presidential norms. They are rarely noticed until they are violated.

Donald Trump is a norm-busting president without parallel in American history. He has told scores of easily disprovable public lies; he has shifted back and forth and back again on his policies, often contradicting Cabinet officials along the way; he has attacked the courts, the press, his predecessor, his former electoral opponent, members of his party, the intelligence community, and even his own attorney general; he has failed to release his tax returns or to fill senior political positions in many agencies; he has shown indifference to ethics concerns; he has regularly interjected a self-regarding political element into apolitical events; he has monetized the presidency by linking it to his personal business interests; and he has engaged in cruel public behavior. The list goes on and on.

Presidential norm-breaking is neither new nor always bad. Thomas Jefferson refused to continue the practice begun by George Washington and John Adams of delivering the State of the Union address in person before Congress, because he believed it resembled the British monarch speaking before Parliament. For the next 112 years, presidents conveyed the State of the Union in writing—until Woodrow Wilson astonished Congress by addressing it in person, a practice that once again settled into a norm. Wilson’s novel step was part of a broader change from the 19th century, when giving policy speeches before the public was rare and controversial for a president, to the 20th century, when mass oratory became a routine tool of presidential leadership. Although the Constitution allowed presidents to serve for more than two consecutive terms, no one did so until Franklin Roosevelt won a third term, in 1940. Roosevelt tried but failed to break another norm when he sought to increase the number of Supreme Court justices in order to secure more favorable interpretations of his New Deal programs.

These and countless other examples show that presidential norm violations have often been central to presidential leadership. Even if presidents don’t always get the calculation right (Roosevelt’s court-packing plan was and remains almost universally derided), they usually break norms to try to improve the operations of government.

Trump’s norm violations are different. Many of them appear to result from his lack of emotional intelligence—a “president’s ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to diminish his leadership,” as the Princeton political scientist Fred I. Greenstein has put it. Trump’s behavior seems to flow from hypersensitivity untempered by shame, a mercurial and contrarian personality, and a notable lack of self-control.
A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing.

Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t “recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference,” Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have noted in Foreign Affairs. He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle.

Commentary about Trump’s behavior has tended to assume that presidential norms, once broken, are hard if not impossible to restore. This can be true, but in Trump’s case isn’t. Presidents don’t embrace their predecessors’ norm entrepreneurship unless it brings political advantage, and Trump’s hasn’t. His successors are no more likely to replicate his self-destructive antics than they would be if he yelled at the first lady during a public dinner or gave a televised address from the White House Rose Garden in his bathrobe.

Another reason presidential norms will prove resilient is that Trump’s aberrant actions have been sweepingly condemned. He has been rebuked for his attacks on investigatory independence not just by his political opponents but by more-sympathetic voices in the Republican Party and on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and even, implicitly, by his own Justice Department appointees, who have continued the Russia investigation despite his pushback. Trump’s response to the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August produced a uniform outcry that will reinforce norms for future presidents about denouncing racism and racial violence. The majority of the other presidential norms that Trump has defied will similarly be strengthened by the reactions to his behavior, and will snap back in the next presidency.

But that doesn’t mean virtuous norms will hold elsewhere.

During the presidential campaign, Trump gave his challengers derogatory nicknames. Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary.” Jeb Bush was “Low-Energy Jeb.” Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted.” And Marco Rubio was “Little Marco.” Trump’s taunts exceeded the bounds of campaign decorum but generated attention and helped distinguish him from the stale, conventional elite wisdom reflected by other candidates in both parties. (Norm-breaking helped him more during the campaign than it has in the presidency.)

Two days before Super Tuesday, on February 28, 2016, Rubio decided to fight back. “Have you seen his hands?,” Rubio asked the audience at a rally at Roanoke College. “You know what they say about men with small hands.” The college students loved the juvenile humor, and Rubio briefly got the increased cable coverage he sought. But he had sacrificed his integrity, and his campaign collapsed. Immediately after the remark, “Rubio’s aides were besieged with dazed and irate missives from donors, allies, and friends” because his “reputation as conservatism’s upbeat, optimistic standard-bearer—so meticulously crafted over so many years—was dissolving before their eyes,” Tim Alberta reported in National Review. Rubio later admitted that the gambit had been a mistake, and apologized. “I didn’t like what it reflected on me,” he said. “It embarrassed my family. It’s not who I am.”

What happened to Marco Rubio on the campaign trail is now happening to a variety of American institutions. These institutions have risen up to check a president they fear. But in some instances, they have defied their own norms, and harmed themselves and the nation in the process. Unfortunately, many of these norm violations will be hard to reverse.

Since the day of Trump’s election, members of the federal bureaucracy have taken unusual steps to stop him. Soon after November 8, online guides for how to “resist from below” or to “dissent from within” the administration popped up. During the transition, and continuing after the inauguration, federal employees who were repulsed by the new president and his agenda discussed strategies to hide or alter documents, leak damaging information, and slow down the process of changing government policy. “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” an anonymous Justice Department official told The Washington Post in January. “People here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable.”

These tactics had been used before; clashes between the governing class and a new administration are not uncommon. But the scale of the effort, and especially how it was coordinated, was new. “Federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives,” The Washington Post reported. Federal employees used encrypted communications to avoid detection by the president’s team, and a number of anonymous Twitter accounts attributed to government officials—@Rogue_DoD, @alt_labor, and the like—cropped up to organize resistance and release damaging information about the administration.

Leaks are not new, but we have never seen anything like the daily barrage of leaks that have poured out of Trump’s executive branch. Not all of them have come from bureaucrats; Trump appointees have engaged in leaking too. But many of the leaks appear to have come from career civil servants who seek to discredit or undermine the president. And many involve types of information that have never been leaked before. In August, The Washington Post published complete transcripts of conversations Trump had had with the prime minister of Australia and the president of Mexico. These leaks were “unprecedented, shocking, and dangerous,” as David Frum wrote for The Atlantic’s website. “No leader will again speak candidly on the phone to Washington, D.C.—at least for the duration of this presidency, and perhaps for longer.”

The most-harmful leaks have been of information collected in the course of surveillance of Russian officials. The first, in February 2017, concerned a December 2016 court-approved National Security Agency wiretap of a phone conversation between the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and the incoming national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, that included a discussion of U.S. sanctions against Russia. (This was the leak that exposed Flynn’s lies and led to his resignation.) Other leaks by current and former intelligence officials have involved intercepts of Russian government officials discussing “derogatory” information about Trump and his campaign staff; of other Russian officials bragging that they could use their relationship with Flynn to influence Trump; of Kislyak claiming to have discussed campaign-related issues with then-Senator Sessions; and of Kislyak reporting to Moscow that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, wanted to establish a secure communication channel.

The leaks of Russia intercepts may seem commonplace, but they violated taboos that had been respected even in the wild west of unlawful government disclosures. The first was a taboo against publishing the contents of foreign intelligence intercepts, especially ones involving a foe like Russia. It is hard to recall another set of leaks that exposed so much specific information about intelligence intercepts of a major adversary. This form of leaking risks compromising a communication channel and thus telling an adversary how to avoid detection in the future. The Russia leaks may well have burned large investments in electronic surveillance and constricted future U.S. surveillance opportunities.

The Russia leaks also breached a taboo against revealing information about U.S. citizens “incidentally collected” during surveillance of a foreign agent. The government acquires this type of data without suspicion that the citizen has engaged in wrongdoing, and thus without constitutional privacy protections. For this reason, it is typically treated with special care inside the government.

The gush of this information to the public was an astounding breach of privacy. 
It also violated yet another taboo—against using intelligence information for political ends. In the bad old days when J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, the bureau regularly leaked (or threatened to leak) secretly collected intelligence information about U.S. citizens, including government officials, in order to influence democratic politics. The intelligence reforms of the mid-1970s and beyond eliminated this pernicious practice for four decades and were believed to have created a culture that would prevent its recurrence. The anti-Trump leaks mark a dangerous throwback.

These norm violations are an immune response to Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community. But the toll from the leaks has been significant and may outlast the Trump presidency. Although a future president likely won’t find advantage in following Trump’s example, intelligence officials who have discovered the political power of leaking secretly collected information about Americans may well continue the practice. A world without norms to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information about U.S. citizens is not just a world in which Michael Flynn is revealed as a liar and removed from office. It is also a world in which intelligence bureaucrats repeat the trick for very different political ends that they deem worthy but that might not be.

Trump has not attacked the U.S. military while president, but he has taken a wrecking ball to customs of civilian–military relations. More than other presidents, he has staffed senior positions with current and former military brass. He has attempted to leverage popular admiration for the military into backing for his policies, such as by signing his initial executive order on immigration in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes and by giving political speeches before military audiences. He has even urged soldiers to contact members of Congress in support of his policies, contrary to regulations and customs forbidding them from lobbying. These practices threaten to politicize the military and leave “tattered shreds of the military’s ethics and values in their wake,” Phillip Carter of the Center for a New American Security wrote for Slate. Even if future presidents don’t repeat Trump’s practices, he will have done great harm if attitudes change within the military toward the chain of command and the appropriateness of service members’ engagement in politics.

Trump is also politicizing the judiciary. He has accused the judges reviewing his January immigration order, and a replacement order he signed in March, of trampling presidential prerogatives and endangering national security. But the judges reviewing Trump’s orders engaged in norm-breaking behavior of their own.

Courts have always been political, in the sense that laws and precedents don’t always yield obvious answers and, especially in high-stakes cases, judges’ personal views can matter. But it is important to judicial legitimacy that judges appear neutral and detached, that they appear to follow precedent, and that they appear to pay presidents appropriate deference and respect. This is especially true in cases touching on immigration and national security, where the executive branch’s authority is at its height.
In the Trump immigration cases, the judges sometimes abandoned these norms. They were in a tough spot because they were reviewing extraordinary executive-branch actions in a highly charged context.

But they reacted with hasty and, in some ways, sloppy judicial opinions. They issued broad injunctions unsupported by the underlying legal analysis. They seemed to extend constitutional protections to noncitizens who lacked any connection to the United States. And they failed to give the government’s national-security determinations proper deference.

The judges had many avenues to rule against Trump on many issues, especially with regard to the first order. They had plenty of reasons to be angry or defensive because of his tweeted attacks. But they neglected principles of restraint, prudence, and precedent to rule against him across the board based on what seemed to many a tacit determination that the just-elected president lacked legitimacy on immigration issues.

If judges were to continue such behavior for four or eight years, judicial norms and trust in the judiciary might take a serious hit. But there are reasons to think this won’t happen. Federal judges sit in a hierarchical system with the Supreme Court at the top. The highest court in the land doesn’t just overrule lower-court legal decisions; it can also model proper judicial behavior. This is what the Supreme Court did in its opinion in late June announcing that it would review the lower-court decisions about Trump’s second immigration order. The nine justices rarely agree on any issue of importance. But they unanimously ruled that, at a minimum, the lower-court injunctions were too broad and had failed to take his national-security prerogatives seriously enough.

The Court did not indicate how it will ultimately rule. But its sober, respectful, low-temperature opinion sent a strong signal about the importance of judicial detachment. For this reason, the judiciary has a fighting chance to return to normal patterns.

The same cannot be said of the norms that govern the news media. Journalistic practices, of course, were already evolving as a result of social media, the decentralization of news production, and changing financial models. But Trump has had a distinct effect.

The vast majority of elite journalists have a progressive outlook, which influences what gets covered, and how, in ways that many Americans, especially outside of big cities, find deeply biased. The press was among the least trusted of American institutions long before Trump assaulted it as the “enemy of the people” and the “lowest form of life.” Members of the media viewed these attacks, correctly, as an effort by Trump to discredit, marginalize, and even dehumanize them. And they were shocked when the strategy worked. “The country was really angry at the elite, and that included us, and I don’t think we quite had our finger on it,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, said with exquisite understatement during a roundtable discussion with his reporters in June.

After the election, news organizations devoted more resources than ever to White House coverage, and they have produced exceptional in-depth reporting that has been integral to the constitutional checks on the presidency. Reporting on a flagrantly norm-breaking president produces a novel conundrum, however. A Harvard study found that Trump’s mainstream coverage during the first 100 days of his presidency “set a new standard for negativity”: four negative stories for each positive one and no single major topic on which he received more positive than negative coverage. Many Trump critics insist that his behavior justifies this level of adverse scrutiny. But even if that is true, the overall effect can make the press seem heavily biased and out to get Trump. “Every time he lies you have to point out it’s a lie, and there’s a part of this country that hears that as an attack,” the New York Times media columnist, Jim Rutenberg, said at the June roundtable. “That is a serious problem.” Trump’s extremes require the mainstream press to choose between appearing oppositional or, if it tones things down, “normalizing” his presidency. Either way, Trump in some sense wins.

The appearance problem that Rutenberg described is real. But it is also true that many reporters covering Trump have overreacted and exaggerated and interjected opinion into their stories more than usual. In doing so, they have veered from the norm of “independence” and instead are “binge-drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid,” as the venerable Bob Woodward argued in May. Such excesses lend credence to Trump’s attacks on “the fake-news media.”

So, too, do other changes in the norms of covering the president. Many journalists let their hair down on Twitter with opinionated anti-Trump barbs that reveal predispositions and shape the way readers view their reporting. And news outlets have at times seemed to cast themselves as part of the resistance to Trump, and seen their revenues soar. (It cannot be an accident that The Washington Post’s “Democracy dies in darkness” motto, though used in-house for years, was rolled out publicly in February.) Just as Trump drew energy and numbers on the campaign trail from the excessive coverage of his norm-busting behavior, the news media seem to draw energy and numbers from their own norm-busting behavior.

But while Trumpism has been good for the media business, it has not been good for overall media credibility. An Emerson College poll in February indicated that more voters found Trump to be truthful than the news media, and a Suffolk University/USA Today poll in June concluded that the historically unpopular president still had a slightly higher favorability rating than the media. Trump is not just discrediting the mainstream news, but quickening changes in right-wing media as well. Fox News Channel always leaned right, but in the past year several of its programs have become open propaganda arms for Trump. And sharply partisan outlets like Breitbart News and The Daily Caller have grown in influence among conservatives.

“Does it ever go back?” chief White House correspondent Peter Baker asked his Times colleagues. “Have we changed something in a fundamental way in terms of the relationship between the person in the White House, people in power, and the media?” The answers to those questions are no and yes, respectively. The media have every incentive to continue on their current trajectories. And because Trump’s extreme media-bashing is perceived to have served him relatively well, other Republicans will likely perpetuate his strategy. Many on the right increasingly agree with a point Ron Unz, the influential former publisher of The American Conservative, made in a memo last year. “The media is the crucial force empowering the opposition and should be regarded as a primary target of any political strategy,” Unz wrote. “Discrediting the media anywhere weakens it everywhere.”

Citizens’ trust in American institutions has been in decline for a while. That’s one reason Donald Trump was elected. His assault on those institutions, and the defiant reactions to his assault, will further diminish that trust and make it yet harder to resolve social and political disputes. The breakdown in institutions mirrors the breakdown in social cohesion among citizens that was also a major cause of Trumpism, and that Trumpism has churned further. This is perhaps the worst news of all for our democracy. As Cass Sunstein lamented in his book #Republic, “Members of a democratic public will not do well if they are unable to appreciate the views of their fellow citizens, if they believe ‘fake news,’ or if they see one another as enemies or adversaries in some kind of war.”

To that depressing conclusion I will add another. The relatively hopeful parts of the analysis offered here—that the Constitution has prevented presidential law-breaking, and that most of Trump’s norm violations will not persist—rest on a pair of assumptions that have so far prevailed but that might not hold in the future. The first is that Trump’s presidency, which has accomplished little, will continue to fail and that he will not be reelected. But it is conceivable that he will turn things around—for example, by pulling off tax and infrastructure reform and putting Kim Jong Un in a box—and win the 2020 election, perhaps in a three-way race. If Trump succeeds and makes it to a second term, his norm-breaking will be seen to serve the presidency more than it does today. If that happens, the office will be forever changed, and not for the better.

The second assumption is that the country is fundamentally stable. In Trump’s first seven months in office, the stock market boomed and the United States faced no full-blown national-security crisis. But what if the economy collapses, or the country faces a major domestic terrorist attack or even nuclear war? What if Mueller finds evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians—and Trump fires not just Mueller but also scores of others in the Justice Department, and pardons himself and everyone else involved? These are not crazy possibilities. The Constitution has held thus far and might continue to do so under more-extreme circumstances. But it also might not.

How the fear of death makes people more Right-wing

Bobby Azarian

is a cognitive neuroscientist, a researcher in the Visual Attention and Cognition Lab at George Mason University, and a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and Scientific American, among others. His research has been published in journals including Cognition & Emotion and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. He also runs the blog Science Is Sexy.
Published on Aeon

A string of terror attacks across the globe have shaken the world’s most powerful nations to their core. As a result of these tragic events, and the fear-mongering from politicians hoping to exploit them, many feel that an existential threat is nigh.

To make matters worse, a highly influential and experimentally verified theory from social psychology predicts that, as long as an existential threat looms, the world will grow ever more divided and increasingly hostile. Terror management theory (TMT) explains how and why events that conjure up thoughts about death cause people to cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews – siding with those who share their national, ethnic or political identity, while aggressively opposing those who do not.

Consequently, sharp increases in deadly terror attacks around the world serve to create a sweeping psychological condition that sets the stage for waves of far-Right nationalist movements that encourage prejudice, intolerance and hostility toward dissimilar others.

Europe’s nationalist surge, Brexit in the United Kingdom and the presidency win for Donald Trump in the United States are just the most recent demonstrations of TMT, first proposed by social psychologists in the 1980s and derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology, The Denial of Death (1973).

Becker’s big idea was that much of human action is motivated by a fear of death. Unlike other animals, which lack higher cognition and the ability to reflect, humans recognise the inevitability of their own death. The conflict that results from this realisation and the natural desire to live produces cognitive dissonance that causes profound terror and anxiety. According to Becker, humans invented culture as a buffer for the terror. By adopting cultural worldviews that instil life with meaning and value, one can effectively manage the subconscious dread that is always bubbling below the surface.

While religions offer a path to literal immortality through the belief in an afterlife, non-religious cultural worldviews – such as political ideologies and national identities – provide paths to symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality refers to being part of something larger that will ultimately outlive the individual, such as a great nation or a movement with a collective identity and pursuit. Much of human effort is dedicated to acts that might help one be remembered by groups or society long after death.

Of course, no matter how logical or intriguing a theory might sound, it is merely speculation if it makes no testable predictions that can be confirmed or disproven by experiment and measurement. What might be most impressive about TMT is how much success it has had in the laboratory. Hundreds of empirical studies have provided support for the theory by confirming something called the mortality salience hypothesis.

According to this hypothesis, if we do in fact adopt cultural worldviews to curb a fear of death – as TMT posits – then reminders of our mortality should produce actions that serve to strengthen faith in our worldviews. Specifically, death reminders should motivate individuals to invest more in groups to which they belong and, conversely, to act more aggressively towards those with different cultural worldviews and national or ethnic identities.

A particularly amusing experiment used hot sauce to measure the phenomenon. Students were broken into two groups and asked to write an essay about their own death or another, more benign topic. They were then presented with someone who did or did not disparage their political views, and asked to decide on the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce that person should have to consume. In line with TMT and the mortality salience hypothesis, participants who’d written about death allocated a large dollop of hot sauce to those who didn’t share their worldview, while those in the control condition did not.

Another mortality salience study on aggression conducted on both Iranian and US college students shows disturbing results. One group of students was asked to ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die,’ and to describe the emotions aroused. Participants in the control condition were given similar questions related to dental pain. The results showed that Iranian students who were made to think about death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the US, while those in the control condition opposed them. Similarly, death reminders made US students who identified as politically conservative more supportive of extreme military attacks on foreign nations that could kill thousands of civilians.

From these findings, it is easy to see how nations under attack can quickly grow more divided and increasingly hostile towards those from outside cultures. In fact, studies have shown that mortality salience can amplify nationalism and intensify bias against other groups. Evidence suggests that reminders of death can even influence elections, pushing voters to favour candidates on the Right. Five weeks before the 2004 US presidential election, scientists conducted studies on New Jersey voters to see whether mortality reminders influenced voting directly.

Participants were given the same questions about death as the Iranian students in the previously mentioned study, while those in the control condition received parallel questions about watching television. What they found was pretty astonishing. Those voters prompted to think of death said they intended to vote for George W Bush, the hawkish conservative president, by a three-to-one margin; those prompted to think about TV strongly favoured the Left-wing challenger, John Kerry. Such results could help to explain why, after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush went from having some of the lowest approval ratings ever to being extremely popular with both Republicans and Democrats.

So what does this all mean for the world today? If massively destructive terror attacks continue, terror management theory predicts that societies will grow exponentially more chaotic and divided. Heightened aggression towards dissimilar others produces a tendency to favour war over peace. Right-wing nationalism will thrive along with prejudice and intolerance. Islamic fundamentalism will flourish while terror attacks grow more frequent. Raised tensions between nations, ethnicities and political groups will lead to further conflict, creating a devastating feedback loop of suspicion and violence.

But it is critical that we not lose optimism in these challenging times. By becoming cognisant of the inflammatory and divisive effect that death reminders and perceived existential threat have on all of us, we can begin to take steps toward defending against it. After each terrorist attack we must actively work to unite groups with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural worldviews. We must help build bridges between dissimilar communities, and discourage ideas such as immigration bans. And we must be conscious of the way some politicians use fear-mongering and propaganda to manipulate voters. Such efforts, combined with a calm and cool temperament, can help manage the terror of mortality in ways that preserve rationality, compassion and peace.

Rich People Just Care Less

By Daniel Goleman

Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.

These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.

In contrast, extensive interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F. Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that it was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led him to study prejudice.

In his research, he found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close friends within the other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.” Whether such friendly social contact would overcome the divide between those with more and less social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it would help.

Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

Thousands Protest in AZ as Trump Threatens Govt Shutdown over Border Wall & Defends C’ville Remarks

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Phoenix, Arizona, where President Trump held a rally where he repeatedly defended his response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also criticized Arizona’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, without directly mentioning their names. Neither were there, nor was the governor.
While Trump spoke, thousands of protesters gathered outside the Phoenix convention Center. Police attacked the thousands of protesters with tear gas and pepper balls. There are also some reports that police fired rubber coated steel bullets at the protesters. Police reported four people were arrested. During his speech, Trump repeatedly criticized the corporate media.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: These are truly dishonest people. And not all of them. Not all of them. You have some very good reporters. You have some very fair journalists. But for the most part, honestly, these are really, really dishonest people. And they are bad people. And I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that. And I don’t believe they’re going to change, and that is why I do this. If they would change, I would never say it. The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump attacked the media for about 20 minutes of his speech. During that speech, he also defended former CNN analyst Jeffrey Lord, a Trump backer, who was fired for tweeting a Nazi victory salute.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You wonder why CNN is doing relatively poorly in the ratings? Because they’re putting like seven people, all negative on Trump, and they fired Jeffrey Lord. Poor Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lord. I guess he was getting a little bit fed up and he was probably fighting back a little too hard. They said, "we better get out of here. We get him out."

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also criticized what he described as "weak weak people" who have allowed Confederate statues to be removed in recent weeks.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: From George Washington — please, don’t take his statue down, please. Please. Does anybody want George Washington’s statue? No? Is that sad? Is that all sad? To Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, I see they want to take Teddy Roosevelt’s down, too. They’re trying to figure out why. They don’t know. They’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history.

AMY GOODMAN: While thousands of protesters rallied outside the Phoenix Convention Center, Trump openly dismissed his critics.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: All week they’re talking about the massive crowds that are going to be outside. Where are they? Well, it’s hot out. It is hot. I think it’s too warm. They show up in the helmets and the black masks and they’ve got clubs and they’ve got everything. Antifa!

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also threatened a government shutdown if he didn’t get Congressional approval to build a wall on the Southern border.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: We are cracking down on these sanctuary cities that shield criminal aliens. Finally. And we are building a wall on the southern border, which is absolutely necessary. Build that wall. Now, the obstructionist Democrats would like us to do it. But, believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahead of his speech in Phoenix, there was much speculation Trump would pardon Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who’s been convicted of contempt of court for defying a court order to stop his deputies from racially profiling people, then detaining them on suspicion of being undocumented. Last night, Trump hinted a pardon would be coming soon.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: By the way, I’m just curious. Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?

CROWD: [cheers]

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job? That’s what —

CROWD: Yeah.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: He should have had a jury. But, you know what? I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, OK? But, but, but, I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy. Is that OK? All right? But, Sheriff Joe can feel good.

Reckoning with a Trump Presidency and the Elite Democrats Who Helped Deliver It

By

Betsy Reed, Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald

 

Listen to SoundCloud

 

 The United States has been plunged into a state of purgatory following the election of Donald Trump. In all political quarters, people are engaged in their own post-mortem analysis of how this happened and what it means, not only for the future of this country, but for the world. Trump ran on a pledge to engage in mass deportations, denying Muslims entry to the US, the stripping of abortion rights and threats to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Although Trump has staked out conflicting positions on a wide range of issues over the past several years, his campaign centered on an overtly nativist agenda. And his running mate, Mike Pence, is one of the key leaders of the radical religious right contingent of the Republican Party.

 

While many Democrats are pointing fingers outside their own ranks to make sense of the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, few are willing to examine how their choice of nominee and the campaign they ran shaped the result. In this podcast, Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed and co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill break down how we got here and what a Trump presidency means for civil liberties, surveillance, war, abortion rights, and other issues. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Jeremy Scahill: Thanks for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept coming to you from American purgatory. The phrase President Trump is going to be a reality for at least the next four years. To discuss how this happened and what it means I’m joined by two of my colleagues, Betsy Reed who is the Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept, and Glenn Greenwald, my fellow cofounder of The Intercept and columnist and journalist. Glenn, you wrote a piece in reaction to the election, “Democrats, Trump and the ongoing dangerous refusal to learn the lesson of Brexit” — tell us about that piece.

Glenn Greenwald: It was inspired essentially by the immediate effort of the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the media who had basically devoted themselves single-mindedly to Hillary Clinton’s election over the last eighteen months to immediately start searching for everybody they can find to cast blame on, other than themselves, for what is now really the reduction of the Democratic Party into a small fringe minority party.

James Carville said that he doesn’t recall in his lifetime any party being as weak across the board as the Democratic Party. You would think that when a party faces such devastating losses over time but especially such a crushing defeat like this one to such a weak candidate like Donald Trump, there would be some introspection, some self-examination and there was almost none of that. There was a desire to just say that it was everybody else’s fault.

I was particularly disturbed by the way that they were casting and maligning essentially all of the people who had committed the sin of voting what they regarded as the wrong way by simply dismissing them all as primitive or troglodyte or racist or misogynist. Even though of course many of them are, many of them are not and even for the ones that do have that as part of their motive, there are independently of that a lot of long, deep trends that have destroyed the welfare and economic security of tens of millions of people and put them into a mindset where they want to destroy this system of authority that they blame. I think that is what caused Brexit and I think to a large degree that’s what’s caused Trump. It’s urgent that we think about what these policies are that have done that to these people: who it is, who has done it, what the reasons are and how to stop. Watching them blame the media or WikiLeaks or Putin or Jill Stein or whomever they could find seemed very clearly to be a way of avoiding that conversation. My piece was really about urging everybody to have that conversation.

JS: Right. In some ways it really felt like the closing stages of this election was like the series finale of The Americans where Cold War propaganda was dumped out upon the American people. There was some bizarre coalition of Julian Assange, Putin, and Trump all in bed together to subvert the glorious American democracy that would take hold as soon as Hillary Clinton won and I was, as you do often Glenn, I was battling people on Twitter who were basically trying to blame the election result on Jill Stein of the Green Party and her voters, and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and their voters and none of the people that were going after third parties in this country wanted to talk about the atrocious policies of the corporatist candidate that the Democrats ran.

No one wants to talk about the fact that the Clintons are perceived as corrupt royalty by a large segment of the U.S. population: a candidate who was hawkish who deservedly got the endorsement of many leading neocons. Instead it was, well “whoever voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, you’re a misogynist and you are responsible for this.” The fact is that according to the exit polls, nine percent of registered Democrats actually voted for Donald Trump. Seven percent of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, but why isn’t there this rage at their own partisan Kool-Aid drinking base? Instead it’s like they envision a world that they want where people are only allowed to vote for the candidates that they choose, that these individual people choose. And that exercising your right to vote for a third party somehow means that you are not fully participating in the democratic process and, in fact, you’re sabotaging the anointing of the chosen candidate of the Democratic Party.

I wanted ask Betsy: on this issue we have seen a kind of development on social media but also in columns written by, well, on the one hand, very partisan, lifelong Democrats, blaming everyone else except their candidate, but [on the other hand] this was viewed in the sort of mainstream world of feminist writers as a referendum on misogyny and a referendum on sexism — and if you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton then you are part of electing a women-hating punisher who is going to mercilessly strip away women’s rights in this country. Now, no doubt that Hillary Clinton endured an incredible barrage of sexist motivated attacks that a man certainly would not have received had they run the exact same campaign as Hillary Clinton, but what do you think about that line that is being stated quite bluntly by high profile feminists that anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is part of ensuring an overt misogynist theocracy in the United States?

Betsy Reed: Well, I mean I guess I would say I have somewhat complicated feelings about that because I actually do believe that this election was an absolute tragedy for American feminism. It’s a complete and terrible defeat and I think that what Donald Trump displayed during the campaign and throughout his entire career is just nothing but contempt and hatred toward women.  I have a thirteen year old daughter and to try to explain to her how this man could have been elected despite all of that, despite that record, I mean it’s very difficult, a very painful conversation to have and I think a lot of women are just shell shocked about that.

So on one level,  I have a lot of empathy for that, and I feel that myself. But at the same time I think it’s a big mistake not to —  as Glenn said — take this moment to reflect a little bit on what this reveals about our movements and about our priorities. And I feel that nominating this candidate [Clinton] who is so deeply compromised, who is so embedded in the corporate elite that has wrecked American democracy was an impossible thing —  and a lot of feminists, real feminists, supported Bernie Sanders for exactly this reason. They were not “Bernie bros.” I am one hundred percent a feminist and I just could never get on board with Hillary Clinton’s version of feminism. So I think we as feminists need to have a reckoning and a real discussion of what it means to be a feminist because we do face tremendous challenges in the period to come. I mean. PENCE. It’s just a complete nightmare. On a symbolic level Trump is a total disaster but Pence has made his entire political career out of the determination to abolish women’s reproductive rights. So that is an incredibly important struggle in the period to come.

JS: Right and Mike Pence — clearly it was a very strategically wise decision on the part of the Republicans to sort of foist him onto Trump as his running mate because Mike Pence is from the Rick Santorum wing of the Republican Party, whose primary issues are stopping gay people from marrying each other and stopping women from making their own decisions on what happens with their bodies. Everything else is secondary to that — that is their major obsession.

But to transition from the earlier point that you made, it doesn’t seem like the institutional Democratic Party is learning any lessons from this. There’s other debates going on in the rank and file, ordinary people that are against Trump, but the idea that Howard Dean just threw his hat into the ring to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee raises a lot of questions about how much introspection they’re actually doing. Keith Ellison, who is very progressive, first Muslim member of the U.S. Congress — African-American congressman from Minneapolis —  is being talked about as a potential D.N.C. chair. Glenn, can you talk a little bit about what that represents, the idea that Howard Dean could be the next head of the D.N.C.?

GG: I was thinking about this this morning in terms of what happened in this election and how the Democratic Party in the past has succeeded, and if you look at the last twenty five years of Democratic Party politics you find this really interesting trend which is: the Democratic politicians who succeeded, who won the national election, which is Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, had one thing in common which is that they both ran as these hardcore devoted consummate outsiders. I’m not part of Washington; I’ve never been a part of Washington, in the case of Clinton I’ve only been a southern governor, in the case of Obama I’ve only been a senator for four years, and what I want to do is go in and radically and fundamentally change how this entire place that you all hate and that we all hate, how it functions. And they won.

And if you look at the ones over the same time who have lost, which is Al Gore and John Kerry and now Hillary Clinton, they are exactly the opposites. They were completely incapable of pretending to be outside forces. They were obviously with great accuracy identified as being consummate Washington insiders and so it was obvious to everybody that they would go in and perpetuate and protect and safeguard and continue to be beneficiaries of this Washington establishment and status quo that most of the people in the country hate, and for that reason they lost.

And I think Hillary Clinton was probably, of all of them, the most identifiable as a Washington insider exactly because of all the reasons that her supporters tried to claim she was most qualified and all of that. And yes, she was the most qualified in the sense that she has spent the most time inside Washington, in the most varied capacities. But that’s exactly what made her such a great liability and I think what this reflects is a fundamental flaw in how Democrats think. Especially their spokespeople, the opinion-making elite in the party, the operatives and in the media who live in these coastal cities, regard these institutions as fundamentally good and trustworthy and worthy of admiration, and of course some tinkering and some reform, but by and large they’re forces for good that ought to continue. This is the standard liberal mindset of believing in institutions of authority.
And so when you keep continuously holding yourself out as purveyors of and defenders and protectors of institutions in a culture that most of the people in the country completely despise, of course the country is going to turn its back on you and will reject you because you’re purporting to defend something that they hate.

And Howard Dean, you know people think of him at this fire-breathing liberal and maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t back in 2003 when people remember him, but since 2004 when he lost, he has done nothing but cash in on his political celebrity. He has become the worst part of DC elite corruption. He lobbies for designated terrorist groups like MEK, which is this Iranian cult that has long wanted US intervention in that part of the world. He lobbies for health care and for corporate companies. He claims he’s not technically a lobbyist, though at The Intercept, as Lee Fang wrote, whether he’s technically one or not he certainly acts like one. And to even contemplate the idea that somebody like that this consummate insider who is in bed with every corporate interest, every lobbying interest, could now be the face of the Democratic National Committee — just the mere possibility of anyone talking about that shows how no lessons have have been learned.

I actually don’t think he will be the D.N.C. chair; I think the symbolism of Keith Ellison being not only African American, but the first Muslim elected to Congress, being part of the progressive wing, being a really effective communicator; I think he’ll probably end up being selected — I hope so — but the fact that people are even thinking of Dean reflects this ongoing pathology.

JS: Well and let’s remember that Keith Ellison was one of the few and one of the first members of Congress to openly endorse Bernie Sanders. And Keith Ellison also was a major part of trying to fight against the rigging of the primary system under Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leadership at the D.N.C. , which of course we now know from a variety of documents and public statements by people, that the whole thing was essentially a fraud intended to ensure that Bernie Sanders was not going to be the nominee and the ironic thing about that is he probably would have been the Democrats’ best chance of beating Donald Trump because Bernie Sanders was perceived as an outsider, despite the fact that he spent so much time in Washington. The ideas he was articulating were ideas that you never heard a high profile winnable candidate put forward by the Democrats, and so —

BR: –well that is a counterfactual that we’ll never know. I mean because I do believe that you’re right, but I also think that the power of Wall Street is tremendous and they would have been virtually united against him.

JS: Well I mean that that may well be true—

GG: –maybe, maybe, but I think they still they would’ve feared Trump. And yes they don’t like Sanders ideologically but they view Trump as this kind of like unpredictable and unstable maniac and they hate instability and unpredictability more than they hate anything else. I think they would’ve hated both. I think Mike Bloomberg probably would have run.

JS: But I think part of the point that I’m making, though– I am not claiming that Bernie Sanders would have won; what I am saying is that I think he would have been a more viable opponent to Donald Trump, for a couple of specific reasons but one very broad reason: I think that a lot of the people — for instance the state of Wisconsin where I’m from — I think a lot of the people, including rank and file union members, that did vote for Trump did so because of the trade policies linked to the Clintons and that Hillary Clinton herself we know called the “gold standard”, as Donald Trump kept repeating about the TPP, jobs are being shipped overseas.

People are hurting. People that are genuinely progressives even I think felt like this was a referendum on the legacy of the Democrats, the institutional Democrats position on trade. That certainly wasn’t the only issue– race, sexism all of those things played a role; but I do think that Bernie Sanders tapped in to the same kind of emotion that Trump did in a kind of parallel universe and I think that that’s worth talking about. Hillary Clinton didn’t say Bernie Sanders name– she tried to avoid saying that man’s name for months and months and what we saw was that when people are allowed to hear those ideas articulated as Sanders did, which are held by wide swaths of the population that never get that kind of a platform, that it resonates with people and so that also is a commentary on the corrupt state of the debate process in this country. The two party primary system etc.

BR: I agree with you Jeremy, but I do think that to some degree there is a discussion among Democratic Party insiders looking back in a Monday-morning quarterbacking way at the tactical missteps of the campaign, and they say “oh you know she really should’ve listened to Bill and campaigned more in these states” but I actually think that the problem with Hillary went much deeper because she really was the candidate who believed in TPP, she believed in trade, she was close to Wall Street, she couldn’t have gone there because if she had shown up, they wouldn’t have believed her — and for good reason. So you know I think we have to keep that in mind I also think, though that we should—

JS: –But that’s a bad idea then to have a candidate that you’re like, “oh well we better not send her among ordinary people because they’re going to see that she’s an empire politician.”

BR: But at a broader level we need to keep in mind as context the fact that she did win the popular vote in the country. So this is an important discussion about the Rust Belt and these economically punished communities and I think we have to reckon with that, but at the same time, the popular vote showed how there’s large support in this country for a politics of tolerance, of progressivism, around culture issues, around gender and race, and we should keep that in mind because that coalition is going to be an important bulwark against the hate that Trump represents.

GG: Yeah, she did win the popular vote; I think she probably will end up winning the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes or so. So a relatively small margin. A big reason why she’s going to win the popular vote is because the number of votes she received in places like New York City and California increase significantly over what even Obama received in large part obviously due to fear and horror over the prospect of a Trump presidency. But I think that that’s really cold comfort for a couple of reasons. Number one is because campaigns don’t cater themselves to the popular vote but to the Electoral College. Who knows what the popular vote total would have been had Trump spent time in California or New York trying to increase his vote total in those places. He instead ignored those as he should have done and we have an Electoral College system, that’s where the campaigns devote themselves to winning.

And then, the other aspect of it is that it isn’t just this election. If you look at like the Democratic Party’s problems, it isn’t just the fact that Hillary Clinton just lost to Donald Trump. They are also a minority in the House, a minority in the Senate. They have a record low number of governorships. And then on the state level in terms of state legislatures and even like county commissions and city councils and school boards Republicans are completely dominant.

So it’s really a systemic failure on the part of the Democratic Party. So yes, Hillary Clinton won a couple hundred thousand more votes because a lot of people in Manhattan and Los Angeles and San Francisco turned out. But I agree with what Betsy just said which is that that we do have to keep in mind that there are a huge number of people in the country who are horrified by and angry about Donald Trump’s views, and we shouldn’t just be so downtrodden that we forget that we have real weapons as people who dissent and as people who want to resist it. And there’s a really good opportunity to galvanize huge numbers of people in a way that might be really like emboldening and clarifying about these political values. So I completely agree with that point I think it’s important to emphasize, but I don’t think that should be used to kind of paper over or diminish how much of a failure the Democratic Party has become in electoral politics in this country at every level.

JS: Well but also if you look at Hillary Clinton’s concession speech delivered the next day, at the remarks that President Obama made and then, online, the various statements put out by all sorts of prominent Democrats and their backers and their lobbyist etc. This notion, “well Trump is now our president and we have to give him a chance and we have to proceed with an open mind” — to me that’s an utterly ridiculous idea. The idea that you’re going to take someone who has openly espoused a desire to do mass deportation, to shut down the borders. to have a screening process for anyone who happens to be of a particular religion, i.e. Islam, that has openly said that he wants to overturn Roe versus Wade– what chance is there to give this person? I mean to me it shows the bankruptcy of partisan politics and embracing the system that produces these kinds of options. The idea that you don’t just immediately start from the position that this is going to be a disaster and you somehow wait for him to do something, you know, really outrageous — to me actually is a pretty devastating commentary on the state of the establishment Democratic Party.

BR: Yes, just look at the neocons who were so outraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency in the national security world and they’re already turning right around on that, they’re pivoting straight to—

JS: –“praying for our commander in chief” and they’re all going to want positions in that government which actually is–

GG: –And they’re going to get them—

JS: And they’re going to get them. It’s a good transition though to let’s actually now talk about what this means.

GG: No wait before we go on to something else, I think that’s actually a super interesting point that you raise that I just want to explore just a little bit. And I’m actually really interested in what you both have to say because this has been bothering me a lot. So think about this: I’ve just heard anecdotally from friends who have children, who are, like either the children of the same age as Betsy’s daughter or a little bit older like millennials in their college years. People like a lot of young people from Democratic families or liberal families or people who live on the coast are genuinely traumatized, like scared, about the fact that Donald Trump was just elected president and that was in part because he was often depicted as comparable essentially to like the rise of Hitler. Maybe sometimes the rhetoric didn’t go quite that far but that was definitely the tenor of a lot of this. And that wasn’t completely unjustified I mean he’s talking about things like deporting 11 million people and you know banning all Muslims beyond just like the standard Republican horror show about like raging wars on reproductive rights and the LGBT and all of that like genuinely things that are outside of the norm of all political decency.

So I understand why President Obama is shaking hands with him in the Office and [saying] that we need to respect him and give him a chance because there’s this idea that we’re always supposed to have a smooth transition of power. But if you really believe everything that has been said about him over the last six months, including the fact that he’s been turned by Putin and is like an actual agent of a foreign enemy, on top of like all the other things. Isn’t that incredibly reckless and even amoral to start normalizing him that way and telling Americans that they should treat him with respect and an open mind? I mean isn’t our obligation instead to do exactly the opposite and to say, we don’t accept this and we are going to stand up to it. I mean I get that this ritual exists but is it actually appropriate in this case if we really believe in the things that we’ve all been thinking about him and hearing about what he actually is and the threat he poses?

JS: Right. They went so far in the direction of explicitly stating that Putin, the K.G.B, Russia had successfully infiltrated the US electoral process, and then — that was part of the point I’m getting at — if they are, if they believe that then what’s with all of this “well we’ve got to give him a chance he’s our president now?” It really shows the lack of actual principle there in a sort of enslaved mentality toward the empire must always have this peaceful transition of power. If they believe their own propaganda, then this is a completely incongruous response to Trump’s election.

BR: But the reality is there is actually a lot of uncertainty about what Trump will do. I mean it is terrifying. The possibility that he will follow through on some of his promises — he’s made immigration… he said that that’s going to be one of his first priorities. That is genuinely, legitimately terrifying. But he also contradicts himself right and left and he did throughout his whole career. He’s gone back and forth on Snowden and he’s back and forth on everything in the diametrically opposed positions, the guy has assumed. So it is difficult to know, I think, to what extent we do need to fear him.  I certainly fear him because I fear the worst.

JS: Andrew Kaczynski who now is at C.N.N. was pointing out that over the past four years Trump has staked out the polar opposite position on the premier issues that ended up being present in this, in this debate: certainly on immigration, on abortion, on gay rights, etc. Yeah, I mean Donald Trump is a wild card of sorts but the thing that I have trouble imagining [is] Trump at these trade meetings. You know with Angela Merkel and other world leaders. I have trouble imagining what’s going to come as a result of the avalanche he’s going to be on the other end of when he starts getting, which he is now, these all-access intelligence briefings. This [is] transitioning into talking about what this means that Trump is now going to be the president of the United States.

When a presidential candidate is elected and they start to receive these briefings from the intelligence community, this is where the dark world of the kind of parallel national security apparatus in the United States thrives. Once someone comes in, particularly someone like Trump, never been in the military, never held elected office. They are going to overwhelm him — intentionally — with all sorts of dark scenarios of what can happen if he doesn’t renew this program or expand this program.
President Obama went through this in 2009 and the end result of those briefings was that he outsourced large portions of what they call the counterterrorism policy to the most unsavory, darkest components of the U.S. national security apparatus. Trump is going to be coming in with General Mike Flynn, certainly as one of his top advisers, who knows if Flynn will end up in a cabinet position? Who is General Flynn? Flynn was the intelligence chief for General Stanley McChrystal when he was running murder incorporated as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command — handpicked by Dick Cheney. That is the guy who is guiding Trump’s worldview on counterterrorism. He is a guy that believes that assassination should be the lead policy of the United States combined with kidnapping and torturing people.

Flynn has criticized Obama’s drone program, not because it’s somehow unconstitutional, but because it’s not as effective as torture. Flynn has said Obama just wants to kill people because he doesn’t want to put them in GITMO, “we’re losing an opportunity to get great intelligence out of these people.” So the fact that Obama has failed to shut Guantanamo, the fact that he never held anyone accountable for the CIA torture, is going to mean that Trump, who already is going to be a malleable character in the face of a dozen and a half intelligence agencies inundating him with all of this stuff, but his hand-picked top advisor is one of the Hall of Famers of the world of dark ops.

And so you know people that say, “oh well, Trump is sort of anti-war, or he’s not going to be interventionist?” Just wait until he gets his twentieth, thirtieth briefing from the generals, the admirals, the unelected non-Senate confirmed national security bureaucracy. We are going to see hellfire with Donald Trump and anyone who thought they were voting for an antiwar candidate is going to be proven mercilessly wrong.

BR: I think the same exact thing is going to be true on trade and economics. I mean he’s already staffing up with all of these deregulators, all the very architects of the policies that devastated millions of Americans in 2008.

JS: Glenn what about on the issues of civil liberties — we know that when the PATRIOT Act was passed only one U.S. senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — who just lost for the second time in a row, his Senate race in Wisconsin — he voted against the Patriot Act… Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force… we sort of saw the bipartisan nature of those horrendously dangerous votes in Congress, but lay out what your current or your initial thinking is on how Trump is going to impact civil liberties, surveillance, being in control now of the N.S.A. and other surveillance entities. What do you see coming?

GG: Just to Betsy’s point on this issue, she’s one hundred percent right that Trump’s unpredictability on all of these issue is attributable to the fact that he really doesn’t have any stable positions; he’s a con artist, he says what he needs to say to get you sign on the dotted line to sell you the used car. That’s who Donald Trump is. There are a couple of stable, cogent positions; he railed against TPP and there was actually a report from C.N.N. [on November 11] saying that TPP is dead, at least in the lame duck.

Who knows whether it will be revitalized, but I think that the best way to deduce what’s likely to happen in the Trump administration is not by looking to what Donald Trump believes because that’s indiscernible anyway, but this is the key to me. He himself said three or four months ago: when I’m president I’m going to allow Mike Pence to run foreign policy and domestic policy. I don’t want to be involved in these details, I’m not going to be involved in policy making. And then they said to him I think it was at a New York Times editorial board interview, well if Mike Pence is going to be running foreign policy and domestic policy, what are you going to be doing?

JS: Tweeting.

GG: And he said, “I’m going to be making America great again.”

JS: By tweeting.

GG:  I think that’s a pretty honest assessment of how he intends to conduct his administration. So I think that the way that you try and figure out what’s going to happen in the Trump administration is not by trying to understand or decipher his policy pronouncements because they’re all inconsistent anyway as Betsy said. But look at the people that he is going to be empowering. And by and large they are the traditional, hard, hawkish right wing members of the Republican Party because the more moderate people, as at least that term is understood in Republican politics, were the ones who were essentially radically against him.

Even the Bush wing, you know the Bush wing is now sort of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, even George W. Bush made it clear publicly that he did not vote for Donald Trump. So that part of the Republican Party will likely wield very little influence. It’s going to be people like, the hardcore, authoritarian fanatics who are the prosecutors who supported him, like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, who although moderate on some issues within their realm of primary expertise and influence are as authoritarian as it gets.

JS: Also John Bolton.

GG: John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin. We’re talking about the Tea Party wing – so the sort of Ron Paul, Rand Paul Libertarian wing is not really involved, and nor is the kind of like establishment, responsible Republican figures who were cheered by Democrats for opposing Trump — we’re talking about the crazies. The Cheney-ites.

JS: Well even one step beyond that — so when we talk about Mike Pence, I just want to underscore this, because I think a lot of people had never really heard of Mike Pence before he became the Vice Presidential nominee will be now the Vice President. We need to be clear: Mike Pence is a Christian supremacist. He is as radical of a Christian as Mullah Mohammed Omar was radical in his interpretation of Islam as head of the Taliban. This is a guy whose primary view of himself in the world is as a Christian warrior.

And Dick Cheney certainly was an ideological figure whose ideology was rooted in a warped reading of the Federalist Papers and a notion of America First. Pence is all of that, although a kind of dime store version of that when it comes to neocon ideology, but is more motivated by an idea that Christianity needs to be saved and needs to govern the world. And that has so many frightening consequences when you have someone that powerful, that dedicated to a religious supremacist agenda. I don’t think we’ve seen someone as much of a zealot for Christianity – his warped version of Christianity — as Mike Pence, the incoming V.P.

BR: It calls to mind Erik Prince.

JS: Well they’re good friends. Erik Prince poured in $100,000 in the closing stages of this election — Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. Actually I think Erik Prince would have done just fine under Hillary Clinton, but the reason he gave the one hundred thousand dollars — and his family is one of the premier funders of these initiatives — was to stop gay marriage and abortion. That’s his social agenda. Prince would have done just fine under Hillary Clinton. And by the way for all of the talk about “jina, jina, jina” from Trump — you know, China this, China that; he says China with a J — Erik Prince is now working for the Chinese government. And simultaneously giving $100,000 to Donald Trump, who supposedly is going to stand up against China. But even America’s most famous mercenary, his main thing with Trump is: end abortion and gay marriage.

Glenn I want to ask you… on this issue of civil liberties. You know part of part of what I think we’ve seen in the post 9/11 reality is that Obama picked up from where Bush and Cheney left off in some of their most outrageous policies and interpretations of the Constitution, and definitely has continued on the mission of consolidating power within the executive branch. Not just by issuing executive orders but the climate of secrecy. And I’m wondering, just to throw out a hypothetical: what do you think would have been the response if two years into a Trump administration we had the Snowden revelations. How would that have impacted the public debate in this country versus it happening under Obama?

GG: I always said that if Edward Snowden had leaked documents during a Republican administration, with a Republican president in the White House, there would be a gigantic fifty-foot statue erected outside of the headquarters of MSNBC at 30 Rock in his honor. And I think that this is the critical problem, I just wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on exactly this issue — and in the course of writing that op-end I went back and was looking at the debates over the civil liberties record of Obama from the time that he was inaugurated.

And you just see over and over and over again leading Democratic Party operatives and officials, as well as leading members, leading liberals in the media, continually mocking and deriding the idea that the powers that Obama was institutionalizing in the name of terrorism and national security — these unconstrained powers to launch wars without congressional authorization to target people for assassination including U.S. citizens without a whiff of due process, to imprison them indefinitely without charges or trial, to spy on them no matter where they are the world without any limits at all — continually mocking and scoffing at concerns over these objections on the grounds that the people who run the U.S. government are kind and good and benevolent and trustworthy.

And I remember in particular, and had my memory triggered as I was doing this op-ed, that in 2013 after the Snowden revelations, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives formed that was lead on the one hand by Justin Amash, the young Libertarian member of Congress from Michigan, on the other by John Conyers a 25-term African-American liberal also from Michigan, and they lead a bipartisan coalition to seriously rein in the N.S.A. and the amount of electronic spying the U.S.
government could do, particularly on U.S. soil and U.S. citizens but also against non-Americans as well.

And it really looks like they had got together a winning coalition if they were going to really be able to put together a bill meaningful reform to rein in these powers. And the White House was opposed to it, and they recruited Nancy Pelosi to lead the way to sabotage this bill and at the last minute she whipped just enough votes to defeat that reform bill and protect the N.S.A. And there’s even a huge article in Foreign Policy, which I re-read this morning, and the headline is How Nancy Pelosi Saved N.S.A. Surveillance.

And you go across the board: to drones and assassinations, to due process free imprisonment, to signing statements, to executive power theories that allow secrecy to shield the president from judicial review when it’s alleged that their conduct has been illegal or criminal or in violation of the Constitution.

These are now the powers that were begun by George Bush, but then extended and consecrated by Barack Obama. So they were converted from radical G.O.P. dogma into non-debated bipartisan orthodoxy. This is now the template of awesome, scary, unconstrained powers that is being handed to Donald Trump on a silver platter and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because Republicans and Democrats have spent fifteen years legislating the power defending them in court and convincing people politically to turn their backs from those who are objecting to overtly support them.

And so to the extent of the Donald Trump presidency is incredibly scary — and it is — Democrats have had a very large role to play in why that is.

JS: Well, and also beyond the way that this all played out among the elites of the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress and elsewhere, you had this broad notion, it seemed — and it certainly was perpetuated by many of the hosts on MSNBC, which we call MSDNC, which Glenn and I both have said on their airwaves before — the idea that we just trust Obama.

So you know, the drone striking of American citizens: “Oh, well, I trust Obama to make this decision.” The widespread use of JSOC in the CIA for covert action: “Well, we just trust Obama.” That now is going to come back and bite these people because how can you say, “Well, I support President Obama’s kill list, but oh my God, I don’t want Donald Trump to have a kill list!” It really shows that Democrats are vegetarians between meals when it comes to some of the most important issues of our time. There are no Democratic and Republican cruise missiles.

And the fact is that when you when you empower The White House in the way that the Democrats did through their silence or their support of horrid violent policies under Obama, you then continue the game forward so that whoever comes next starts from that point and not from sort of a baseline debate about what’s constitutional.

You know there was this sort of flurry of activity over the past year where people were saying Obama is trying to put in place these rules for his drone program so that the next person elected—no, you have already stated publicly that you have a right to kill American citizens who have not been charged with crimes. You’ve maintained secret kill lists. The CIA has a kill list, the military has a kill list, the National Security Council has a kill list, and now Donald Trump is going to be in charge of a kill list. And how can you then go back and say, “Oh we don’t want Trump to be in charge of these things!” when you accepted it for partisan reasons from your own person?

BR: This is an extraordinarily depressing conversation. But uh…

JS: We’re going to make Intercept razorblades… if you pledge… Our version of NPR.

BR: At The Intercept we have done a lot of talking and thinking about encryption and ways that people can protect their electronic privacy in the face of these threats. And unfortunately those kinds of technologies are going to become ever more important in this era when we face this amount of power in the hands of such a terrifying government.

JS: Well the journalist Allan Nairn, who is a great reporter that revealed the CIA’s backing of the FRAPH death squads in Haiti, uncovered U.S. support for war crimes in Guatemala, then did groundbreaking reporting from the genocide in East Timor and elsewhere, has really kind of studied authoritarian governments, and he was pointing out the other day on Twitter in the aftermath of Trump’s election that under J. Edgar Hoover the enemy’s list basically was at times like a domestic kill list or a domestic target list, and I think that that could be one major difference between Obama and Trump.

There was a lot of discussion about is Obama going to kill an American with a drone on U.S. soil?, and you had Rand Paul filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director largely over that issue. But under Trump and his — you know one of his surrogates, Omarosa, from his show The Apprentice, said that Trump has an enemies list and that they are going to be cleaning shop and draining the swamp when he gets to power.

I think that is a different fear than would exist under Obama. It’s not that Obama’s Justice Department hasn’t engaged in horrid misconduct, particularly the F.B.I. with all of these terror plots that they’ve manufactured themselves and then broken up, and other things — but I do think that Trump would go so far as to view the F.B.I. as a score-settling apparatus in the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover. Glenn may push back on that, but I really do think that — I can’t see Obama using it in the way that I could see Trump using it.

GG: Yeah you know it’s interesting, I actually do agree with that, and it has been a kind of depressing conversation, but it’s hard not to have a depressing conversation with talking 72 hours after Donald J Trump was just elected the president of the United States.

But to try and find a couple of silver linings — and before I point out the silver linings, I’ll contribute a little bit more to the depression. Which is, think about what will happen — as bad as all this is, as bad as the whole framework is that he has now inherited — imagine what will happen if there is any kind of a successful terrorist attack or ISIS attack on US soil. Even if it’s like a low level one like San Bernardino, or the Boston Marathon, let alone a bigger one like Orlando, let alone something on the level of 9/11. If anything like that happens, the extent to which they’re going to exploit that, and the extremes to which they’re going to go, you could pretty much say all bets are off. So I think you can get a lot worse, as bad as it is, if something like that were to happen.

BR: OK, what’s the silver lining?

GG: The two silver linings are… you did see some pretty significant pushback during for example the time in the campaign when Trump was advocating things like murdering a the families of terrorists, and reintroducing all new ways to torture people, you saw leading members of the CIA and the Pentagon say that they would disobey orders of that kind… you’ve seen members of the intelligence community really actively working against Trump by calling a Kremlin agent.

There are some pretty seriously powerful factions invested in not having the United States veer completely off the deep-end of radicalism and extremism. And I think there are going to be a lot of internal fights within the deep state, within some of these powerful factions. Yes they’re going to try and co-opt Trump and manipulate him but also I think are going to try and subvert him and work against him, especially if the true crazies start to get their way a little bit too much.

Not because they are moral but because they just perceive that as against the interests of their faction, but also against the interests of the United States as they perceive them. But I think there are those kind of institutional pushbacks, which you’re sort of ambivalent about because on the one hand they cam have some good effects, but on the other it’s kind of an anti-democratic, sort of almost like a coup-type dynamic where these unelected but powerful factions start undercutting and subverting the democratically elected leader as he tries to carry out the policies that probably his voters and supporters would want him to carry out.

JS: I’m not…

GG: The other silver lining that I do think is possible and I hope will happen and I think that we should try and do what we can to play as much of a role as we can and galvanizing, is that there just are a lot of people in this country genuinely horrified of the things that Trump is saying and wants to do. As Betsy pointed out earlier, even though the Democrats lost pretty resoundingly, there are more people in the country who voted for her that voted for him.

And you’re seeing protests, and you’ve seen the media unite in a unique way, against some of his more horrific proclamations; it’s cut across party lines at least at the elite level in ways we haven’t quite seen before. So I do think there is an opportunity to galvanize a real resistance, like actual meaningful dissent, to the most powerful faction in Washington in a way that we haven’t seen in a few decades if not longer.

And in the process re-underscoring and kind of re-animating and re-enlivening a lot of the political values that we’re all supposed to believe and defend because they will be under assault in a more extreme way than ever before and hopefully that reaction, that action, that we take will trigger a kind of counter-reaction that could be very positive if it’s managed the right way and driven and organized the right way and I’m hoping that will happen.

JS: Well we’re going to wrap up here — just one closing thought, you know we’re seeing a rise now in hate crimes and in attacks against Islamic communities, Muslim communities in this country, with graffiti and you have this empowerment of people like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. And part of the legacy of Trump, regardless of what his policies end up being, is that he has empowered this very dangerous segment of US society and has really openly encouraged violence against people from certain communities and I think one thing all of us can do is be very vigilant in watching out for these hate crimes in our own communities.

I mean it’s a micro thing but I think it’s very real. A lot of my Muslim friends in this country are really afraid of what this means for them and I think those fears are real. And a lot of women fear for what’s going to happen to their basic health care rights. And outside of even big picture political organizing, these are times that I actually think on a small level we really have to look out for the most vulnerable in our society.

We encourage people to keep reading us at The Intercept, The Intercept.com. Glenn Greenwald is @ggreenwald on Twitter. Betsy is @BetsyReed2. I’m Jeremy Scahill. @JeremyScahill is my Twitter handle. Thanks for joining us.