Is American democracy in peril?

Claudine Gay says U.S. is dealing with historic levels of political polarization, but there is reason for hope
by Colleen Walsh Harvard Staff Writer

Political scientist Claudine Gay said her interest in the field developed out of a desire to understand what motivates the political choices and behaviors of ordinary people and “how well those perspectives are represented in national politics.” Since the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, Gay, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies, has found herself rethinking how she approaches the discipline and reconsidering the foundational norms, values, and institutions long considered central to American democracy. She shared some of those thoughts in a recent exchange with the Gazette. This interview was edited for clarity and length.

 

Q&A

Claudine Gay

GAZETTE: American democracy appears to many to be on shaky ground right now. How does that affect your work/scholarly perspective?

 

GAY: As a scholar, I feel challenged in bringing the normal paradigms and theoretical frameworks we rely on in political science to understanding the conditions that we face right now in the U.S, because so many of the assumptions that typically ground our thinking have been upended. This crystallized for me as I witnessed the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Here was a moment when thousands of people turned against American democracy itself, choosing violence as the way to achieve their aims. I thought a threat that profound would shock and unify us. But it, instead, has generated as polarized a response as any other issue or event. That reality has disrupted my thinking, and it forces us all in the discipline to consider anew the basic norms, values, and institutions that we’ve taken for granted as stable (and stabilizing) features of American political life.

 

GAZETTE: Can you talk a bit more about your reaction to Jan. 6? Has it evolved since the event itself?

 

GAY: Before I became the dean of FAS, I taught a course titled “Democratic Citizenship,” the study of public opinion and political participation in contemporary American politics. The question we kept returning to is the basic premise of democracy, whether ordinary people can be trusted to make consequential decisions. And as we interrogated that idea over the course of the semester, we would focus increasingly on the conditions that enable ordinary people to make consequential decisions, realizing that context matters.

 

Since Jan. 6, I have been thinking about how many of those conditions are directly under assault. One of those conditions is access to a common foundation of facts, which play a central role in the functions of a democratic society. But with a fractured media landscape, as well as the echo-chamber-like quality of social media, Americans now live in separate “factual” universes.

 

Another important contextual factor is equal access to a transparent, secure electoral process. Our democracy is made better the more we all participate, not when fewer people participate. And yet nearly two dozen state legislatures are working with relentless energy to erect barriers that will make it even more difficult to vote. If successful, these measures may have the effect of erasing whole groups of people from American political life.

 

Another condition that we talked about was the confidence that your voice will be heard and represented, which is the most basic expectation of democracy. A sense of political efficacy, reinforced by evidence of democratic responsiveness, is in part what motivates people to participate. From extreme partisan gerrymandering to the continuing attempts to discredit the 2020 election, all of these efforts give citizens ample reason to question whether their voices are heard and represented.

 

GAZETTE: Do you think we can take some comfort in the idea that democracy is always somewhat in flux, that we are always somewhat more or less democratic?

 

GAY: I’m not sure if I take “comfort” in the idea, but it does help to put this moment in perspective. Multiracial democracy is a work in progress for the U.S. — that’s undeniable. But a sense of alarm about signs of democratic backsliding, given what is at stake (including our credibility in the world), still feels appropriate.

 

GAZETTE: How do we ensure that democracy survives in this country?

 

GAY: One answer might be a bipartisan consensus and commitment to re-establish a common foundation of facts (for example, about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election), and to reaffirm the importance of broad-based democratic participation. But such consensus is elusive. If it were a fringe movement outside of politics that aimed to sow distrust in our electoral system and limit access to the vote, then it would be easier to see how we might find our way to a solution. But this is not happening outside of the political system; rather, it finds expression mainly through the Republican Party. That is what makes this so alarming. It is so hard to see how to break through in any kind of bipartisan way.

 

GAZETTE: The nation has endured deep divisions before. Why is this moment different?

 

GAY: The existence of different views and positions, hotly debated and fought over, is normal and, in many ways, is a strength of democracy. But the polarization that exists now is unprecedented in its intensity. It’s reached levels that are toxic when it comes to the ability to come together on any issue. When you have a situation where substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans view the other party as “immoral” and a “threat to the U.S.,” that is not ordinary political and policy disagreement. There’s no room for even a conversation across partisan lines, let alone compromise.

 

If we exist in a moment when bipartisan collaboration and compromise are impossible and in some ways anathema to partisans, then we are not well-served by decision-making systems that require supermajorities. If being a Republican now means that you minimize — even embrace and normalize — the Jan. 6 attack, if it means that you continue to discredit the 2020 election, if it means that you believe the problem with democracy is when too many people vote, if that is all part of the identity of being Republican now, how do you engage those partisans in the urgent work of protecting our democracy?

 

GAZETTE: Can you give me some examples of that work?

 

GAY: We need federal legislation to protect voting rights, such as the two bills now stalled in the Senate. These bills alone won’t entirely undo all the damage that’s been done through state-level action over the last year and a half, but some of the restrictive measures now in place would be rolled back. Federal legislation is impossible, however, without the elimination of the filibuster, given the Republican party’s commitment to making it maximally difficult to vote.

 

GAZETTE: Is there anything you look to that gives you any hope?

 

GAY: What gives me hope is that even as difficult as we make it to vote, so many people persevere and turn out. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 159 million Americans voted, many for the first time. That’s the largest total number of ballots cast in U.S. history, by a wide margin. Citizens overcame all of the obstacles we put in front of them — sometimes waiting in poll lines for two, three hours — to demand that their voices be heard. That to me is the clearest expression of the continuing faith in the power and promise of multiracial democracy, in the belief that ordinary people can be trusted to make consequential decisions. Many advocacy groups are engaged in deep organizing and grassroots mobilization to register new voters and ensure their access to free and fair elections. These efforts were pivotal in 2020 and will continue to be. An expanding electorate, millions of citizens newly awake to the transformative power of the vote, and more determined than ever to be part of the democratic process and to be equitably represented in government — that’s what gives me hope.

 

Noam Chomsky: 'Republican Party has drifted off the spectrum

Amanda Gorman reads inauguration poem, 'The Hill We Climb'

When day comes we ask ourselves,

where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry,

a sea we must wade

We've braved the belly of the beast

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace

And the norms and notions

of what just is

Isn't always just-ice

And yet the dawn is ours

before we knew it

Somehow we do it

Somehow we've weathered and witnessed

a nation that isn't broken

but simply unfinished

We the successors of a country and a time

Where a skinny Black girl

descended from slaves and raised by a single mother

can dream of becoming president

only to find herself reciting for one

And yes we are far from polished

far from pristine

but that doesn't mean we are

striving to form a union that is perfect

We are striving to forge a union with purpose

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and

conditions of man

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us

but what stands before us

We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,

we must first put our differences aside

We lay down our arms

so we can reach out our arms

to one another

We seek harm to none and harmony for all

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

That even as we grieved, we grew

That even as we hurt, we hoped

That even as we tired, we tried

That we'll forever be tied together, victorious

Not because we will never again know defeat

but because we will never again sow division

Scripture tells us to envision

that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree

And no one shall make them afraid

If we're to live up to our own time

Then victory won't lie in the blade

But in all the bridges we've made

That is the promise to glade

The hill we climb

If only we dare

It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,

it's the past we step into

and how we repair it

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation

rather than share it

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy

And this effort very nearly succeeded

But while democracy can be periodically delayed

it can never be permanently defeated

In this truth

in this faith we trust

For while we have our eyes on the future

history has its eyes on us

This is the era of just redemption

We feared at its inception

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs

of such a terrifying hour

but within it we found the power

to author a new chapter

To offer hope and laughter to ourselves

So while once we asked,

how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?

Now we assert

How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was

but move to what shall be

A country that is bruised but whole,

benevolent but bold,

fierce and free

We will not be turned around

or interrupted by intimidation

because we know our inaction and inertia

will be the inheritance of the next generation

Our blunders become their burdens

But one thing is certain:

If we merge mercy with might,

and might with right,

then love becomes our legacy

and change our children's birthright

So let us leave behind a country

better than the one we were left with

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,

we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,

we will rise from the windswept northeast

where our forefathers first realized revolution

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,

we will rise from the sunbaked south

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover

and every known nook of our nation and

every corner called our country,

our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,

battered and beautiful

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we're brave enough to see it

If only we're brave enough to be it

NOAM CHOMSKY : "Trump's ideology consists of two letters : me"

F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia

By Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.

The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Mr. Baker said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.

No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.

The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.

The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

In the months before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. was also already investigating four of Mr. Trump’s associates over their ties to Russia. The constellation of events disquieted F.B.I. officials who were simultaneously watching as Russia’s campaign unfolded to undermine the presidential election by exploiting existing divisions among Americans.

“In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.

“That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times.

And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an investigation into the president’s national security adviser, the requests set off discussions among F.B.I. officials about opening an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct that case.

But law enforcement officials put off the decision to open the investigation until they had learned more, according to people familiar with their thinking. As for a counterintelligence inquiry, they concluded that they would need strong evidence to take the sensitive step of investigating the president, and they were also concerned that the existence of such an inquiry could be leaked to the news media, undermining the entire investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, two more of Mr. Trump’s actions prompted them to quickly abandon those reservations.

The first was a letter Mr. Trump wanted to send to Mr. Comey about his firing, but never did, in which he mentioned the Russia investigation. In the letter, Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Comey for previously telling him he was not a subject of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.

Even after the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, wrote a more restrained draft of the letter and told Mr. Trump that he did not have to mention the Russia investigation — Mr. Comey’s poor handling of the Clinton email investigation would suffice as a fireable offense, he explained — Mr. Trump directed Mr. Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation anyway.

He disregarded the president’s order, irritating Mr. Trump. The president ultimately added a reference to the Russia investigation to the note he had delivered, thanking Mr. Comey for telling him three times that he was not under investigation.

The second event that troubled investigators was an NBC News interview two days after Mr. Comey’s firing in which Mr. Trump appeared to say he had dismissed Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” he said. “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that a fuller examination of his comments demonstrates that he did not fire Mr. Comey to end the Russia inquiry. “I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s the wrong man for that position.”

As F.B.I. officials debated whether to open the investigation, some of them pushed to move quickly before Mr. Trump appointed a director who might slow down or even end their investigation into Russia’s interference. Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump’s Rages and the Case for Optimism

By David Remnick


If Donald Trump were not so unbalanced, were he not exacting such immeasurable damage on the domestic welfare and the national security of the United States, you might find it in yourself to feel a tinge of sympathy for one so lost. Since his failures in the midterm elections, his unwinding has accelerated. The President of the United States rages daily on the heath, finding enemies in the shapes of clouds.

Speaking to the Daily Caller, a right-wing Web site, Trump declared, without a crumb of proof, that the reason for the Republican losses in the election last week was people dressing up in disguises. Seriously. “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time,” Trump said. “I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

Foreign leaders who have tried to soothe Trump, to locate his human core, have an equally difficult time searching for rationalism in the White House. They find, over and over, to their grief, that Trump is unreachable, lost in his dark reveries and conspiratorial fantasies. The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided to call Trump last Friday, when he was en route to Europe, on Air Force One. Her goal, according to the Washington Post, was “to celebrate the Republican Party’s wins in the midterm elections—never mind that Democrats seized control of the House.” Trump replied to May’s gesture with an “ornery outburst,” berating her at length for failing, in his estimation, to help him contain Iran and to reverse unfavorable international-trade agreements.

The next day, in France, Trump did what he always seems to do on foreign trips: he alienated his allies, undermined national interests, and displayed a level of heedlessness and foul temper that would have embarrassed Richard Nixon. On the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, Trump was scheduled to make the short trip from Paris to the site of the Battle of Belleau Wood, which was fought in June, 1918. There were nearly ten thousand American casualties at Belleau Wood, a legendary battle in the history of the Marines. Many of those marines are buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where the commemorative ceremony was held. Trump blew it off. It was raining. The President, it was reported, does not like the rain. The grandson of Winston Churchill declared Trump “pathetic.”

The unwinding accelerates daily. The unhinged tweet storms; the thunderbolts of blame and insult; the firing of Jeff Sessions and the appointment of a hyper-obedient acting Attorney General; the invective hurled at the press (and particularly at African-American reporters); the fact-free rants directed at firefighters trying to put out conflagrations amplified by climate change; the obvious fear of looming investigations and the special counsel’s report. . . . There is no question: the President is losing what last shred of poise he might have possessed.

It was, from the start, impossible to imagine Trump carrying out the duties of state, practical or ceremonial, with any sense of deliberation or dignity. A little more than two years ago, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to watch President Obama give a memorial address on Veterans Day. It was a brilliant fall day. Thousands of vets and their families had come, as they do every year. It was a distinctly melancholy occasion, and not only because of the surroundings, the heavy fact of having so many war dead around you. Just two days before, Obama had met with Trump, the President-elect—their only one-on-one meeting.

At Arlington, Obama carried a wreath to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then, in a speech at the amphitheatre, he said, “Veterans Day often follows a hard-fought political campaign, an exercise in the free speech and self-government that you fought for. It often lays bare disagreements across our nation. But the American instinct has never been to find isolation in opposite corners. It is to find strength in our common creed, to forge unity from our great diversity, to sustain that strength and unity even when it is hard.

“It’s the example of the single most diverse institution in our country—soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguardsmen who represent every corner of our country, every shade of humanity, immigrant and native-born, Christian, Muslim, Jew, and nonbeliever alike, all forged into common service.”

Seventy days remained in Obama’s Presidency. One had to imagine Trump at Arlington and at other solemn moments like it. When Trump took power, his first instinct in office was to divide, to issue the “Muslim ban,” to unleash a toxic cloud of rhetoric intended to undermine what his predecessor had called, at Arlington, “our great diversity.” On Veterans Day, Trump, in all his petulance and lack of understanding of his own office, did what he had done in France. He passed. He did not go to Arlington.

The midterm elections did not suggest at all that Trump is finished, that he has no chance to be reëlected and prolong this degrading chapter. He still has the capacity to energize a significant and powerful base of voters. He still holds the Senate; his capacity to deepen his mark on the Supreme Court and on lower courts remains. Trump will surely start devising ways to slime the committee chairpeople in the House, particularly those who are likely to lead investigations into his activities—Maxine Waters, Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Elijah Cummings—and those who will, after New Year’s Day, start announcing their candidacies for the Presidency. Trump’s ferocity as a campaigner is not to be underestimated, and, sensing his own imperilment, he is bound to campaign with even less consideration for the bounds of decency than he did in 2016 and 2018.

And yet the election results, which continue to accumulate, are not on Trump’s side; his furies make plain that—his declarations of glorious victory to the contrary—he understands this. The Democrats won back at least seven governorships and made serious inroads in state legislatures.They performed well not merely on the coasts but in crucial parts of the Midwest, the Southwest, and even the South. The cities and the suburbs are not with him.

The Democrats took at least thirty-four seats back in the House and, of course, flipped the chamber, so that committees will now all be chaired by Democrats. The House Freedom Caucus, which has been so influential, has lost its footing. The voices of women, particularly Democratic women, have been amplified in Congress like never before.

Finally, the elections, over all, made it even more evident than before that the Republican Party has made its pact with a President who is losing support and, in demographic terms, losing the Party’s traditional advantages. The advantages that it continues to hold have less to do with popular support than with the inequities of gerrymandering and the structure of the Senate and Electoral College.

For two years, certain institutions and forces of American life have, imperfectly, fitfully, resisted the autocratic and anti-constitutional instincts of the Trump Administration. Judges, investigators, civil-society organizations, protesters, government officials and ex-government officials in possession of a conscience, and the press have done important work. The election, which nearly everyone understood as a referendum on Donald Trump, has had the most powerful effect of all, and it has led to his current unwinding.

There is no overestimating the damage that Trump has done and will continue to do. He will go on, at best, ignoring the perils of climate change, the evidence of a future that is our present, from the wildfires of California to the swamping of New Orleans, Houston, Puerto Rico, and the state of Florida. He will go on, at best, ignoring the mortal peril of gun violence and the fiscal peril of heedless financial policy. He will go on trying to frighten Americans about “caravans” and “terrorists” infiltrating the country. And he will go on undermining invaluable international institutions and alliances.

But there has always been a case to be made for hope. And the case was made, most powerfully, at the ballot box. When the President fantasizes that the vote was a fraud, the result of criminals dressed in one hat, then another, one shirt, then another—well, that rhetoric of desperation is a signal that maybe, just maybe, a change is on the way.

See How a Controversial Female Imam Is Fighting Muslim Patriarchy

Singer/songwriter Ani Zonneveld is one of the few female imams (Muslim religious leader) in the world. She is the founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values, and insists that the Qur’an is a progressive text which presents an egalitarian view of Islam. In addition to advocating for universal human rights and interfaith initiatives within Islam, she works to create music to counter both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia. Despite her efforts she is met with resistance, including vocal opposition from many fellow Muslims and even death threats. With unprecedented access to Zonneveld’s daily life, al imam presents a personal view of her work and beliefs, examining what it means to stand up for what you believe in the face of great resistance.

al imam was directed by Omar Al Dakheel and fully funded by USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each semester, advanced graduate students are invited to pitch short documentary projects to faculty in a competitive process. Three films are selected to be developed, produced, and completed with crew comprised entirely of students under the guidance of faculty.


The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers from around the world and selected by National Geographic editors. We look for work that affirms National Geographic's belief in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world. To submit a film for consideration, please email sfs@natgeo.com. The filmmakers created the content presented, and the opinions expressed are their own, not those of National Geographic Partners.

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.