On the Front Lines of the GOP's Civil War

In 2016, a group of Republicans broke ranks with their party to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency. Now they’re rallying once more to keep him from destroying the country. Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Never Trumpers.

 By Sam Tanenhaus, Illustrations by Edward Steed

  Book parties in Manhattan tend to be overspillings of the workday. People stop by in office clothes on their way home—uptown, downtown, to Brooklyn, or out to the suburbs. But in D. C., book parties are social occasions, even when they involve business, which is to say politics, the only business that matters. One Saturday evening in late October, some of the brightest figures in Washington’s media elite streamed into a splendid Colonial Revival house on Foxhall Road in Wesley Heights. “Outer Georgetown,” someone clarified: The phrase implied more than it said, like so much else in this surreal time in American politics. Some of the guests were liberal journalists whose faces were as familiar as their bylines: Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Drew, Andrew Sullivan and David Corn. But among them, too, was a cadre of the uprooted and displaced, writers, intellectuals, and pundits who, had they gathered in Paris or London—well, Ottawa, anyway—might have worn the haunted glamour of émigrés and exiles, though in this case they are strangers in the same precincts where they once felt very much at home. Call them Republicans with a conscience, conservatives without a party, or simply, as most do, the Never Trumpers.

Liberals and conservatives have always commingled easily in Washington, but a year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, old lines are blurring and new alliances are forming in remarkable ways. Exhibit A is the owner of the grand house on Foxhall Road: David Frum, a former hardcore conservative and speechwriter for George W. Bush. It was Frum who, with another Never Trumper, Michael Gerson (now a Washington Post columnist), coined the phrase “axis of evil” in 2002 and promptly entered the annals of liberal infamy. These days, however, Frum is better known as a heretic and outcast, primus inter pares of the Never Trumpers. 

As the party got under way, Frum and his wife, the author Danielle Crittenden—he in a dark-blue suit and white shirt; she in black pants and a sleeveless blouse—greeted their guests. With his broad forehead and Tory accent (“agaynst”), Frum still has the manner of the Toronto gentry in which he was reared. Standing near a pair of museum-quality African sculptures, he gently urged his guests down a small flight of stairs to the backyard, which was getting crowded and buzzy in the fading light. 

The week that had just ended was no more or less lurid than many others in the first year of Trump’s America, that bottomless tasting menu of national debasement. The day before, a video had surfaced proving that the administration’s Mr. Clean, John Kelly, the chief of staff universally praised for bringing soldierly order to an anarchic White House, had defamed an African-American congresswoman. Meanwhile, the week-old #MeToo movement had begun to fell big media names. (A no-show at the Frums’, though he’d been on the guest list, was Leon Wieseltier, the former New Republic eminence and literary monarch of Washington; his story would break a few days later.)

Given all this, it didn’t seem odd to be celebrating, near a lighted pool with fountain spouts on a warm Indian-summer night, the publication of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (sample chapter: 

“Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”), which had just that week gotten a rave in The New York Times. As the Champagne fizzed and the “Eastern Europe–themed” hors d’oeuvres circulated on silver trays—smoked sturgeon, osetra caviar, borscht shots with vodka that went down like raspberry sherbet—the book’s author, Post columnist Anne Applebaum, gave brief remarks. She thanked her “beloved friends the Frums,” who “care about the things I care about,” and also reminded the guests of another book, From a Polish Country House Kitchen: 90 Recipes for the Ultimate Comfort Food, which she and Crittenden wrote in 2012. “We had a little discussion beforehand about whether we should talk about the cookbook in honoring a book about the famine,” Applebaum said. 

“After a famine,” Crittenden called out, “you want a cookbook.” 

Everyone laughed, but Applebaum, in a black cocktail dress, had serious things to say. For one, the lessons of the Ukraine famine, in which almost four million died, were more immediate than we might suppose. Consider: The mass starvation was not an accident but a plan—part of a policy designed by Stalin to stamp out rebellion in a region five hundred miles from Moscow. Stalin’s paranoia went back to the beginning of the Russian Revolution, which had inspired anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Ukraine and caused his predecessor, Lenin, to say, “We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance in the coming decades.”

"Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything."

Well, the decades kept coming, but so did resistance, in ever-changing forms. Today, it is the Never Trumpers who are holding out against “forced collectivization”—imposed by the leaders of their own party—and feel locked in an epochal struggle, with a great deal riding on the outcome. To them Trumpism is more than a freakish blight on the republic. It is a moral test. “We’ve seen a moment before when holders of property gambled that their best hope of retaining their property was to disenfranchise fellow citizens,” Frum told me. “We’ve seen before when important parts of society put their faith in authoritarianism. Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything—‘It’ll just happen automatically.’ ” 

This is not the sort of thing Frum said in his former life, as a wunderkind of the American Right. But for him, as for many of the guests at his party, the rise of Trump changed the old refrain “It can happen here” into something more dire and pressing: “It’s happening now and must be stopped.” One guest, the affable conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, has called Trump a “European-style blood-and-soil nationalist.” Another, the historian Ronald Radosh, has written that when he met Steve Bannon in 2013, at the so-called Breitbart Embassy in D. C., Trump’s future Rasputin told him, “I’m a Leninist. . . . I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” That establishment includes the Never Trumpers, and it’s a sign of how far things have come that these insiders have now become outlaws.

Long before Trump was even nominated, when hopeful moderates were pointing to his encouragingly sane positions on abortion and health care and party elders like Bob Dole and Trent Lott were saying that Ted Cruz was the greater evil, a small but influential band of Republicans, not yet called Never Trumpers, were warning that he was an authentic global menace. One august figure on the Right, the Post columnist George Will, renounced the Republican party in June 2016, declaring himself unable to witness its submission to Trump. Others, such as longtime GOP operatives Mike Murphy and Rick Wilson, began appearing on MSNBC, where they swung hard at nominee and party alike. At the time, Trump seemed headed for a historic rout in the general election, and the spectacle of these chagrined oppositionists was a cheap-thrills sideshow to liberals, who chortled, if only to themselves, “So now you get it.” 

What was missed was the message the Never Trumpers were trying to send, and how genuinely alarmed they were. “There wasn’t a single conservative I talked with at the beginning of 2016 who thought Donald Trump was a remotely acceptable candidate for president,” says Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign-policy writer who served as an advisor to John McCain in 2008 and Marco Rubio eight years later. In March 2016, as Trump closed in on the nomination, another neocon, William Kristol, a founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to engineer a third-party escape hatch. It went nowhere. Two years on, Boot has quit the Republican party and says of his Never Trump confederates, whose numbers seem to shrink by the day, “Right now we could all fit in my living room.” Boot’s tone, plaintive but defiant, is common among the Never Trumpers. It echoes the cadences of another period in our history, when a generation of would-be communist revolutionaries were similarly blindsided—the Ukraine famine was only the first of several shocks—and subsequently abandoned the faith. Some of these apostates swore off politics altogether.

Others went into retreat. Still others rejoined the fight but switched sides. They became counterrevolutionaries, spoiling for one last showdown. One of them, the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, predicted at midcentury that “the final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists.” 

A parallel conflict is unfolding today, as one sharp blow after another—from Trump’s humbling of Fox News to the reductio ad absurdum of Roy Moore—has deepened the enmity between the pro-Trump faction and its adversaries on the Right. This latter group sometimes sounds like liberals, but its members are in fact counter-Republicans who mean to take their party back, or blow it up. Others are seeking a third way. A group that includes Boot and Applebaum is creating a centrist sanctuary and talk shop, the Renew Democracy Initiative. They’re polishing up a manifesto and plan to bring out a book, “a kind of Federalist 2.0,” says one contributor, the columnist Bret Stephens, a Never Trumper exile from The Wall Street Journal. In April of last year, Stephens went to the Times and hasn’t looked back, except to toss grenades at Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, and the rest of what he calls “the bigoted, dipshit wing of the Republican party.” Stephens today sounds less disillusioned than emancipated—as though, in his words, he’s “walking away from a love affair gone bad.”

The same is even truer of Frum, who outdoes all others in his born-again zeal, perhaps because he got there first and has the scars to show for it. His bill of particulars against the movement and the party he once championed long predates Trump and Trumpism. In the essays and columns he writes for The Atlantic, in his fluent commentary on MSNBC, in his smart Twitter observations (he has close to six hundred thousand followers), and in his new book, Trumpocracy, Frum’s sharpest jabs are aimed not at the “kleptocrat” Trump but at House and Senate Republicans whose “ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity” and were a “radical attack on American norms of governance.” 

His pages on the “Rigged System,” the Republican campaign to disenfranchise African-American voters in no fewer than twenty states, burn with the white-hot anger we would expect to read in The Nation, not in a book by a former Bush staffer who once teamed up with Richard Perle, the neocon “prince of darkness,” to write An End to Evil, a jeremiad heady with high-Cheneyist fumes. 

(“Mullahs preach jihad from the pulpits of mosques from Bengal to Brooklyn,” Frum and Perle wrote. “Our enemies plot, our allies dither and carp, and much of our own government remains ominously unready for the fight.”) 

The Never Trumpers have their own history to live down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism. Jacob Heilbrunn, who wrote a skeptical history of neoconservatives and their swaggering approach to foreign policy, says Frum and the others are “back on old and comfortable terrain as intellectual renegades, issuing apocalyptic warnings about a totalitarian threat to democracy. They want to make neoconservatism great again by championing regime change—this time in Washington itself.”

On the Right, “neoconservative” carries a second, explicitly cultural depth charge, as Boot acknowledges when he says that “Jewish conservative intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been pretty stalwart.” That’s not surprising, given the anti-Semitic odor that clings to the alt-right pockets of Trumpism. It also stirs troubling memories of the long history of white ethnocentrism on the American Right, from the Depression-era demagoguery of Father Coughlin through the “Christian Front”–style offensives against the civil-rights movement in the fifties, up through Pat Buchanan’s attacks on the pro-Israel “Jewish lobby.”

This may explain the Never Trumpers’ defensiveness. “I’m a registered Republican,” Frum told me recently, as if trying to convince himself that the party he once belonged to still exists . . . somewhere. Across the continent, possibly? “If I lived in California,” he speculated, “I’m sure I’d be voting for Republican members of the state legislature or a Republican candidate for governor”—but not, he allows, if he lived in Alabama. 

Of course, Frum knows very well that Republicans have no power in California and frighteningly much in Alabama. And one can scour the conservative press—which tends toward either robust Trumpism or evasive anti-anti-Trumpism—and not feel the urgency that one finds in Frum’s Trumpocracy, with its despairing plea to an audience he worries is deaf to the approaching thunder of the Cossacks. “Maybe you don’t care about the future of the Republican party,” he writes, addressing an imaginary liberal reader. “You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

---

Frum dates his apostasy to the 2008 election, which he wrote about as a conservative journalist (for National Review) and policy expert (for the American Enterprise Institute, the Beltway’s premier conservative think tank). Everyone knew it was going to be a tough year for the Republicans. Bush’s second term—Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the subprime-mortgage crisis—was catastrophic. The Democrats had a charismatic presidential candidate in Barack Obama. John McCain, the Republican nominee, was overmatched and showing his age. In desperation, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. “When McCain picked her, you could understand how they arrived at that decision,” Frum says today. “She’s a woman. She raised taxes on the oil industry. I was briefly sold on that idea.” 

Not for long, though. McCain’s team hadn’t vetted Palin with any rigor, but Frum did, informally. “YouTube was still a very new thing,” he recalls, “and I remember watching all the video I could find. There wasn’t much, maybe three hours.” It was enough to see the obvious. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about Alaska.” 

Palin’s ignorance alone was disqualifying. Even worse, Frum remembers, she had a brilliant but disturbing campaign style. “She had a genius for finding the stress points in American society and turning people against people,” he says, meaning her insinuating praise of small-town “real America” and her accusation that Obama, the nation’s first black presidential nominee, had been “palling around with terrorists.” Palin didn’t invent this style of demagoguery. But she was, in Frum’s telling, the purest practitioner. 

After the election, he began to rethink. The trouble wasn’t McCain’s drubbing. It was the conservative embrace of Palin, which seemed tied to “the collapse of support for the Republican party by the young and the educated,” as he later told The New York Times. He left National Review with an idea to revive a more moderate Republicanism. His vehicle was a now-defunct website called the FrumForum. 

During the first months of the Obama presidency, Frum says, he noticed that an odd silence had settled over his colleagues at AEI. The country was locked in debate over the Affordable Care Act, the most ambitious legislative initiative in a generation. Why wasn’t AEI more vocal about it? Frum thought he knew: Many of the policy experts at AEI supported the bill but were afraid to say so, lest they anger their allies—and donors.

In fact, there was every reason for conservatives to like the policy, in principle at least. Its cornerstone, the so-called individual mandate, was the stepchild of an idea dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation, the number-two conservative think tank in D. C. Today, Republicans from Trump on down vehemently denounce the mandate—it was a casualty of the tax bill the Senate passed late last year—but it was designed as a market-based approach to health care, a near carbon copy of the plan Mitt Romney had enacted as governor of Massachusetts. These resemblances were no secret. On the contrary, they were supposed to be a selling point for Obamacare. “It was a compromise measure, crafted with the buy-in of the pharma and insurance companies, with a lineage stretching back to Richard Nixon’s proposal, and based on the Heritage-Romney plan,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a chronicle of the modern Republican party. “It was an alternative to the Medicare-for-all that the Democrats surely would have preferred.”

Conservative opponents of the ACA were well aware of the bill’s provenance. But since attacking Obamacare worked at election time, they pretended otherwise, inventing the fiction of “repeal and replace.” The same dishonesty explains why they couldn’t come up with a workable substitute: Obamacare was the GOP plan. “The Republicans never had a health-care alternative,” says Ross Douthat, the New York Times op-ed columnist who counts himself among the Never Trumpers. 

All of this is obvious today, but Frum saw it happening in real time. Though he is by temperament and talent an intellectual pamphleteer, he’s also a first-rate wonk. His book Dead Right, published in 1994, stripped bare the myth of Ronald Reagan as the vanquisher of big government. And he knew that the Democrats had been serious about health-care policy, dating back at least to Hillary Clinton’s attempt in 1993. “Hillarycare” has entered history as a dismal flop, but it was a political defeat, not a policy failure. We forget that Hillary dazzled legislators of both parties in early hearings, and that the task force she set up brought the full spectrum of experts into “the process.” The program crashed only after Republicans launched a media campaign to destroy it.

Frum understood this because he’d been on the other side, fending off the evils of big government, but by 2010 he was looking at things less ideologically. To begin with, the country was still digging out of the Great Recession. The economy had been shedding five hundred thousand jobs a month—and when people lost jobs, they lost medical coverage. They needed help. But Republicans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. Congressional hotshots like Paul Ryan were calling the economic crisis a boondoggle for tax-and-spend Democrats. 

Republicans vowed that health care would be Obama’s Waterloo. They all but ignored the excitement he inspired, and the discipline of his congressional majorities, who had learned from the mistakes of Hillarycare. All this indicated that the ACA was going to pass, which meant Republicans should bargain hard for the pieces they wanted—especially since Obama preferred a bipartisan bill. Instead, the GOP stonewalled. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing,” Frum wrote on his website in March 2010. “We went for all the marbles, we ended with none.”

The Obama White House delightedly tweeted Frum’s post, and then came the angry barrage. First, Frum was eviscerated in a Wall Street Journal editorial. No matter that he had been an editor there during the first Bush presidency, and had edited columns by Paul Gigot, who had since become the Journal’s top opinion-page editor. “Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role,” the Journal said. “He’s peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics.” 

Next came a call from AEI. “Time for me to come in and have a chat with the powers that be,” Frum recalls. He had a meeting with AEI’s president, Arthur Brooks, the next day. According to Frum, Brooks “told me I was welcome to keep my title but I should give up my salary and my office and not come to work anymore. I was mad about it at the time. In retrospect, I don’t know that he had any choice.” Frum means he’d asked for it. “There’s a part of me that knows I should write in a blander way,” he says. “It would be healthier. I know that and then I just won’t do it.” 

It helps that he doesn’t have to. With children not yet of college age, Frum would have preferred to keep his $100,000 AEI salary. But he didn’t need the money. His father, Murray Frum, was a Toronto real-estate tycoon and one of North America’s major art collectors (hence the exquisite African sculptures), and he led a consortium that came close to buying the Blue Jays in 1997. Barbara Frum, David’s mother, was a revered CBC journalist. 

But while Frum didn’t have money worries, others did. “The economy of the conservative world in 2009 and 2010 was very difficult,” he told me. “A lot of think tanks were shrinking. And a lot of people were scared. They didn’t want to be seen with me. It felt dangerous.” As he was pushed further out of the circle, something inside him was freed up. He began to reinvent himself as a conscientious objector to the Republican party, criticizing it from within. In 2011, he wrote a blistering cover story for New York magazine in which he said the GOP had “lost touch with reality.” 

All its policy ideas, he said, boiled down to a single fetish: “more tax cuts for the very highest earners.” (Six years later, Trump’s GOP made a prophet of him with its tax “reform” bill.) Frum also wrote a takedown of Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek. “That was really out of bounds,” he told me with a laugh. “I’d committed various infractions against orthodoxy and people were genuinely mad,” Frum says. “It was lonely and disorienting. I lost a lot of friendships. Suddenly people I spent a lot of time with weren’t around.”

---

All political movements contain the seeds of their own ruin. Either the leaders of the movement sue for peace with the establishment, or they keep pushing the envelope ever further, until the fringe displaces the center. Both those fates combined to undo “movement conservatism.” Its first theorists and publicists, a small nucleus well aware that they were outnumbered in their efforts to roll back history, ran interference for dubious causes and rabble-rousing politicians. In the fifties, William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, both Yalies, wrote a book defending the below-the-belt slugger Joseph McCarthy and arguing that the true hysterics were the “enemies” who were out to get him. Barry Goldwater, the GOP presidential nominee in 1964, defended the crackpots of the John Birch Society as doughty patriots while insisting that the actual extremists were liberal intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Still later, when talk radio became big, Republican elites championed Limbaugh. “Dear Rush,” Ronald Reagan wrote in 1992, “thanks for all you’re doing to promote Republican and conservative principles. Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you’ve become the number-one voice for conservatism in our country.” Soon enough, Limbaugh was on the cover of National Review, with the headline “The Leader of the Opposition.” From there it was a small step to Palin love. After her debate with Joe Biden in 2008, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote, “I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked at me’. . . . And her smile . . . sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”

“Every major non–Wall Street Journal columnist was against Trump. The Weekly Standard was against Trump. National Review was against Trump. None of it mattered.”

The high-low fusion was risky—a kind of unsafe political sex. With each compromise, movement elites gave up more ground. “You can tell this story as one of a changing media environment,” says Ross Douthat. “From Buckley to Roger Ailes”—the longtime head of Fox News—“you go from a time when the leading media impresario was intellectual and high-minded to someone who was primarily interested in making money.” Buckley and company had an old-fashioned belief in institutions, and were confident the movement would remain a top-down operation. The ideas began with them. Why wouldn’t power accrue to them, too? “What you have in Buckley and Reagan is a desire to have what the liberals have had,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice. “Buckley doesn’t want a second-rate New York Times. He wants an actual conservative Times that has the same standing, same quality and reputation as the liberal Times. Reagan does not want a conservative president in office who’s going to have a less capable government than the liberals have had before.”

That illusion crumbled in 2016. “The election proved elite conservative media doesn’t matter,” says Douthat. “Every major non–Wall Street Journal columnist was against Trump. The Weekly Standard was against Trump. National Review was against Trump. None of it mattered.” 

And if those publications don’t matter, why fund them? Even as Trump taunts the “failing” New York Times, it’s the boutique right-wing media that’s truly in peril, now that its lack of influence has been exposed. When National Review—the country’s most venerable conservative journal—published its celebrated “Against Trump” issue just ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2016, the blowback was considerable. On a fundraising cruise last August, donors and subscribers objected fiercely to the issue. (NR editors and writers pointed out that it had been a one-off.) Today, Rich Lowry says that reports of financial pressure have been exaggerated. But at the time there was serious concern. “There were complaints and cancellations,” says Jack Fowler, National Review’s vice-president, though he adds that the magazine has since rebounded. 

It has done so by splitting the difference on Trump. NR writers Kevin Williamson and Jay Nordlinger oppose the president, while their colleague Ramesh Ponnuru looks for places where Trumpism intersects Reaganism or George W. Bushism. Meanwhile, Lowry, who has sometimes pushed an anti-anti-Trump line in his own columns, tries to keep NR’s pages in balance. “I watch the tone and the volume,” he says of attacks on Trump. “But, more or less, people can say what they think. We’ve probably had more internal debates than we’ve had in a while, but that’s a symptom of the times.”

The other option is to capitulate, which is what happened at The Wall Street Journal. Much has been written about friction between the Journal’s down-the-middle, just-the-facts news reporters and its highly ideological editorial department. But the more significant story—an obsession for the Never Trumpers—is the rupture within the Journal’s editorial pages and the exodus that resulted. 

Bret Stephens, who won a Pulitzer in 2013, was the defector with the highest profile. He was deputy editor when he jumped over to the Times, where he was soon joined by his editor at the Journal, Bari Weiss. The Journal’s books editor, Robert Messenger, is now at The Weekly Standard. Sohrab Ahmari, a foreign-policy writer, went to Commentary. Mark Lasswell, an editor, was told not to return from a book leave. 

Those were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors, was the Journal’s skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win. Several sources pointed to the editorials by one writer, James Freeman. “All-in for Ted Cruz” during the primaries, Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.” 

Since then, the Journal has gone further. Even jaded readers were startled to see the editorial-page call for Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation, to resign. And when an op-ed urged Trump to issue blanket preemptive pardons for the accused, John Yoo, the theorist of the expansive “unitary executive” and author of the Iraq War “Torture Memos,” warned in the Times that the Journal’s advice would place Trump on the road to impeachment. (Neither Gigot nor Freeman replied to interview requests.)

“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe,” says Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post writer who has declared war on both Trump and his GOP. “They’re not Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.” It is ideological groupthink, the Right’s own political correctness. And it gives credence to the old argument, rooted in the culture wars of the nineties, that a great many conservative writers and policy experts are intellectuals manqué, tightly leashed by wealthy donors, just like the Republican politicians they promote. 

But in truth, “Conservatism, Inc.” was never the luxury gravy train its critics depicted. It was closer to a Soviet-style nomenklatura, with a good deal of ideological policing. “I had the president of a small conservative think tank tell me he admires my anti-Trump position but he just can’t be identified that way because his donors would cut him off,” says Boot. Even now, the Never Trumpers I talked to, though freed from the grip of the old dogma, were constantly going off the record or pleading, “Protect me.” Who can blame them? For all their resources, they are indeed outnumbered—unwanted and unloved.

So it was in an earlier time, too. “We ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about,” Arthur Koestler, another of the great apostates, said long ago to liberals disinclined to take him and his ilk seriously. The good news is that the Never Trumpers are getting a close hearing. Whatever mistakes they made in their time of devotion, they have emerged as the best exegetes of the conservative god that failed. No one else understands it so well—its means, its ends, its methods, its costs. “The problem with the devil’s bargain is that the devil never delivers,” Frum says. “That’s the point of the story.”

Trump and the Goodfellas

The presidential candidate says he didn’t know he was doing business with the mob.

WSJ

Donald Trump says he’ll succeed as President because he has succeeded in business, so it’s appropriate to scour his business record. One area in particular that deserves scrutiny is his business relationship with companies controlled by the Mafia.

The reporting on this has so far been scanty, and we have no new revelations. But Mr. Trump was active in construction in the 1980s, when federal racketeering cases highlighted the influence that a “club” of mobsters exerted over large construction projects in New York City. In one 1988 trial, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, was among those convicted in a scheme to control and profit from the concrete contracts for numerous buildings in Manhattan, including Trump Plaza.

We asked Mr. Trump about these ties on his recent visit to the Journal, and his answers are worth hearing at length. Mr. Trump recalled that in Manhattan there were perhaps three concrete companies and “virtually every building that was built was built with these companies.” He added that “a lot—all of these people—were somehow associated, according to what I read, I don’t know it for a fact.”
Since the Mafia is in the business of stealing, we figured Mr. Trump would be angry that he had to build a “mob tax” into the cost of his projects. But he seemed to be a satisfied customer.

In his stream-of-consciousness way, Mr. Trump described the concrete companies of that era: “You know, Wall Street Journal didn’t write about these guys but these guys were excellent contractors. They were phenomenal. They could do three floors a week in concrete. Nobody else in the world could do three floors a week. I mean they were unbelievable. Trump Tower, other buildings. They would do literally—and you’d say how can you do three? They’d set it, pour it; before the concrete was even dry, they would be putting forms on the floor working off the steel beams, okay?”

He added that “they were unbelievably good contractors in terms of doing the work. But a lot of them were supposedly associated with the mob.” Did he realize at the time that he was, for example, working with a company largely controlled by Salerno? “No, nobody would know that,” said Mr. Trump.

He recalled that after the bust following the 1980s real-estate boom, many contractors “tended to be not around so much after that. Then a lot of them got indicted I think by [former New York County District Attorney Robert] Morgenthau, who was a great D.A., fantastic guy, fantastic, but he indicted a lot of people. I don’t know in concrete, but a lot of people were indicted. And then they started sort of disappearing. Actually it’s a much different world today. But if you built a building in New York, you basically were, unless you didn’t want to build it, you basically had to use one of the two or three companies that were there, for the concrete structure mostly.”

Atlantic City brought more transactions with wise guys. The Washington Post recently reported that Mr. Trump’s casino license was delayed as he was developing the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in part because of ties to reputed Scarfo crime family associate Kenny Shapiro.

Asked about a July CNN report suggesting Mr. Trump had overpaid for a parcel of Atlantic City land from Philadelphia mobster Salvatore Testa, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t know who Testa is.” CNN reported that the transaction occurred in 1982. That was a long time ago—and two years before Testa was found shot to death.

What about the contractors in south Jersey? “You had contractors that were supposedly mob-oriented all over Atlantic City,” Mr. Trump said, adding that “every single casino company used the same companies, just I hope you will say that.” Mr. Trump said that “unlike the ones I told you about in New York, they had some lousy contractors. But basically when you’re in Atlantic City, you’re using all of the contractors, you bid them out. Some of them may have been mob-oriented, I don’t know.”

But if Mr. Trump didn’t know whether his associates had mob ties, why did he warn others not to get involved in casino gambling lest they attract organized crime? Mr. Trump now says he was merely trying to discourage potential competitors from entering the casino business: “I’d say negative about it because I didn’t want to have other jurisdictions do gambling. That’s sort of, like, you know, basic business sense.” So he says he warned about mob influence to deter competitors while claiming lack of knowledge about mob ties to his own projects.

Mr. Trump has never been accused of a crime, and his see-no-evil, he-had-no-choice explanation worked for him as a businessman. The question is whether this is adequate for someone who wants to be President.

The question is especially apt for GOP primary voters because Democrats would surely raise it in the general election. Mitt Romney lost in 2012 in part because Democrats trashed his stellar business record in private equity. Better to vet Mr. Trump’s business record now than next October.

What’s Been the Effect of Western Sanctions on Russia?

by Priyanka Boghani
Source: Frontline

Watch: Putin's Way

When Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine last March, the United States and European Union responded with an economic weapon — sanctions.

The first few rounds, applied in March and April of 2014, targeted Russian and Crimean officials, as well as businessmen seen to have close ties to President Vladimir Putin — his “inner circle” — with travel bans and asset freezes.

Since then, the West has steadily expanded its sanctions against Russian entities, targeting major businesses and parts of Russia’s financial, energy and military industries.

FRONTLINE talked to Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on Jan. 8, 2015 about the effects and consequences of Western sanctions on the Russian economy. Åslund served as an economic adviser to the Russian and Ukrainian governments in the 1990s.

Which round of sanctions do you think really had an effect on the Russian economy? How would you measure that?

The sanctions the U.S. imposed came in two big chunks. The first concerned Crimea, and they were only personal sanctions for Crimean and Russian leaders involved in the Crimean drama.

Then, the important sanctions were imposed on July 16, which are called sectoral sanctions.

We can see that no money has been going into Russia after July. No financial institutions dared to provide Russia with any financing more than a month after that. And that we know from talking to banks. …

The point is that the [July] financial sanctions have worked out as far more severe in their effect than anyone seems to have believed.

Would sanctions alone have damaged Russia’s economy without the current plunging oil prices?

There are three major causes for Russia’s economic troubles. The first cause is the corruption and bad economic policies that Putin pursues, which on their own would lead to stagnation, or at most 1 percent growth.

The second element is the falling oil prices. The oil prices have now fallen so much that Russia’s total export revenues this year will be two-thirds of what they have been before. That means that Russia will have to cut its imports by half. This is a big blow.

This is then reinforced by the financial sanctions, so that Russia cannot mitigate this blow by borrowing money. By ordinary standards, Russia is perfectly credit-worthy with a public debt that is only 10 percent of GDP. But if you don’t have access to financial markets, then it doesn’t matter how credit-worthy you are, because you’re not credit-worthy so-to-say.

[Editor's Note: On Jan. 9, Fitch Ratings cut Russia's credit rating to BBB-, one step above junk.]

What has been the impact on the Russian public so far?

The big impact is that the prices of buckwheat have increased as much as 70 percent. Basic food stuff has increased sharply. We’re seeing consumer panic in Russia because of the falling exchange rate. And the falling exchange rate is mainly because of the oil prices, but it’s also the financial sanctions. People are fearful of the situation and we’re seeing that the exchange rate is jumping up and down. It’s moving either way every so often by 5 percent in a day. The worst we’ve seen is it has gone down by 10 percent in a day.

There’s fundamental financial instability in Russia now, and this will have a big impact on the banking system. We’ve so far seen one medium-sized bank going under and two of the big state banks have needed recapitalization. We will see more of that.

And this of course will hit the GDP. My guess is we’ll see a decline in the order of 10 percent this year.

One of the initial rounds of sanctions targeted members of Putin’s so-called inner circle, including Gennady Timchenko [founder of commodity trading company Gunvor], Igor Sechin [chairman of Rosneft, Russia's leading petroleum company], Arkady and Boris Rotenberg [magnates with majority stakes in construction firm Stroygazmontazh, and banks SMP and Investcapitalbank] and others. Were these sanctions largely symbolic, or did they do some real damage?

 

I think they’ve done real damage. These people… many of them are billionaires. They’re used to living in grand style, and now they are not allowed to travel to Europe and the U.S.

It’s particularly [the fact] that they’re not allowed to go to Europe that hurts them.
[Gennedy Timchenko] lives in Geneva. What I hear is that he moved back to Moscow because it became so impossible. Another of them — Boris Rotenberg — lives in Finland. Both Timchenko and Rotenberg are actually Finnish citizens.

A recent Bloomberg investigation found that companies linked to Timchenko and Arkady Rotenberg actually received more state contracts after being sanctioned. Does that mean the strategy of targeting Putin’s “inner circle” has in some way backfired?

 

Putin indeed has given Timchenko and Rotenberg more contracts through Gazprom. It now looks as if Putin is making the same mistake as [deposed President] Viktor Yanukovych did in Ukraine, giving ever more to his friends and very little to the others. Putin has been very good previously at distributing widely, but now he has tightened it so that it only goes to his close friends, and that is not likely to be popular.

And what do you think that could lead to, in terms of sentiment?

The elite [who aren't part of his inner circle] are utterly alienated from Putin now. I don’t think they will rise in any way against Putin, but they will take money out of the country as fast as they can, so it will further destabilize the country.
The question is what will happen in the big industrial cities outside the most wealthy cities — Moscow and St. Petersburg. It would be surprising if we don’t see some social unrest down the road, because these are big blows to ordinary people.

Are further sanctions possible? What would next steps look like?

My view is that the sanctions are so severe that it’s simply not necessary to reinforce them further. It’s also easier to keep the Western front together. The U.S. has, in this case, been very careful to keep a united front with the whole of the European Union. The administration has thought that it’s more important to keep unity with the E.U. than impose even more severe sanctions. I think that policy has borne fruit now.

Have sanctions been seen as a success from the U.S. government’s perspective?

I would think that one could strongly argue that, because what’s happened is that Russia cannot get international financing from any source. Russian international reserves declined last year by $135 billion. We haven’t gotten the final number, but that’s the order. There has been a huge outflow of reserves from Russia. And of course, the Russian economy is now in a serious financial crisis, which is, to a considerable extent, caused by the financial sanctions.

Are Russians trying to get around the sanctions? Is that even possible?

They clearly are trying to get around it. They’ve been trying to get money from China. But it’s very striking that the Chinese are not providing financing for Russia, because like everyone else they’re afraid of the American financial regulators. …

How the Gun-Rights Lobby Won After Newtown

Watch Frontline Gunned-Down and read How the Gun-Rights Lobby Won After Newtown. How American politics is controlled by National Rifle Association (NRA)!

by Sarah Childress
 

Even by the standards of mass public shootings in America, what happened last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staggering. Twenty-six victims, most no older than seven, were gunned down in their classrooms days before Christmas.

For gun-control advocates, Newtown offered an unprecedented moment to push to reform the nation’s gun laws. The day of the shooting, a visibly moved President Barack Obama called for “meaningful action.” One month later, a coalition of grieving Sandy Hook parents vowed to fight nationwide for “sensible solutions to prevent gun violence.” Some politicians with top ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA) even indicated they’d be willing to consider new laws.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, the gun-rights lobby outspent, out-organized and out-maneuvered gun-control advocates at both the state and federal level. A FRONTLINE examination of state legislation and federal lobbying expenditures shows that gun-rights groups outspent gun-control backers by nearly $10 million, and that around the country, states passed more than twice as many laws expanding gun owners’ rights than they did gun-control measures.

Representatives of the two top national gun lobbying organizations declined to talk to FRONTLINE about their efforts this past year. But records show that since Sandy Hook, 27 states have passed 93 laws expanding gun rights, including measures allowing people to carry concealed weapons in churches, public parks and schools, and to accept gun permits from neighboring states. In Congress, gun-rights lobbyists helped defeat the most comprehensive reform bill proposed in nearly two decades.

What happened?

“As upset as people who don’t own guns are about the misuse of guns — and of course gun owners are too — at the end of the day, they aren’t going to vote for or against you on the basis of what you do on this issue,” said Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearms Owners Association, who advocates what he calls “effective solutions” on guns. “Gun owners are going to vote, and they care deeply about this issue.”

Gun-control advocates say that they’re just beginning to gain momentum to challenge the well-funded and organized gun-rights movement. But they’ve also run up against the current political reality of guns in the U.S.

“These Are Good Bills”

Within three months of the shooting, states were consider more than 1,000 pieces of legislation — about half to expand gun rights, and the other half to curtail them.

By the end of 2013, only 43 gun-control laws had passed, nearly one-quarter of them in California.

Colorado legislators passed four laws, including expanded background checks and a ban on most magazines with more than 15 rounds. But the outcry among gun-rights supporters was so great that two senators who voted for the measures were recalled in September, and another stepped down last month to avoid being ousted. Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is running for re-election next year, is also struggling to stay ahead in the polls.

In Rhode Island, gun-rights advocates successfully lobbied to modify proposed gun-control bills until they felt they didn’t impose on firearm owners’ rights. The Providence Journal documented the House vote:

“They’ve been kind to us gun folks,” said Rep. Doreen Marie Costa on the House floor. “I want to make sure the NRA people and the [Federated Rhode Island Sportsmen’s Club] can hear this,” Costa added, as the lobbyists and gun-rights advocates watched from the balcony. “These are good bills.”

A New Gun-Rights Power

In January, President Obama announced 23 executive actions intended to strengthen the enforcement of existing gun laws. Last month, he touted some progress, including improving the national background-check database and appointing a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a post that’s been vacant for seven years.

But the administration’s major effort to pass what would have been the most sweeping reform in nearly two decades — new legislation that would have expanded background checks to include gun shows and online sales — failed within months in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

The legislation was staunchly opposed by gun-rights groups, including a powerful newcomer in the federal arena.

The National Association for Gun Rights, or NAGR, which considers itself to the right of the powerful NRA, spent nearly $6 million in lobbying this year through September 2013 — more than double what the NRA paid out and far more than any other group on either side of the debate.
The NAGR was founded in 2001, but until this
 year it focused mainly on advocacy, keeping local groups apprised of gun legislation in their states. The source of its funding isn’t clear because as a 501(c)4, the NAGR isn’t required to disclose its backers.

The group’s leadership has ties to former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The group’s executive vice president, Dudley Brown, declined to talk to FRONTLINE for this story. But earlier this year, Brown told the Center for Responsive Politics that the Sandy Hook shooting prompted the group to get involved on the federal level.

“We had not hired a federal lobbyist previous to that point, and we immediately started seeking one out after Connecticut,” he said. The group gained notoriety for running attack ads again Republican members of Congress, including Eric Cantor, the House majority whip, accusing them of supporting the president’s gun-control initiatives.

The “Connecticut Effect”

Gun-control advocates have never been as organized, as wealthy or as motivated as gun-rights groups, so even with the newfound momentum that some have called the “Connecticut effect,” they’re working at a disadvantage.

But in 2013, gun-control advocates marked several victories, including in Connecticut, one of the few states to pass comprehensive gun control legislation. After the shooting, gun-control groups in the state gained thousands of new members. Suburban moms speed-dialed legislators every Friday at 9:30 a.m., the moment the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary began. Other groups formed to march against gun violence, and advocates showed up at legislative hearings to counter pro-gun supporters.

That kind of grassroots power is new for the gun-control movement — and something they admit will take years to replicate nationwide. The goal: create enough baseline support for legislators so they can vote for gun-control measures without fearing for their political lives.

“A year ago, not only were we swimming against the tide, there wasn’t much hope at all that people felt in terms of passing laws that would actually save lives,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Now, he said, “We’re on the right trajectory. Every day that we wake up, we’re focused on continuing that momentum that we’ve established, with grassroots organizing across the country, new levels of membership, and funding that this issue hasn’t seen in years. It all is headed in the right direction.”

The question now is what happens next year, as the 2014 midterm elections approach. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the largest gun-control group in terms of lobbying expenditures, plans to continue to back politicians who side with them and attack those who don’t. The Brady Campaign says it’s working with federal lawmakers to craft a new background-check bill, although they declined to name names on a recent conference call with reporters.

“It will take us awhile to match what the NRA has accomplished in two decades, but I think it’s happening a lot faster than anyone thought it would,” said Mark Glaze, Mayors’ director.

But the gun-rights movement isn’t likely to lose its momentum, either. The NAGR rallied its supporters this week to oppose Congress’ extension of a ban on plastic guns that can avoid detection by airport security. Although the bill passed, it lacked new restrictions proposed by gun-control supporters.

And, the NRA, which plans to reintroduce gun-rights legislation that failed at the state level, has billed 2014 as the “biggest battle for gun rights in our lifetime.”

The Mafia's Deadly Garbage: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal

By Walter Mayr of Der Spiegel 

For decades, the Mafia has been dumping toxic waste illegally in the region north of Naples. Recently declassified testimony shows that leading politicians have known about the problem for years, yet done nothing about it -- even as the death toll climbs.
 
 Part 1: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal

Carmine Schiavone has been baptized twice. The first time was as a newborn, by the priest. The second was by the godfather himself, Luciano Liggio, a leading figure in the Sicilian Mafia.

"The second baptism went like this," says Schiavone. "An icon was placed in my hand and a drop of blood was dribbled onto it. Then, the icon was burned and the following was recited: 'You shall burn like this saint if you betray the brothers or the allies of the Cosa Nostra.'"

Schiavone gave his vow, committed himself to the cause -- and nevertheless went on to betray it in the end. After years as a leader in the notorious Casalesi clan, part of the Mafia network around Naples, he changed sides in 1993 and became a key witness in legal proceedings against his associates. He testified against Casalesi heavies with nicknames such as Sandokan, Midnight Fatty, Baby and others.

When the so-called "Spartacus Trial" finally ended in 2010, members of the Campania clan received up to 16 consecutive life sentences, thanks not least to the testimony provided by Schiavone. His reward has been a new life under police protection in which he had to constantly remain on the move. On this morning, too, he has a fake ID in his pocket just in case, complete with an alias and a birthplace in Libya.

Sitting in front of an open fireplace in a countryside villa, a cat dozing on his lap, he looks like someone who has made his peace with the world. But the bucolic scene is misleading; the guilt from his previous life weighs heavily on Schiavone. "I participated in about 50 murders, some of them I ordered myself. I knew about an additional 400 to 500."

The ex-Mafioso has spent roughly half of his 70 years in jail or under house arrest. From a legal point of view, he has paid for his crimes. Yet these days, Schiavone is once again the center of attention, due to testimony that he delivered on Oct. 7, 1997 before a parliamentary investigative committee in Rome. His statement was so expansive that it was kept secret -- until the Italian parliament relented to public pressure at the end of October last year and lifted its classification.

'Millions of Tons'
 
The 1997 hearing was not focused on the kind of killing that Schiavone played a role in during the gang warfare in the Neapolitan hinterlands. Rather, it centered on negligent homicide -- the product of contaminated soil and groundwater from highly toxic waste that, as is now known, was for years illegally and profitably dumped, primarily by the Casalesi clan.

"We are talking about millions of tons," Schiavone, formerly head of administration for the Mafia organization, told the parliamentarians. "I also know that trucks came from Germany carrying nuclear waste." The operations took place under the protection of darkness and were guarded by Mafiosi in military police uniforms, he said. He showed Italian justice officials the location of many of the dumpsites because, as he put it in 1997, the people in those areas are at risk of "dying of cancer within 20 years."

More than 16 years have passed since Schiavone uttered this prophecy before the investigative committee -- and nothing has been done. The outrage is all the greater now. Not only because cancer researchers have found mounting indicators that Schiavone might have been telling the truth. But also because numerous officials at all levels must have known about Schiavone's warnings since the mid-1990s -- and ignored them.

The pressure is particularly great on the following players:

• Giorgio Napolitano was Italy's interior minister at the time and thus ultimately in charge of the investigation. Today, he is the country's president.
• Gennaro Capoluongo was, according to Schiavone, in a helicopter that went on a tour of some of the toxic waste dumps. Today, he is Italy's Interpol head.
• Alessandro Pansa was head of mobile units for the Italian police force at the time. Now he is head of the Italian State Police.
• Nicola Cavaliere was with the criminal police at the time and was involved in the case, according to Schiavone. Today is the deputy head of Italy's domestic intelligence service.

But even as evening news programs in Italy are now warning of an "atomic inferno," the country's officials are proceeding as they always have, particularly President Napolitano. He speaks of the Camorra as being the "main actor" in the environmental disaster near his hometown of Naples while preferring not to talk about his own role. Secret service deputy Cavaliere has said that he "never directly" dealt with the issue. And others implicated by Schiavone have either remained silent or attempted to play down concerns.

Names, Dates and Places
 
Didn't the journalist Roberto Saviano already describe in his book "Gomorrah" how the Mafia had transformed Italy's south into a garbage dump for the rich north? Why the sudden alarm? Might it be that a crazed ex-Mafioso is suddenly sowing panic so that the state spends millions to clean up the toxic sites -- from which the Mafia could once again profit?

It's certainly possible.

But even that would do little to lessen the severity of Schiavone's accusations. Nobody before him spoke of nuclear waste transports. Nobody before him described in such detail how industrial waste from illegal plants in the north found its way to the south. He recounted how the waste -- irrespective of whether it contained dioxin, asbestos or tetrachloroethylene -- was dumped into pits that had been dug in the process of road construction.

It is estimated that 11.6 million tons of waste are illegally disposed of each year in Italy. The environmental organization Legambiente puts the business in black garbage at over €16 billion in 2012. It would seem to be a crisis-proof line of work, particularly given that Mafia clans offer their services at a fraction of the price of official disposal firms.
The Mafia is a part of the state, Schiavone says, adding that the Casalesi were a "state clan" and that the state profited from the garbage business as well -- serious accusations which he says he can prove. The former Mafioso opens the door into a room where he keeps boxes of documents, digs into the papers and starts naming names, dates and places.

All of the information in his possession, Schiavone says, was provided to national anti-Mafia officials in the 1990s. The name of a Milan-based intermediary firm, which played a key role in the north-south waste transfer, was also included in the documents. "But that part of my testimony was classified by King Giorgio," he says.

King Giorgio? "Napolitano, who was interior minister at the time." And who was behind the company in Milan? "One of the partners," Schiavone says, "was PB -- Paolo Berlusconi." Paolo Berlusconi is the vice president of the football club AC Milan and brother of four-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Was he really a participant in the Mafia's trade in toxic and nuclear waste? Schiavone has publicly said as much, but Paolo Berlusconi calls his claims a "fairy tale."

'Land of Poison'
 
If you head south on the Autostrada del Sole and exit at Casserta, just short of Naples, you will end up where thousands of trucks in past decades dumped their loads of industrial waste -- in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. It is right in the heart of the region where Goethe spent some time during his southerly travels, describing it delightedly as the "most fertile plain in the world."

Times have changed. As early as 2004, the British medical journal The Lancet Oncology described the area around Acerra as a "triangle of death" where sheep with two heads were born. Later, the entire region north of Naples was dubbed "Terra dei fuochi" or "Land of Fires." Images circulated of ragged children in front of black pillars of smoke rising above unauthorized garbage dumps. Now that it has become clear that the greatest danger is posed by what remains beneath the earth, it is referred to as "Land of Poison."

The area that Goethe once traveled through is now a series of non-descript settlements separated by cauliflower fields and shopping centers; one sees Nigerian prostitutes, figurines of saints in roadside altars and mountains of garbage where you can find everything from beer bottles to barrels of dioxin. And yet, even on this piece of maltreated Italian territory, there is a tiny drop of color: a vanilla-toned fortress, stranded like a UFO on a far-away planet.

The lovingly landscaped US Navy base in Gricignano lies halfway between two poisoned swathes of land. Which means that everyone on the base, including Admiral Bruce Clingan, who commands US and Allied forces in Europe and Asia -- and resides in the "Villa Capri" with its view of Mt. Vesuvius -- must obey strict rules. Tap water may no longer be used on base, not even for brushing teeth. Even the Naval Support Activity commander's cat drinks bottled water.

Part 2: Tumors and Autism

The reasons are carefully listed in a $30 million study commissioned by the US Navy in 2011 -- a paper that was only brought to the attention of Italians via an article in the magazine L'Espresso. It's title: "Drink Naples and die."

The Americans took soil, water and air samples from the thousands of square kilometers surrounding the base, with 5,281 contaminated or suspicious locations being identified. It was found that water from 92 percent of the private wells sampled outside the base posed an "unacceptable health risk." In 5 percent of the samples, uranium levels were found to be "unacceptably high." The most embarrassing verdict for Italians? "Over time, it became evident that lack of enforcement by responsible institutional bodies contributed to the current situation in Naples."

Should a soldier elect to live off base, he or she is advised to live in a multi-story building and to avoid ground-floor apartments; contamination from toxic gases is lower on upper floors. Three areas not far from the base have been declared completely off-limits.

In the meantime, the more than 500,000 Italians who live in the region north of Naples are trying to make the best of their situation. They spend their evenings in places like the Goldhotel in Marcianise, right in the heart of the residential zone that is forbidden for American troops. They don't ask three times where the vegetables in their insalata mista come from or where the buffalo, whose milk was used for the mozzarella, grazed.
Indeed, much of the produce from the region is still considered to be uncontaminated and there are several harvests per year. Yet there are still days when even upright men such as General Sergio Costa from the national forest service have the feeling they are looking through the "gates of Hell:" on the day in November, for example, when he and his men dug up barrels of toxic waste from beneath cauliflower fields in Caivano. The plastic gloves some of the officers were using to handle the waste dissolved on contact.

Europe's Nastiest Landfill
 
Further west in Giugliano, 500 Roma live in shacks and caravans at the foot of what is probably Europe's nastiest landfill, stuffed with, among other things, toxic sludge and dioxin. It is a place where, in the opinion of the responsible government commissioner, a "sarcophagus like in Chernobyl" would be necessary to protect the public. According to a geological study, a disaster of such finality isn't expected there for another 50 years -- until then, the poisons will continue to "contaminate dozens of square kilometers of land and everyone who lives there."

Antonio Marfella from the Italian Cancer Research Institute in Naples offers other sober findings: Tumors have increased by 47 percent among men in the province of Naples within the past two decades. Above all, the occurrence of lung carcinoma is increasing, even among non-smokers -- a rarity in Europe. The region of Campania now has the highest infertility rate in Italy and also leads in cases of severe autism -- triggered, experts suspect, by increased exposure to mercury.

That autistic children now play on the precious marble in the villa of the incarcerated Casalesi boss known as Sandokan is one piece of good news out of Naples. The residence was confiscated and transformed into a social center for the autistic.

There are other signs of hope elsewhere: when angry farmers, who are forced to sell their suspicious produce at ridiculously low prices, come together and discuss eco-agriculture as a model for the future, for instance. Or when Padre Maurizio Patriciello preaches to his flock.

The pastor of Caivano is a symbol of resistance in the toxic belt around Naples, a silver-tongued rebel in long robes who commands an audience when he says he can no longer look at all the "white coffins of children" in his church. On this morning he has placed photos of the children he has buried in the past few years close to the altar while he talks about how locals have begun to fight back.

'Despair Is Spreading'
 
"Early on, we didn't even know what was happening in the next parish," says the pastor, "until we began to organize ourselves. Since we started adding up the cancer deaths, there is fear -- and despair is spreading."

Padre Maurizio preaches, comforts and fights practically around the clock. He encourages believers to be vigilant and perform their civic duties. He teaches schoolchildren to keep a closer eye on politicians and on the Carabinieri. He has lobbied the senate in Rome and the European Parliament in Brussels for assistance, and he has requested an audience with Pope Francis.

Civil rights campaigners working with Padre Maurizio have sent 150,000 postcards, depicting mothers looking into the camera while holding photos of their dead children on their laps, to the pope and to President Napolitano. More than 100,000 people attended a protest march in November in Naples -- solidarity with the Land of Fires.

The petite Anna was on the front line of demonstrators. Her son Riccardo, a "boy who smiled constantly," was 20 months old when he died of leukemia in 2009. The children in this area have been "murdered, you understand? Murdered!" Anna shouts from the stage in Naples. "We demand first and last names, and not just of the Camorra people," she continues. "Everyone should pay for multiple murders and crimes against humanity!"

"Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!" the crowd echoes from below; the name of President Napolitano is hardly mentioned. The state and the Mafia, it's "more or less the same thing," Schiavone told the parliamentary committee in Rome way back in 1997.

Radioactive Waste from East Germany
 
Of course the influence of the Casalesi clan didn't -- nor does it now -- end on Italy's northern border, Schiavone says, sitting by the fireplace at his villa, adding that he said the same thing to the German federal police who interrogated him in Munich and Rome. "We had one of our men in Germany, who had contacts to politicians there," said Schiavone. "Through him, among others, came the toxic waste, including nuclear, to the company in Milan."

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office confirms that a meeting with Schiavone took place in 1994 and that it pertained to Casalesi activities on German soil. But officials say they have no recollection of discussions over toxic or nuclear waste.

Schiavone insists, however, that radioactive material "presumably from East Germany" was delivered in lead containers around 50 centimeters long. The containers were then buried "up to 20 meters deep -- but the probe, which was later used for measurements, only went six meters deep."

According to the prefect of the Campania region, the information provided by Schiavone is being verified. But for small quantities of radioactive material, he said, that could take a while.