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.

Noam Chomsky: The Future of Organized Human Life Is At Risk Thanks to GOP’s Climate Change Denial

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we want to turn to an issue that you have written about, that so many are so deeply concerned about, that hardly gets any play in this country, even in this critical midterm election. It’s the issue of climate change. Noam Chomsky, a new study has found that the world has massively underestimated the amount of heat absorbed by our oceans. The paper, published in the journal Nature, has concluded that for the past quarter of a century about 150 times the amount of energy used to generate electricity globally has been deposited into the seas, 60 percent more than previous estimates.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes days after leading meteorologist Eric Holthaus issued a dire warning following Jair Bolsonaro’s election win in Brazil. He tweeted, quote, “This is worth repeating over and over. The most horrific thing Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has planned is privatization of the Amazon rainforest. With just 12yr remaining to remake the global economy and prevent catastrophic climate change, this is planetary suicide,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, in a report issued earlier this week, the World Wildlife Fund found that human beings have wiped out 60 percent of all mammals, birds, fish and reptiles on Earth since 1970. This is WWF executive director of science and conservation Mike Barrett.

MIKE BARRETT: What’s absolutely clear at the moment, looking at the declines of nature that we’re currently seeing, is that the planet does need to be put on life support. And frankly, the solutions we’re coming up with at the moment are merely sticking plasters. So, this is now at the point where, as people, we’ve got to take a choice: Are we going to let this continue? Are we going to do something about it? Globally, at the moment, we are completely failing to tackle the loss of nature on the planet. And that’s got to stop now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Mike Barrett of the World Wildlife Fund. Noam, you are deeply concerned about this issue—and, of course, you’re not alone—climate change, the issue of climate change.

NOAM CHOMSKY: We can add to the list of your dire warnings, as if it weren’t horrendous enough, a few more examples. A couple of weeks ago, the IPCC, the international group of scientists monitoring climate change, came out with a very ominous report warning that the world has maybe a decade or two to basically end its reliance on fossil fuels if we’re to have any hope of controlling global warming below the level of utter disaster. And that, incidentally, is a conservative estimate. It’s a consensus view. There are—repeatedly, over the years, it has been shown that the IPCC analyses are much less alarmist than they should be.

Now comes this report in Nature that you mentioned, a couple of days ago, which shows that there has been a serious underestimate of the warming of the oceans. And they conclude that if these results hold up, the so-called carbon budget, the amount of carbon that we can spew into the atmosphere and still have a survival environment, has to be reduced by about 25 percent. That’s over and above the IPCC report. And the opening up of the Amazon to further exploitation will be another serious blow at the prospects of survival of organized human society.

I should—at the same time, the Trump administration, right now, is opening up new areas of the West for fracking, for increasing the use of fossil fuels. You’ve probably seen maybe discussed one of the most amazing documents I have ever seen. The Trump department of highway standards, whatever it’s called, just issued a long report, hundred-page report, urging that all regulations on automotive emissions should be ended. And they had a very logical argument. They said if we extrapolate current trends by the end of the century, the climate will have warmed several degrees centigrade, meaning a huge rise in sea level, which they underestimate. So, basically, we’re going over the cliff anyway, and automotive emissions really don’t add much to this, so there’s no point cutting them back. The assumption of the department is that everyone in the world is as criminally insane as we are, and isn’t going to do anything about it. And since—on that assumption, yeah, let’s just rob while the planet burns, putting Nero into the shade—he only fiddled while Rome burned. I can’t think of anything like this in human history. You just can’t find words to describe it. And at the peak of the monstrosity is, in fact, the Trump administration.

We should recall that Trump himself, as I mentioned, is a firm believer in global warming. Recently, he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a huge wall, one of his famous walls, this one to protect a golf course of his in Ireland, which, as his plea indicates, is threatened by sea level rise as a result of global warming. You take a look at the big banks, JPMorgan Chase and the others. They’re increasing their investments in fossil fuel development. The energy corporations are working all over the world to try to find new resources that destroy the environment.

The media are focusing on real outrages, like the ludicrous military preparation for this wave of mothers and children planning to invade us and destroy us—you know, they’re concentrating on that, but take a look at their coverage of these things. So, there was a big report, long front-page report, in The New York Times a couple days ago about the opening up of the West to further fossil fuel extraction. Discussed everything you can think of. Did mention some of the negative consequences, like it might harm water resources. It might make things harder for ranchers. Not one phrase, one phrase in this long report, on the effect on the environment. In the political campaign going on, every—all kinds of issues are not discussed, but not the two existential threats that human beings face, threats that have never arisen in human history.

We have to make decisions now which will literally determine whether organized human life can survive in any decent form. You can just imagine what the world would be like if the sea level rises, say, 10 or 20 feet or even higher, which is within the range—easily within the range of predictions. I mean, the consequences are unimaginable. But it’s as if we’re kind of like the proverbial lemmings just happily marching off the cliff, led by leaders who understand very well what they’re doing, but are so dedicated to enriching themselves and their friends in the near future that it simply doesn’t matter what happens to the human species. There’s nothing like this in all of human history. There have been plenty of monsters in the past, plenty of them. But you can’t find one who was dedicated, with passion, to destroying the prospects for organized human life. Hitler was horrible enough, but not that.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned linguist, dissident, author Noam Chomsky. You can visit our website for Part 1 of the interview, where Chomsky talks about U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, the migrant caravan, the crisis in Gaza and the white supremacist attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue.
Tune in Tuesday night for Democracy Now!'s live coverage of the midterm elections. We're teaming up with The Intercept for a special broadcast from 7 p.m. Eastern to 1:00 in the morning. You can check your local listings or go to democracynow.org.

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.”

U.S. withdraws from U.N. Human Rights Council over perceived bias against Israel

by Carol Morello

The Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday in protest of what it perceives as an entrenched bias against Israel and a willingness to allow notorious human rights abusers as members.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has sought major changes on the council throughout her tenure, issued a blistering critique of the panel, saying it had grown more callous over the past year and become a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.” She cited the admission of Congo as a member even as mass graves were being discovered there, and the failure to address human rights abuses in Venezuela and Iran.

“I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments,” she said during a joint appearance with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the department. “On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”

Haley accused governments with woeful human rights records of seeking seats on the council to avoid scrutiny and then resisting proposals for reform.

“When we made it clear we would strongly pursue council reform, these countries came out of the woodwork to oppose it,” she said. “Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt all attempted to undermine our reform efforts this past year.”

The decision to leave the 47-nation body was more definitive than the lesser option of staying on as a nonvoting observer. It represents another retreat by the Trump administration from international groups and agreements whose policies it deems out of sync with American interests on trade, defense, climate change and, now, human rights. And it leaves the council without the United States playing a key role in promoting human rights around the world.

The United States is midway through a three-year term on the council, which is intended to denounce and investigate human rights abuses. A U.S. departure deprives Israel of its chief defender at a forum where Israel’s human rights record comes up for discussion at every meeting, a standing “Item 7” on the agenda.

“By withdrawing from the council, we lose our leverage and allow the council’s bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked — including running roughshod over Israel,” said Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House committee that oversees the State Department.

“However, this administration’s approach when it sees a problem is to take the United States off the field,” he added. “That undermines our standing in the world and allows our adversaries to fill the void.”

But Pompeo was scathing in his assessment of the council, calling it an “exercise in shameless hypocrisy, with many of the world’s worst human rights abuses going ignored, and some of the world’s most serious offenders sitting on the council itself.” 

“The only thing worse than a council that does almost nothing to protect human rights is a council that covers for human rights abuses, and is therefore an obstacle to progress and an impediment to change,” he said. 

The decision came a day after the U.N. human rights chief slammed the administration’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children after they enter the United States at the Mexican border, calling it “unconscionable” and akin to child abuse.

This is the first time since the Human Rights Council was formed in 2006, replacing the disbanded Human Rights Commission, that a sitting member volunteered to step aside, though Libya was suspended in 2011 after a government crackdown on unarmed protesters.

The United States initially shunned the panel over President George W. Bush’s concerns that so many human rights offenders could be seated through noncompetitive elections for members nominated by their regional colleagues. The Obama administration sought a seat in 2009 in an effort to showcase that human rights were an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy.

Before the United States joined, half the country-specific votes condemned Israel. During the first six years the United States was a member, resolutions critical of Israel dropped to one-fifth. U.S. membership also led to a sharp decrease in the number of special sessions that focused exclusively on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“It’s true, the Human Rights Council continues to disproportionately focus on Israel,” said Peter Yeo, an official with the United Nations Foundation that connects the organization with private and nongovernmental groups and foundations. “But with U.S. leadership, the attention Israel brought has dropped significantly. U.S. leadership matters. We’re still the only ones with credibility on human rights on the world stage.”

The Trump administration’s irritation with the council makeup and its agenda has been telegraphed with drumbeat regularity by Haley. A year ago, she denigrated it as a “forum for politics, hypocrisy and evasion,” and threatened a U.S. exit if the council did not kick out abusive regimes and remove Item 7, the standing resolution critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. She repeated her ultimatum two weeks ago.

Since 2006, the Human Rights Council has passed more than 70 resolutions critical of Israel, 10 times as often as it has criticized Iran. On one day alone in March, the council passed five resolutions condemning Israel.

The council’s current membership includes 14 countries that are ranked as “not free” by Freedom House: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, China, Cuba, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

Haley said many countries agree with U.S. accusations of anti-Israel bias on the council and hypocrisy by abusers but would not openly challenge the status quo.

“We gave them opportunity after opportunity, and many months of consultations, and yet they would not take a stand unless it was behind closed doors,” she said. “Some even admitted they were fine with the blatant flaws of the council, as long as they could pursue their own narrow agenda within the current structure.”

Bret Schaefer, a Heritage Foundation scholar who analyzes U.N. actions, called the withdrawal a “measured” response.

“The Trump administration seems to be the only government that seriously wanted the Human Rights Council to promote universal respect and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in a fair and equal manner,” he said.

But some questioned whether a U.S. withdrawal will lead to reforms, or further undermine the council’s mission.

“The Trump administration’s withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel.”