Where Is Barack Obama?

The most popular American, whose legacy is the primary target of Donald Trump, has, for now, virtually disappeared from public life.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Barack Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad.

The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days later, the Boy Scouts’ leader would apologize for Trump’s speech.

In Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more than he expected to. He issued careful statements defending the Affordable Care Act and supporting the Paris climate-change agreement, avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb.

It was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant (mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat is positioned to give.

But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet.

Where is Obama? It is a question much of the country has been asking over the last two years, sometimes plaintively. “Come back, Barack,” Chance the Rapper sang in a Saturday Night Live sketch. “We all miss him,” Kobe Bryant said, speaking for other athletes. Even former FBI director James Comey admitted to German interviewers this spring that he misses Obama.

Beyond the anguish is, often, simply bafflement: How did the most ubiquitous man in America for eight years virtually disappear? Over the course of his presidency, Obama cast himself as the country’s secular minister as much as its commander-in-chief, someone who understood the moral core of the nation and felt compelled to insist that we live up to it. What explains his near absence from the political stage, where he might argue publicly against the reversals of his policy accomplishments, and also from American life more broadly? What is keeping him from speaking more frequently about the need to protect democratic norms and the rule of law, to be decent people? Where is the man who cried after Sandy Hook and sang in Charleston, who after each mass shooting tried to soothe an outraged nation, who spoke of American values in his travels across the globe? And, tactically, what is behind the relative silence of one of the most popular figures alive just as American politics appears to so many to be on the brink of breaking?

Earlier this month, weeks after news first came out of thousands of immigrant children being held apart from their parents at the border, and after Laura Bush had published an article excoriating her party’s policy, Obama and his team chose to make a rare foray into the news cycle. First, they decided that Michelle should take the lead, and she did so by retweeting Bush’s article approvingly (“Sometimes truth transcends party”). That received a further retweet from Barack, in a bid to keep the conversation about families rather than about politics — as he calculated it would have been had he weighed in directly. Two days later, with the crisis dominating the national news, Obama’s advisers saw an opportunity in World Refugee Day to issue a statement of his own that focused on American values rather than Trump-administration policy. It was an eloquent call for empathy. It was also, to Democrats desperate for him to break post-presidential precedent, the very least he could have done.

Obama’s reticence is more than simply a matter of communications strategy. He has mostly opted out of liberal America’s collective Trump-outrage cycle. Though he reads the Times and other newspapers, he doesn’t follow daily Trump developments on Twitter or watch television news. He is upset by the administration’s actions, and he’s confided to friends that what worries him most is the international order, the standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage. Still, in conversations with political allies, Obama insists that today’s domestic mess is a blip on the long arc of history and argues that his own work must be focused on progress over time — specifically on empowering a new generation of leaders. He says his legacy is not what concerns him. (“Michelle and I are fine,” he tells those who ask about it.) And while he often says he misses the day-to-day work of fixing people’s problems, he has even less patience for day-to-day politics than he did as president.

“The important thing to think about with Obama in the context of politics is what his overall goals are,” says Jim Messina, his 2012 presidential-campaign manager and informal adviser. Obama’s first goal is to adhere to the precedent George W. Bush set, leaving him alone and respecting the peaceful transfer of power. The second is to engage a younger generation of leaders. “And then, three, how to carefully decide when you have to sacrifice one and two, especially one. He has been really careful about No. 1,” Messina says. “He could pick a fight with Donald Trump every day, and (a) the only winner would be Donald Trump, and (b) we would kind of get into this back-and-forth the Clintons have gotten themselves into: Is there too much Obama? Not enough Obama?”

One of Obama’s friends repeatedly described the former president as newly “Zen-like,” a striking descriptor given that Obama’s impossible calm has been a hallmark of his entire time on the national stage. To those who’ve known him longest, his confidence in the decision not to wade back into the political muck is the product of the same hyper-self-aware posture he’s had since childhood, growing up straddling worlds and then writing a book about himself in his 30s. “This has been a difficult thing for him, and for me, to see what this administration has done to the policy initiatives that we put in place and that were proving to be successful,” says Eric Holder, Obama’s friend and former attorney general. “But I think it’s really been true — we’ve had conversations about this — he’s been encouraged by the amount of progressive energy he’s seen around the country.”

To Obama, the Women’s Marches and the wave of gun-control activism after the Parkland school shooting are more influential than anything he might do to alter the news cycle, especially since his presence as a Trump counterweight often consolidates the otherwise fractured GOP base. “Even when we were in the White House, he wasn’t interested in discussing the day-to-day of politics, whether it was Speaker Boehner or Speaker Ryan or Leader McConnell, or whatever was the news of the day,” says Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers. “Wasting time on things he can’t control is not of interest to him. Getting sucked into a conversation over someone who he has no ability to influence? What’s the point?”

Of all his political gifts and tools, Obama has always been most hesitant to wield raw power, circumscribing the options available to him by dismissing the bluntest tools as either immediately or eventually counterproductive. If one philosophy governed his political activity in the final stretch of his presidency, it was articulated by Michelle at the 2016 convention: “When they go low, we go high.” Built into that code of conduct is his famous long-term optimism about historic progress as well as a confidence that his empathetic approach to governing will ultimately be more successful than dishonest tactics or mean-spirited politics.

But there was always a flip side to both of these assumptions: alongside the optimism, a fatalism about human nature and political incentives, and alongside the confidence, a streak of resignation, a sense that he alone can only do so much. Throughout Obama’s administration — even before, during the 2008 campaign — liberals agonized over his temperament, afraid that he was squandering opportunities or bringing knives to gunfights. As he finished his second term, Obama took a victory lap, and it was easy to believe that he’d been right all along. Then came the Trump era — and with it, a greater test of Obama’s philosophy than he ever imagined it facing.

And yet, for all of the new president’s radical transformation of the nation, he’s done little to alter the character of his predecessor, or reshape Obama’s vision of the world. Obama believes more than ever in his capacity to spark an immediate backlash among Trump fans and to make any policy matter far more partisan. The calls from former staffers and allies who want him in the field, actively protecting his policy legacy — whether it’s through speeches, organizing, or lobbying — are considered but mostly brushed aside. “I know it isn’t usually done that former presidents weigh in, but these are not usual times, and protocol seems to have vanished,” says Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Democratic donor. “On the immigration stuff, if he were willing to go way over the line and get arrested, or something way out there, that would be a galvanizing event,” says one frustrated leading Democratic operative in the midst of the 2018 campaigns.

Even quotidian political activity would be welcomed by many — after all, about two-thirds of the country now approve of his presidency. “People continue to want, to ask for, his intervention — and even be frustrated when they don’t get it,” says Jennifer Palmieri, Obama’s communications director during part of his second term. “But they will be, ultimately, wrong to feel that way. Because what they want is for Barack Obama to be president, and he is not. They miss Dad, and they’re homesick, and there’s so much in the world that’s disorienting, and they want something that they love and that’s familiar. And he can never be what people ultimately want. There’s no outcome here where everyone says, ‘I miss Barack Obama, but I understand what he’s doing and I understand the choices that he’s making.’ ”

Modeling his political engagement out of office after George W. Bush’s, of all people — privileging the customs and traditions of our democracy rather than upending some in order to fight for others — may be among the most optimistic choices Obama has ever made. Perhaps an America that survives Trump will appreciate that his predecessor did not stoop to his level. But Obama’s disciplined restraint could also prove a poorly timed abdication of leadership. “The reason this is different than other post-presidencies,” says Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer, “is this is kind of a crisis in governance.”

The people around Obama are living in Trump’s America, too, they remind skeptics of his approach. They’re just wagering that the former president’s bet pays off. “He’s recognizing that the party and our country will benefit from other voices having an opportunity to weigh in, and that opportunity would be all but completely obscured if he were regularly sharing his opinion on these issues,” says Josh Earnest, who joined Obama in the early days of his first presidential run and who finished the administration as Obama’s last White House press secretary. “It is far too early to tell whether that works.”

Not since Harry Truman’s icy handover to Dwight Eisenhower has the country experienced anything close to the distance between the outgoing and incoming president as there is now between Obama and Trump. There’s been no direct contact between the two since Inauguration Day.

While Trump expressed openness to Obama’s guidance when they first met in November 2016, that fizzled almost immediately as the new president and his allies became obsessed with the idea that Obama and his holdovers were trying to undermine them. Trump even accused Obama of wiretapping him, against all evidence. The hard turn against Obama was probably inevitable from a man whose rise to political prominence was fueled by a conspiracy theory about Obama’s birth certificate. But it’s been cemented by the administration’s systematic attempt to bludgeon every one of Obama’s biggest moves, from strangling DACA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement to enacting regulatory rollbacks through the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Obama is monitoring the destruction, but he spends the bulk of his time on two projects, building his foundation and writing a memoir. It’s a familiar vision for a post-presidency and, for now, a return to two activities with which Obama is temperamentally more comfortable than raw politics: organizing and writing.

The Obama Foundation is designed to be a grand, global convening zone for younger generations of leaders, physically on its Chicago campus but also through international programming and an ambitious online presence. Already this year, it has launched an academic program with the University of Chicago, a hyperselective global fellowship for “civic innovators,” and a community program designed to support and train 300 young leaders in Phoenix, Chicago, and Columbia, South Carolina. The presidential center and museum in Chicago’s Jackson Park, scheduled to open in 2021, is being designed with the idea of giving visitors resources to change the politics around them. “It’s not a mausoleum; it’s not a retrospective-looking entity,” says David Simas, the foundation’s CEO and former White House political director. “The entire experience is being structured in a way where the success is when someone leaves there and wants to not only engage in their community — but we help them tie back into the network that we’re trying to create.” In Washington, Obama frequently meets with the architects of the space. Much of the ambition behind the foundation comes from the assumption that, at 56, he will be fueling its growth for decades.

Obama has been raising money to get the organization on its feet. Multiple people familiar with the fund-raising conversations said it’s currently aiming to bring in between $500 million and $1 billion, and that when Obama meets with major potential donors, his asks can sometimes reach $10 million or $20 million. The foundation has periodically disclosed its donors, categorizing them in broad tiers. Organizations and individuals who have given at least $1 million include major institutions like the Gates Foundation; Democratic heavyweights like Bob Iger, Marc Benioff, and J. J. Abrams; and even Chicago hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin, a prominent Republican donor.

Obama has given well over a dozen paid speeches, earning at least $300,000 for each, sometimes far more, including ones to financial institutions like Carlyle, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Northern Trust. By mid-July, he will have visited every continent but Antarctica since leaving office. At each stop, from New Zealand to Italy, he’s met with local heads of state or allied former leaders, almost always in private. He’s been careful not to appear to be playing at international diplomacy, but people close to him believe his presence is often intended as a reassurance that the world isn’t about to end. 

Appearing in public with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in May 2017, he declared, “We can’t hide behind a wall.” In Milan, he sat with former prime minister Matteo Renzi and talked about the populist Five Star movement and Russian election meddling in Italy. In Buenos Aires, he golfed with President Mauricio Macri, who was facing his own populist challenges. In Montreal, he joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a well-publicized dinner over Hinterland wine and local halibut.

And as he travels the world for speeches and vacations, Obama has included on his itinerary meetings to gather ideas for the foundation from civically engaged young people in India, Indonesia, and Brazil. In October in Chicago, the foundation held its first summit, bringing local civic entrepreneurs together with celebrities including Chance the Rapper, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Prince Harry. In July in Johannesburg, he will convene 200 young leaders from across Africa.

But meanwhile his book looms. While Michelle’s will be published in November, no title or date has yet been announced for his part of the reported $65 million deal the couple signed with Penguin Random House last year. No one close to Obama expects the finished product to look anything like other White House memoirs, given his history as a writer. “He is engaged in reflection, and he also cares about writing,” says Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator and an Obama friend. “I would be surprised if it’s just a standard chronological accounting of his last eight years.”

Large swaths of Obama’s days are now carved out for writing. Yet friends who’ve spoken with him about the process say Obama, who is working closely with speechwriter Cody Keenan and other aides, is still thinking through the central thrust of the book, which he’s been scrawling out, longhand, on yellow legal pads at his desk. People around Obama tend to sigh when asked about his progress — more than one said, “Well, you know, he works best under pressure.”

Occasionally restless, he has taken to bringing in friends to chat during what his aides call “desk time,” both to break up the monotony and to ask for memories of the administration. Kaine said that once, last year, Obama asked him to come over and talk when he was clearly supposed to be writing. Their 30-minute appointment bled toward an hour.

Usually, these catch-ups touch on ongoing issues. Sometimes, he’s offering advice. Eric Lesser, a 33-year-old Massachusetts state senator who worked for Obama’s 2008 campaign and then at the White House, met with him this spring to talk through his work and legislative frustrations. (“It’s like talking about peewee-football practice with Tom Brady,” says Lesser. “Like: ‘I can’t throw a spiral, Tom! Help!’ He was amused I was coming to him with that.”)

Most of those meetings take place in Obama’s polished office, which he shares with Michelle, their chiefs of staff, and roughly 20 staffers. The walls are decorated with memorabilia, including a framed American flag presented to Obama by the Navy seals who killed Osama bin Laden; Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges, signed by Ruby Bridges; and a photograph of one of Obama’s ancestors that was presented to him by the Irish government.

The Obamas appear to be settled in Washington. The chatter about their potential move to the Upper East Side has died out, and they are installing a pool at their home, which is around the corner from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s. Obama is open with friends about the new comforts of his life: the games of Words With Friends on his iPad, the rounds of golf, the slower-paced international travel. Immediately after leaving office, he flew to Palm Springs, then visited with Richard Branson on his private Caribbean island. Before long, he was on David Geffen’s yacht in French Polynesia with Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, and Oprah Winfrey.

Even in Washington, he’s taken to undoing an extra button on his dress shirts and musing about how much more sleep he now gets. When he lets his guard down, he admits that he misses being in the middle of the international fray, but he confides that his life has slowed down so dramatically that he now feels like Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix, who can experience time hyperslowly while facing gunfire.

Over the next few years, his main source of income aside from the book is likely to be the deal he and Michelle signed in May with Netflix, which, he has told friends, he sees as a more palatable way to make money than the paid-speech circuit. That arrangement, long under discussion, came about in large part because of the years-long relationship between Obama and both Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, and Ted Sarandos, its chief content officer. Sarandos, then a Hillary Clinton backer, met his wife, Nicole Avant, at an Obama fund-raiser in 2008 that she was co-hosting. Avant became Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. The connections between Obama and Netflix go deep: Sarandos’s new chief of staff is Ferial Govashiri, who served as Obama’s personal assistant in the White House.

After leaving office, the Obamas were open about their interest in creating content and aware of the positive reaction they received to their recommended book lists and playlists during the White House days, say people familiar with the discussions. They landed on a conceptual agreement with Netflix to create a wide range of programming that will likely be free of politics, light on their own faces, and heavy on telling the stories of individuals who the Obamas believe can guide viewers to be better citizens. When Netflix announced the deal, the Obamas also disclosed that they were launching “Higher Ground Productions” to create the shows. That studio, and team, does not yet exist, and few of the details have been set. No one involved in the project expects any programming to see the light of day until late 2019 or 2020.

Despite not wanting to engage directly in Washington politics, Obama has played a significant behind-the-scenes role in one battle: saving Obamacare from Republicans intent on destroying it. Even before leaving office, he signaled to party leaders that he didn’t see how having his face at the forefront of the fight could be useful. “It’s pretty clear what President Trump’s political strategy always is, which is to find a foil,” says Earnest. “And with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, his most prominent foil has been Barack Obama. That’s been a very effective strategy for President Trump to galvanize his base and effectively put Republicans on Capitol Hill in the fetal position.”

So Obama receded while organizations founded and run by his administration’s alumni sprang up to lean on lawmakers and lead a public-facing campaign to generate support. By mid-2017, the groups were running a war room and hosting regular conference calls. Obama followed at a distance, weighing requests for his input and support and discussing tactics with leaders of the campaign. Senator Bernie Sanders, a longtime skeptic of the ACA who instead favors a Medicare-for-all system, became an outward face of the effort, holding rallies in states where Democrats were trying to peel away GOP support.

Trump’s war against Obamacare intensified, and after a failed effort to gut the law in the spring, a summer vote in Congress began to look more likely to succeed. Obama resisted holding rallies of his own, worried about dissuading on-the-fence Republicans from breaking party lines, but in May he agreed to ratchet up the pressure. He slipped a newsworthy bit into his speech at the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award celebration in Boston: “I hope that current members of Congress recall that it actually doesn’t take a lot of courage to aid those who are already powerful, already comfortable, already influential.”

The next month, as the ACA’s survival prospects looked ever more grim, Obama offered a statement on Facebook condemning the GOP replacement plan. Across Washington, however, Democrats were losing heart, and some wondered why the former president wasn’t more visible. “The idea that Bernie is out there doing rallies for the Affordable Care Act — a law he doesn’t believe in — while Obama pens a Facebook statement or two is laughable. Where are you, dude?” says one top strategist involved in the fight.

As the vote on the repeal effort neared and Trump grew more animated, however, Obama made a few private, strategic phone calls. Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski had emerged as a pivotal swing vote, and so he called Bill Walker, her state’s independent governor, to make his case. The day of the vote came, and Murkowski voted against repeal. Then, past midnight, John McCain stood up and stunned Washington by turning his thumb down. The former president picked up the phone again, this time to thank his old rival for the decisive vote.

Obama’s relationship with his own party is complicated: He is singularly beloved but also increasingly blamed for three developments that in retrospect look like significant, but avoidable, mistakes. All three are directly related to his preference for avoiding the political fray. First, in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, Republicans won the messaging game, branding Democrats as the party of technocratic elitism and themselves as the economic populists. Second, he didn’t speak more forcefully in the moment about Russia’s attempts to sway the 2016 election. And third, he presided over a significant hollowing out of the party’s down-ballot standing during his tenure. In the days before Trump’s inauguration, Obama shouldered a piece of the blame for his party’s sad shape: “I take some responsibility on that,” he told George Stephanopoulos. “I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as commander-in-chief and president of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.” The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama helped Holder launch, is his primary attempt to do it.

The NDRC is Holder’s baby, but it’s given Obama a tidy way to occasionally step back into politics with an eye to long-term reform rather than short-term partisan gain. The pair sat down in February to extensively discuss the group’s 2018 targets and strategy before Holder announced them, and when Obama campaigned in Virginia’s gubernatorial race last year, he made a point of specifically mentioning redistricting on the stump.

Still, much of the liberal angst over Obama’s post-presidential role focuses on what he might do to help direct a historic win in this year’s midterms. He has committed in conversations with party leaders to raising money and campaigning for candidates up and down the ballot. According to those familiar with the conversations, his reemergence on the campaign trail will come late — perhaps in September — and he has told allies he is very unlikely to wade into competitive primary fights, even when former staffers are running. (More than 60 have declared their candidacies.) He often reminds those asking for his help that he believes he needs to create the space for new leaders to emerge.

After helping get his former Labor secretary Tom Perez elected to the DNC chairmanship early in 2017, Obama has had minimal involvement with the party’s central committee. The two speak fewer than once per month now, according to people close to both of them, and Obama has not actively monitored the group’s reform efforts after 2016’s bruising primary fight, which has turned into an identity crisis for the party. He only agreed to hold three fund-raisers for Democratic groups this summer after fielding months of requests, and aside from one event for Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, he has yet to raise money for any individual candidates or party super-PACs.

Party organizers have begun complaining that his focus on his foundation is sapping the coffers they’re desperately trying to tap. Whereas Obama has found significant fund-raising success in Silicon Valley, for example, the rest of the party is still struggling there. “The donor universe that we operate in is limited. It’s the same usual suspects that everyone is going to, whether it’s the House, or the Senate, or these new outside groups, or super-PACs,” says one top party fund-raiser who has been told by multiple potential donors that they’ve already emptied their 2018 checkbooks for the foundation. “And most, if not all, of them were previously Obama supporters, and we’re counting on them for something more important right now than a library in Chicago. Nobody expects him to be out there bashing Trump or being on the campaign trail every day. But to be sucking up resources now is just tone-deaf, and self-serving.”

To the former president’s loyalists, it’s all evidence that some Democrats haven’t come to grips with his role as he has defined it. “I don’t think we should be relying on him as a crutch to deal with Trump,” says Colorado senator Michael Bennet. “We need to step up and deal with Trump.”

Nearly 50 Democrats have, at some point, thought about running for president in 2020, figuring Trump will either be easily beaten or, roughly, “if he can do it, so can I.” And so while Obama is ensuring he’s not his party’s main character in 2018’s fight, he has quietly offered himself up as a consultant of sorts to the ambitious young Democrats who will define the future of the party.

The meetings, which often take place at the sofa and coffee table in Obama’s office, last as long as an hour. Without explicitly diving into his party’s internal disagreements about how far left to tack, and with what emphasis, he takes their questions and talks philosophically about what is needed in the current political moment. He is closely reading contemporary conservative criticism, in particular the work of The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf and academic Patrick Deneen, whose most recent book is Why Liberalism Failed. He frequently worries about the gulf between Fox News and the Times, NPR, and MSNBC, occasionally citing a rand Corporation study on the shrinking role of facts in American life. With measured language, he has occasionally mused about the left’s need to mix idealism with practicality, without falling too hard on one side of the spectrum or losing sight of everyday Americans’ financial reality.

“What we need President Obama’s help with is creating a contrasting economic message heading into 2020,” says Connecticut senator Chris Murphy. “What Obama was brilliant at in 2012 was making that election with Romney all about an economic contrast, making Romney be the candidate of the economic elites and making Obama be the candidate of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That’s a contrast that we didn’t make effectively in 2016 and need to make more effectively in 2020.”

After Bill Clinton left office, he clearly enjoyed the power he retained within the party, involving himself in large and small decisions and flexing his influence. Here, too, Obama has assumed a more passive role, positioning himself as a detached observer who might have some useful advice to bestow. As he was leaving office, he publicly identified a handful of rising liberals who he believes represent the party’s future, including Kaine, Bennet, California senator Kamala Harris, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander. He’s talked to all of them but Harris in recent months, and has also met with others hoping to lead the party in the near term. This includes both Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, potential progressive presidential front-runners who have had difficult relationships with Obama. (They both criticized his paid-speaking tour early in his post-presidency.) Other possible 2020 contenders who’ve met with Obama include New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.

When asked about the presidential election, Obama talks about his own experience. He tells his visitors it took him about a year of campaigning to figure out how to effectively run for president, and he warns them about the toll a presidential race takes on families and personal lives. He says there’s no half-running: They have to fully want it, and they have to know exactly why they’re running. He directs them to his 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, for mechanical and operational advice. And he makes it clear that he has no intention of endorsing early in the 2020 primary.

Still, even this is complicated territory for the former president, who has at least three close associates considering runs. His former vice-president, Joe Biden, is near the top in early opinion polling of the potential field, and Biden’s spent the past two years traveling widely on behalf of local candidates who could prove useful allies in an eventual campaign. Holder has also started publicly musing about running. Yet it’s Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor, whose exploration has stirred the most interest in influential corners of Obama’s world, where he is sometimes thought of as the potential contender likeliest to re-create Obama’s coalition of voters. The pair never overlapped at Harvard Law School, but they met through that connection, and they went out of their way to support each other’s ascent as two of the nation’s most promising young African-American politicians in the George W. Bush era. The former president and the former governor, now an Obama Foundation board member, have spoken multiple times in recent months, just as Patrick’s curiosity about a nationwide run has become common knowledge in political circles.

Obama has said nothing about his three friends in public, but some of his top allies have sent signals about their own preferences. In May 2017, Jarrett was invited to join Jeb Bush on a panel at a hedge-fund conference in Las Vegas hosted by Robert Wolf, a close Obama friend and former bank executive. Before they got onstage, Wolf warned that he’d ask them whom Democrats would nominate in 2020. When the time came, Bush named Biden, who was also at the conference. Jarrett surprised the crowd by predicting her party would nominate Patrick.

On the gray morning of February 12, Trump’s White House was entering the stage of the Rob Porter scandal where the president was defending the just-fired senior aide accused of abusing two ex-wives. Later that day, Trump would introduce a budget blueprint that included a nearly one-third reduction of State Department spending and a one-quarter cut for the EPA.

At the National Portrait Gallery, Obama stared out at a room full of friends, political allies, and former staffers. Behind him onstage was a pair of portraits of him and Michelle, newly unveiled to wide, if wistful, smiles. “Well, good morning, everybody. It’s wonderful to see you all,” he said, looking back at Kehinde Wiley’s painting. “How about that? Pretty sharp.”

Swaths of Puerto Rico were still blacked out, and at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, Vice-President Mike Pence was inflaming tensions with North Korea. Within a few hours, the Senate would debate immigration after months of fury in Washington. The attorney general would soon praise a group convened by the National Sheriff’s Association for upholding “a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” Trump would later sit for lunch with his Education secretary, Betsy DeVos, perhaps as dedicated as anyone in his Cabinet to unwinding the preceding administration’s work.

Looking over the crowd, Obama saw people who had stood with him for eight years and were now, largely, waging the resistance. Many were helping to run issue-advocacy groups aiming to protect his signature achievements, others jumping back into policy-making — some even as the kind of cable-news talking heads Obama couldn’t stand.

“I want to thank everybody who is here,” Obama continued. “It means so much to us, and I hope you’re aware of that. We miss you guys. And — ”

The crowd broke out into uncomfortable giggles, then laughter and applause: He misses us? Does he realize how much we miss him?

Obama looked up, appearing slightly startled by the reaction. The laughter continued, and, clearly stifling a smile, he decided to look down at the lectern for just a beat. Then, sounding serious and louder than before, he repeated himself. “We miss you guys.” He seemed determined not to acknowledge just how much of his isolation is self-imposed.

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By C.J. Polychroniou 

 Truthout

After 18 months of Trump in the White House, American politics finds itself at a crossroads. The United States has moved unmistakably toward a novel form of fascism that serves corporate interests and the military, while promoting at the same time a highly reactionary social agenda infused with religious and crude nationalistic overtones, all with an uncanny touch of political showmanship. In this exclusive Truthout interview, world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky analyzes some of the latest developments in Trumpland and their consequences for democracy and world order.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, I want to start by asking for your reading of what took place at the Singapore summit, and the way this event was covered in the US media.

Noam Chomsky: It’s reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark. What was important was what didn’t happen. Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not undermine the prospects for moving forward. Specifically, he did not disrupt the process initiated by the two Koreas in their historic April 27 [Panmunjom] Declaration, in which they “affirmed the principle of determining the destiny of the Korean nation on their own accord” (repeat: on their own accord), and for the first time presented a detailed program as to how to proceed. It is to Trump’s credit that he did not undermine these efforts, and in fact made a move toward facilitating them by cancelling the US-South Korean war games, which, as he correctly said, are “very provocative.” We would certainly not tolerate anything of the sort on our borders – or anywhere on the planet – even if they were not run by a superpower which not long before had utterly devastated our country with the flimsiest of pretexts after the war was effectively over, glorying in the major war crimes it had committed, like bombing major dams, after there was nothing else to bomb.

Beyond the achievement of letting matters proceed, which was not slight, no “diplomatic skills” were involved in Trump’s triumph.

The coverage has been quite instructive, in part because of the efforts of the Democrats to outflank Trump from the right. Beyond that, the coverage across the spectrum illustrates quite well two distinct kinds of deceit: lying and not telling relevant truths. Each merits comment.

Trump is famous for the former, and his echo chamber is as well. Liberal commentators exult in totting up and refuting Trump’s innumerable lies and distortions, much to his satisfaction since it provides the opportunity for him to fire up his loyal — by now almost worshipful — base with more evidence of how the hated “Establishment” is using every possible underhanded means to prevent their heroic leader from working tirelessly to defend them from a host of enemies.

A canny politician, Trump surely understands well that the base on which he relies, by now almost the entire Republican Party, has drifted to a surreal world, in part under his influence. Take the major Trump-Ryan legislative achievement, the tax scam — “The US Donor Relief Act of 2017,” as Joseph Stiglitz termed it. It had two transparent aims: to enrich the very wealthy and the corporate sector while slamming everyone else, and to create a huge deficit. The latter achievement — as the main architect of the scam Paul Ryan helpfully explained — provides the opportunity to realize the cherished goal of reducing benefits that serve the general population, already very weak by comparative standards, but still an unacceptable infringement on the prerogatives of the 1%. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the law will add $1 trillion to deficits over the next decade. Virtually every economist generally agrees. But not 80 percent of Republican voters, of whom half believe that the deficit will be reduced by the gift their leader has lavished upon them.
Or consider something vastly more significant, attitudes toward global warming (apologies for the obscenity: climate change), which poses a severe threat to organized human life, and not in the distant future.

Half of Republicans believe that what is plainly happening is not happening, bolstered by virtually the entire leadership of the Party, as the Republican Primary debates graphically revealed. Of the half who concede that the real world exists, barely half think that humans play a role in the process.

Such destructive responses tend to break through the surface during periods of distress and fear, very widespread feelings today, for good reason: A generation of neoliberal policies has sharply concentrated wealth and power while leaving the rest to stagnate or decline, often joining the growing precariat. In the US, the richest country in history with unparalleled advantages, over 40 percent of the population don’t earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone. And this is happening in what’s called a “booming economy.”

Productivity has risen through the neoliberal period, even if not as much as before, but wages have stagnated or declined as wealth is funneled to a few bulging pockets. Distress is so severe that among white middle-aged Americans, mortality is actually increasing, something unheard of in functioning societies apart from war or pestilence. There are similar phenomena in Europe under the “business first” (“neoliberal”/”austerity”) assault.

Returning to forms of deceit, one technique is simply lying, honed to a high art by the Maestro. Another technique is not telling parts of the “whole story” that matter.

To illustrate, consider the analysis of “Trump’s claims about the North Korea deal” by the expert and highly competent fact-checker of The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler. His article originally ran under the title of “Not the Whole Story,” with the title presented in extra-large letters to emphasize the ignominy. Kessler’s acid (and accurate) critique of Trump’s distortions and inventions opens by declaring (again correctly) that “North Korea has a long history of making agreements and then not living up to its obligations,” citing the most crucial case, the September 2005 US-North Korea agreement (under six-power auspices), in which, in the official wording, “The DPRK [North Korea] committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards.”

As Kessler points out, the North Koreans did not live up to these promises, and in fact, soon returned to producing nuclear weapons. Obviously, they can’t be trusted.

But this is “Not the Whole Story.” There is a rather significant omission: Before the ink was dry on the agreement, the US undermined it. To repeat the unwanted facts from our earlier discussion of the matter, “the Bush administration broke the agreement. It renewed the threat of force, froze North Korean funds in foreign banks and disbanded the consortium that was to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor. Bruce Cumings, the leading US Korea scholar, writes that ‘the sanctions were specifically designed to destroy the September pledges [and] to head off an accommodation between Washington and Pyongyang’.” The whole story is well-known to scholarship, but somehow doesn’t reach the public domain.

Kessler is a fine and careful journalist. His evasion of “the whole story” appears to be close to exceptionless in the media. Every article on the matter by The New York Times security and foreign policy experts is the same, as far as I’ve seen. The practice is so uniform that it is almost unfair to pick out examples. To choose only one, again from a fine journalist, Washington Post specialist on Korea Anna Fifield writes that North Korea “signed a denuclearization agreement” in 2005, but didn’t stick to the agreement (omitting the fact that this was a response to Washington’s breaking the agreement). “So perhaps the wisest course of action,” she continues, “would be to bet that it won’t abide by this one, either.” And to complete the picture with a banned phrase, “So perhaps the wisest course of action would be to bet that [Washington] won’t abide by this one, either.”

There are endless laments about the deceitfulness and unreliability of the North Koreans; many are cited in Gareth Porter’s review of media coverage. But it would be hard to find a word about the rest of the story. This is only one case.

I don’t incidentally suggest that the deceit is conscious. Much more likely, it’s just the enormous power of conformity to convention, to what Gramsci called hegemonic “common sense.” Some ideas are not even rejected; they are unthinkable. Like the idea that US aggression is aggression; it can only be “a mistake,” “a tragic error,” “a strategic blunder.” I also don’t want to suggest this is “American exceptionalism.” It’s hard to find an exception to the practice in the history of imperialism.

So far, at least, Trump has kept from disrupting the agreement of the two Koreas. Of course, all of this is accompanied by boasts about his amazing deal-making abilities, and the brilliance of his skillful tactics of threatening “fire and fury” in order to bring the dictator to the negotiating table. There are many accolades by others across the spectrum for this triumph — which is about on a par with the standard claims that Obama’s harsh sanctions forced Iran to capitulate by signing the joint agreement on nuclear weapons, claims effectively refuted by Trita Parsi (Losing an Enemy).

Whatever the factual basis, such claims are necessary to justify harsh measures against official enemies and to reinforce the general principle that what we do is right (with occasional tragic errors).
In the present case too, there is good evidence that the truth is almost the opposite of the standard claims, and that the harsh US stance has impeded progress toward peaceful settlement. There have been many opportunities in addition to the 2005 agreement. In 2013, in a meeting with senior US diplomats, North Korean officials outlined steps toward denuclearization. One of those who attended the meeting, former US official and Stimson Center Senior Fellow Joel Wit reports that, “Not surprisingly, for the North Koreans, the key to denuclearization was that the United States had to end its ‘hostile policy’.”

While the US maintains its threatening stance, the North Korean leadership — “not surprisingly” — has sought “to develop a nuclear arsenal as a shield to deter the US while they moved to develop the economy.” The North Korean government, in June 2013, “issued an important new pronouncement that it was open to negotiations on denuclearization,” Wit writes, adding that, “The Obama administration dismissed it at the time as propaganda.” He adds further that “the North Koreans have given a great deal of thought to denuclearization and almost certainly have a concrete plan of action for the upcoming [Singapore] summit, whether the White House does or not.” In fact, at the 2013 meetings, “the North Korean officials actually laid out a concrete plan to achieve denuclearization,” Wit reports.

Not the only case. China’s “double freeze” proposal, supported by Russia, Germany and others, has been on the table for years, rejected by Washington — until the Singapore summit.

Trump’s diplomacy, such as it is, has been subjected to withering attack, especially by liberal opinion: How could the US president agree to meet on friendly terms with a brutal dictator? How could he fail to demand that North Korea end its human rights violations, which are indeed horrendous?

Willingness to look at “the whole story” suggests some other questions, of course unasked — in fact, unthinkable: How could Kim agree to meet on friendly terms with the head of the state that world opinion overwhelmingly regards as the greatest threat to peace? How could North Korea fail to demand that the US end its human rights violations, also horrendous? Has North Korea done anything remotely like invading Iraq, the worst crime of this century? Or destroying Libya? Has it been condemned by the ICJ [International Court of Justice] for international terrorism (“unlawful use of force”)? And a lot more that is easy enough to reel off.

It made perfect sense for North Korea not to bring up US crimes as a condition for moving forward. The proper goal of the meeting was to expedite the efforts of the two Koreas to pursue the directions outlined in their April 27 Declaration. And the argument cuts both ways.

Interestingly enough, while Trump seeks to appease his political doppelgänger in Pyongyang, he has succeeded in alienating most of the US’s major Western allies, including Canada, France and Germany. Is this the consequence of his alleged foreign policy doctrine “We are America, bitch”?

There are extensive efforts to try to discern some coherent doctrine that guides Trump’s behavior, but I suspect it’s a fool’s errand. A very good predictor of Trump policy is [his fixation on] … reversing anything associated with the despised “Kenyan Muslim” he replaced: in foreign policy, tearing up the successful Iran deal and accepting the long-standing possibilities for addressing the serious North Korea crisis (proclaiming to have created an astonishing breakthrough). Much the same is true of other actions that look like random shots when the driving forces are ignored.

All of this has to be done while satisfying the usual Republican constituencies: primarily the business world and the rich. For Trump, that also means unleashing the more brutal wing of the Republican Party so that they can dedicate themselves even beyond the norm to the interest of private wealth and corporate power. Here the technique is to capture the media with attention-grabbing antics, which can be solemnly exposed while the game goes on — so far, quite effectively.

Then comes the task of controlling the so-called “populist” base: the angry, frightened, disillusioned white population, primarily males. Since there is no way for Trumpism to deal with their economic concerns, which are actually being exacerbated by current policy-formation, it’s necessary to posture heroically as “standing up” for them against “malevolent forces” and to cater to the anti-social impulses that tend to surface when people are left to face difficult circumstances alone, without institutions and organizations to support them in their struggles. That’s also being done effectively for the time being.

The “We are America, bitch” posture appeals to chauvinistic instincts and the white supremacy that is a deeply rooted feature of American culture and is now exacerbated by concern that whites might even become a minority. The posture can also delude working people into believing that their tough-guy protector will bring back the world they’ve lost. Such propaganda exercises cannot, of course, target those actually responsible for the plight of the victims of neoliberal globalization. On the contrary, attention has to be diverted away from corporate managers who largely shape state policy while establishing complex global supply chains to maximize profit at the expense of working people. More appropriate targets are desperate people fleeing horrors for which we are largely responsible: “foreigners” who have been “robbing us” with the connivance of “treacherous liberals” and other assorted devils that can be conjured up in periods of social breakdown.

Allies, friends, who cares? There is no need for policies that are “coherent” in any traditional sense. Consequences don’t matter as long as the primary goals are met.

After months of harsh rhetoric against China’s trade practices, Trump has decided to impose tariffs of $50 billion on Chinese imports, prompting Beijing, subsequently, to declare that the US has embarked on a trade war and to announce in turn that it will retaliate with similar measures against US imports. First, isn’t it true that China is merely practicing today the same sort of mercantilist policies that the US and Great Britain practiced in the past on their way to global ascendancy? Second, is the targeting of tariffs expected to have any impact either on China’s economy or on the size of the US trade deficit? And lastly, if a new era of protectionism is about to take off, what could the consequences of such development be for the reign of global neoliberalism?

Several questions arise. First, what is Trump’s motive? If it were concern about China’s economic management and trade policies, he wouldn’t be going out of his way to alienate allies with tariffs and insults but would be joining with them to confront China on the issues of concern. If, however, the driving force is what I discussed earlier, then targeting both China and allies with abuse and tariffs has a certain logic: It may play well in the rust belt, contributing to the delusion that our hero is fighting to ensure jobs for working people — though it’s a tricky strategy, because it harms other parts of his loyal base, mainly farmers, and also, though more subtly, because it imposes a new tax on consumption, which is what tariffs amount to.

As for China’s economic policies, yes, they are similar to those that have been used by developed societies generally, beginning with Britain and then its former North American colony. Similar, but more limited. China lacks the means available to its predecessors. Britain stole superior technology from India, the Low Countries, Ireland, and by force and severe protectionism, undermined the Indian economy, then the world’s most advanced along with China. The US, under the Hamiltonian system, resorted to high tariffs to bar superior British goods, and also took British technology in ways barred by the current US-initiated global trading system. Economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the US as “the mother country and bastion of protectionism” into the 1920s, well after it had become far and away the richest country in the world.

The general practice is called “kicking away the ladder” by economic historians: first use the practices to develop, then bar others from following.

Earlier, Britain’s economic development relied on large-scale piracy, now considered by its former practitioner to be the most heinous of crimes. Keynes wrote that the booty of English pirates, like the famed and admired Sir Francis Drake, “may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investments.” Piracy was also a standard practice in the American colonies. Both British and US economies also relied crucially on the most hideous system of slavery in human history. Cotton was the oil of the industrial revolution, providing the basis for manufacturing, finance, commerce, retail. Such practices are not available to China.

Like Britain before it, the US called for “free trade” when it recognized that the playing field was tilted properly in its direction. After World War II, when the US had incomparable power, it promoted the “liberal world order” that has been an enormous boon to the US corporate system, which now owns about half of the global economy, an astonishing policy success.

Again, following the British model, the US hedged its commitment to “free trade” for the benefit of domestic private power. The British-dominated “free trade” system kept India as a largely closed protectorate. The US-dominated system imposes an extreme patent system (“intellectual property”) that provides virtual monopoly power to major US industries. The US government also provides huge subsidies to energy industries, agribusiness and financial institutions. While the US complains about Chinese industrial policy, the modern high-tech industry has relied crucially on research and development in the publicly subsidized sector of the economy, to such an extent that the economy might fairly be regarded as a system of private subsidy, private profit. And there are many other devices to subsidize industry. Procurement, for example, has been shown to be a significant device. In fact, the enormous military system alone, through procurement, provides a huge state subsidy to industry. These comments only skim the surface.

Britain abandoned laissez-faire when it could no longer compete with Japanese competition, part of the background for World War II in the Pacific. Some in the US are having similar qualms today, concerns that Trump is cynically exploiting. But not the powerful corporate sector that relies crucially on the US-designed global economic order.

The corporate sector relies so extensively on the global economy it has designed that it is sure to use its enormous power to try to head off a major trade war. The Trump tariffs and the retaliation might escalate, but it’s likely that the threat will be contained. Trump is quite right, however, in proclaiming that the US would “win” a limited trade war, given the scale of the US economy, the huge domestic market and unique advantages in other respects. The “We are America, bitch” doctrine is a powerful weapon of intimidation.

The Trump administration is moving full speed ahead with its intent on cracking down on unauthorized entries to the country by separating immigrant children from their parents. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents during the last seven weeks, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought recently to justify Trump’s immigration policy by citing a verse from the Bible. What can one say about an advanced Western society in which religion continues to crowd out reason in shaping public policy and public attitudes? And didn’t the Nazis, although they were no believers, also use Christianity to justify their immoral and criminal acts?

The immigration policy, always grotesque, has descended to levels so revolting that even many of those who foster and exploit xenophobia are running for cover — like Trump, who is desperately trying to blame it on the Democrats, and like the First Lady, who is appealing to “both sides of the aisle” to come together to stop the obscenity. We should, however, not overlook the fact that Europe is crawling through much the same gutters.

One can quote scripture for almost any purpose one likes. Sessions doubtless knows that “all the law” hangs on two commandments: loving God and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But that is not the appropriate thought for the occasion.

It is true, however, that the US is unique among developed societies in the role of religion in social life, ever since the Puritans landed.

Recently, Trump stated that he had the absolute right to pardon himself (after he had already said that he could shoot someone on New York’s 5th Avenue and not lose any support), while his lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said the president could even commit murder in the Oval Office and still not be prosecuted for it. Your thoughts?

After praising Kim [Jong Un] effusively as a strong leader who “speaks and his people sit up at attention,” Trump added: “I want my people to do the same.” When the predictable reaction followed, he said he was kidding. Maybe. I hope we don’t have an opportunity to find out.

While it is clear that the country is well on its way to becoming a pariah nation, the Democrats continue to focus their attention primarily on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia and unethical behavior, all the while trying to outflank the president on the jingoist front, adopting new restrictions for the 2020 elections so they can keep away the likes of Bernie Sanders, and of course, playing masterfully the fundraising game that works in a plutocracy. With all this in mind, how would you describe the nature of contemporary US politics?

Much as in Europe, the centrist political institutions in the United States, which have long been in the driver’s seat, are in decline. The reasons are not obscure. People who have endured the rigors of the neoliberal assault — austerity in the recent European version — recognize that the institutions are working for others, not for them. In the US, people do not have to read academic political science to know that a large majority, those who are not near the top of the income scale, are effectively disenfranchised, in that their own representatives pay little attention to their views, hearkening rather to the voices of the rich, the donor class. In Europe, anyone can see that basic decisions are made by the unelected Troika, in Brussels, with the northern banks peering over their shoulders.

In the US, respect for Congress has long been hovering in single digits. In recent Republican primaries, when candidates emerged from the base, the Establishment was able to beat them down and obtain their own candidate. In 2016, that failed for the first time. True, it’s not far from the norm for a billionaire with enormous media support and almost $1 billion in campaign funding to win an election, but Trump was hardly the choice of the Republican elites. The most spectacular result of the election was not the Trump phenomenon. Rather, it was the remarkable success of Bernie Sanders, breaking sharply with US political history. With no support from big business or the media, Sanders might well have won the Democratic nomination had it not been for the machinations of Obama-Clinton party managers. Similar processes are apparent in recent European elections.

Like it or not, Trump is doing quite well. He has the support of 83 percent of Republicans, which is without precedent apart from rare moments. Whatever their feelings may be, Republicans dare not cross him openly. His general support in the low 40s is not far from the norm, about the same as Obama’s going into his first midterm. He is lavishing gifts on the business world and the wealthy, the authentic constituency of the Republicans (with the Democrat leadership not far behind). He has thrown enough crumbs to keep the Evangelicals happy and has struck the right chords for racist/white supremacy elements. And he has, so far, managed to convince coal miners and steel workers that he is one of them. In fact, his support among union members has increased to 51 percent.

It is hardly in doubt that Trump cares almost nothing about the fate of the country or the world. What matters is me. That’s clear enough from his attitude toward global warming. He is perfectly well aware of the dire threat — to his properties. His application for a seawall to protect his Irish golf course is based explicitly on the threat of global warming. But pursuit of power impels him to lead the race to destruction, quite happily, as is evident from his performances. The same holds of other serious, if lesser, threats, among them the threat that the country may be isolated, despised, declining — with dues to pay after it’s no longer his concern.

The Democrats are now torn between a popular base that is largely social democratic and a New Democrat leadership that panders to the donor class. Under Obama, the party was reduced to shambles at the local and state level, a particularly serious matter because the 2020 elections will determine redistricting, offering opportunities for gerrymandering even beyond today’s scandalous situation.

The bankruptcy of the Democrat elite is well-illustrated by the obsession with alleged Russian meddling with our sacred elections. Whatever it might amount to — apparently very little — it cannot begin to compare with the “meddling” of campaign funding, which largely determines electoral outcomes, as extensive research has shown, particularly the careful work of Thomas Ferguson, which he and his colleagues have now extended to the 2016 elections. As Ferguson points out, when Republican elites realized that it was going to be Trump or Clinton, they responded with a huge wave of last-minute money that not only led to Clinton’s late October decline but also had the same effect on Democratic candidates for Senate, “virtually in lock step.” It is “outlandish,” Ferguson observes, that former FBI Director James Comey or the Russians “could be responsible for both collapses” in the final stage of the campaign: “For the first time in the entire history of the United States, the partisan outcome of Senate races coincided perfectly with the results of every state’s presidential balloting.” The outcome conforms very well to Ferguson’s well-supported “Investment theory of party competition.”

But facts and logic matter little. The Democrats are bent on revenge for their 2016 failure, having run such a rotten campaign that what looked like a “sure thing” collapsed. Evidently, Trump’s severe assault against the common good is a lesser matter, at least to the party elite.

It’s sometimes been noted that the US not only regularly meddles in foreign elections, including Russian ones, but also proceeds to subvert and sometimes overthrow governments it doesn’t like. Horrifying consequences abound, to the present, from Central America to the Middle East.

Guatemala has been a horror story since a US-backed coup overthrew its elected reformist government in 1954. Gaza, declining in misery, may become unlivable by 2020, the UN predicts, not by acts of God. In 2006, Palestinians committed a grave crime: They ran the first free election in the Arab world, and made the “wrong” choice, handing power to Hamas. Israel reacted by escalating violence and a brutal siege. The US reverted to standard operating procedure and prepared a military coup, pre-empted by Hamas. In punishment for this new crime, US-Israeli torture of Gaza sharply increased, not only with strangulation but also regular murderous and destructive US-backed Israeli invasions, on pretexts that quickly collapse on examination. Elections that come out the wrong way plainly cannot be tolerated under our policy of “democracy promotion.”

In recent European elections, there has been much concern about possible Russian meddling. That was particularly true of the 2017 German elections, when the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did surprisingly well, winning 94 seats in the Bundestag, the first time it had won seats. One can easily imagine the reaction had Russian meddling been detected behind these frightening results. It turns out that there was indeed foreign meddling, but not from Russia. AfD hired a Texas media firm (Harris Media) known for support of right-wing nationalist candidates (Trump, Le Pen, Netanyahu). The firm enlisted the cooperation of the Berlin office of Facebook, which provided it with detailed information about potential voters for use in microtargeting those who might be receptive to AfD’s message. It may have worked. The story seems to have been ignored, apart from the business press.

If the Democratic Party cannot overcome its deep internal problems and the slow expansion of the economy under Obama and Trump continues without disruption or disaster, the Republican wrecking ball may be swinging away at the foundations of a decent society, and at the prospects for survival, for a long time.

Trump Cabinet’s Bible Study Minister Justifies Child Separation as Consequence of Immigrants’ “Illegal Behavior”

By Lee Fang

Amid increasing scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, criticisms have been lodged against the policy of family separation at the border by, among others, members of his own party and otherwise stalwart Christian right allies of the GOP. One Christian ally of the White House, though, came out swinging in favor of taking children away from their parents: Capitol Ministries.

Ralph Drollinger, the head of the private Christian group, which leads Bible study sessions for Republican lawmakers and senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, led the charge to defend the administration even as photos and stories emerge showing children crowded into cages and snatched from their mothers.

“No one, especially my personal friend, the kind-hearted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, desires that a mother or father be separated from their children,” wrote Drollinger, in a message to supporters on Friday. But, the Capitol Ministries leader said, there are “three classifications of people in every country, as was true in ancient Israel in the Old Testament.” In Drollinger’s interpretation, there are citizens, legal immigrants, and foreigners — the latter were known as being “illegal,” he said — and the Bible only forbids family separation for citizens and legal immigrants.

“It follows that when someone breaks the law of the land that they should anticipate that one of the consequences of their illegal behavior will be separation from their children,” Drollinger wrote. “Such is the case with thieves or murderers who are arrested and put in jail.”

Sessions attracted controversy after citing a Bible verse to defend the administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement strategy. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” the attorney general declared during a speech in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last Thursday.

Despite the support from a right-wing Christian group that’s especially close to the administration, other conservative Christians are pressuring the Trump administration to change its practices. Earlier this month, a group of evangelical pastors signed a letter harshly condemning the child separation policy. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long lasting, are of utmost concern,” stated the letter, which was signed by the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who gave an opening prayer at Trump’s inauguration and is reportedly close to the president, among other evangelical leaders.

Drollinger, who has become immensely influential following the 2016 election, believes Sessions correctly invoked the scripture.

“The passage the Attorney General cited, Romans 13, bespeaks of this: there are and there should be serious, known consequences for breaking the laws of the land — otherwise the law becomes toothless and inconsequential and it is no longer a deterrent to harmful behavior, which is what God designed it to be,” Drollinger wrote, citing his own Bible study on illegal immigration, published on the Capitol Ministries website two years ago.

In the 2016 Bible study, Drollinger wrote that “immigration laws of every nation should be Biblically based and strictly enforced — all with the utmost confidence that assurance that God approves such actions by the nation’s leaders.” He added, “To procedurally exclude foreign individuals who might be criminals, traitors, or terrorists, or who possess communicable diseases is not racist in the least!”

Drollinger, a former college basketball star turned spiritual adviser to conservative politicians, has quietly amassed power in Washington, D.C., through his Monday evening Bible studies with conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several Cabinet members, including the vice president and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, pray on a regular basis with Drollinger’s group. As the minister recently told a German newspaper, he provides the administration with “the high-protein diet of the Word of God.” In the past, Drollinger bashed gay rights and called Catholicism the “world’s largest false religion.”

As The Intercept first reported, shortly after the presidential election, Drollinger could barely conceal his excitement that members of his inner circle would soon occupy the White House. He published a press statement celebrating the fact that Trump’s appointments for his administration were drawn from “long time sponsors of the Members Bible Studies.”

“It follows then that the sudden rise of Pence, Sessions, and Pompeo — all men who are disciples of Jesus Christ — serve to vividly illustrate the truth of 1 Timothy 2:1-4!” Drollinger announced, referring to a Bible verse that calls for prayer “for kings and all who are in authority.”

Drollinger’s controversial interpretations extend to other areas of GOP orthodoxy. Capitol Ministries claims “that Islam and its Koran are nothing more than a plagiarism of OT truths” — a reference to the Old Testament — “and a non-chronological, sloppy one at that — topped off with a falsified diminution of Jesus Christ.”