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Be critical of the current president
The results of the Helsinki summit are in. President
Trump couldn’t handle statecraft or, for that matter, double negatives,
but he came out of the meeting undefeated and invincible. Like with the
Charlottesville hatefest or the “Access Hollywood” tape, it was just
another day at the office for Trump. Unlike the mocking balloon that soared over London, Trump never loses air.
The
post-summit poll numbers are instructive. While 50 percent of Americans
disapproved of the way Trump handled Vladimir Putin, his Republican
base stayed both loyal and comatose. In a Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance. An earlier Axios-SurveyMonkey poll put the GOP figure at 79 percent, not only more impressive but also downright eerie.
It
is safe to say that these numbers might have surprised even the shaken
White House staffers who flew back to Washington with Trump. The
commentariat was already on the air, reporting on the summit as if it
were a multicar Beltway collision. Even Fox News was critical, and Newt
Gingrich, whose wife is Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See, called the meeting “the most serious mistake” of Trump’s presidency — an extremely high bar.
National security adviser John Bolton got to work. On the plane, according to
the Wall Street Journal, he went about the painful business of damage
control and hammered out talking points advising Trump on how to reclaim
reality. One idea was for Trump to assert his support for the U.S.
intelligence community, the sort of prosaic statement, like a belief in
God, that no president had ever had to make. Trump, of course, did so —
and maintained this stance for almost a day.
There
is such a thing, we are told, as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It is an
ideological version of a speech disorder, which causes certain people to
denounce Trump in obscene ways. It has come over the likes of Robert De Niro and, when it came to Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee.
It has prompted others to call Trump a traitor, which is a slanderous
accusation too often used for crass political reasons. Sen. Joseph
McCarthy called the Roosevelt-Truman administrations “20 years of treason.”
Yet, the more dangerous variant of the syndrome is the willingness of most Republicans to support Trump no matter what. One of the first outbreaks of this occurred in the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary, which Trump won handily.
He did so running against fellow Republicans, not the reliably useful
Hillary Clinton. He even swept the evangelical Christian vote, beating
such staunch conservatives as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ben Carson, both
of whom have been married only once. The thrice-married Trump, in vivid
contrast, had run casinos and exchanged countless smirky remarks with Howard Stern. His piety was in question.
As far as the evangelical community is concerned, nothing has changed.
Trump has been accused of adultery and of buying the silence of his
alleged paramours. He has referred to impoverished nations as “shithole
countries” and — unforgivably — belittled the wartime torture of Sen.
John McCain. None of this shook his base. On the contrary, his support
within the Republican Party has risen and solidified. It now stands at around 90 percent, which is what tin-pot dictators get in rigged elections.
The upshot is that we now have two political parties
— one pro-Trump and one anti-. Some celebrated Republicans — George F.
Will, for instance — have already declared their apostasy. Will is now “unaffiliated,”
but no one runs for president as that. In this country, if you’re
anti-Trump, realism says you’ve got to vote Democratic. (Please, no more
of this Libertarian or Green Party nonsense.)
It’s
impossible to say at this point whether the pro-Trump/anti-Trump
dichotomy is just about the man himself or represents a wider and more
permanent political realignment. (Who’s the next Trump?) But it’s clear
that something beyond economics — and certainly not foreign policy —
motivates Trump’s people. My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a
vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular,
diverse and sexually tolerant. It is, in other words, some of the same
sentiment that once fueled European fascism.
Those
of us who write newspaper columns know that sheer brilliance, should it
happen, gets a silent nod of the head, but affirmation — saying what
readers already think — gets loud hurrahs. This is Trump’s appeal as
well. He validates the thinking — some of it ugly — of many Americans.
To them, Helsinki doesn’t matter and even Putin doesn’t matter. Only
Trump does. To them, he hates the right people.
“God
bless America,” our president said, dutifully, after the bloody Sunday
in Las Vegas. It’s a wish worth repeating. It’s an intervention sorely
needed in a country seriously lost.
God
bless America, where shock over a torrent of bullets that sends dozens
more to the morgue doesn’t last, if indeed there’s shock at all. This
kind of violence is no longer exceptional. But we are. No other affluent
country can match our massacres or, in the face of them, our paralysis.
We stand out boldly in this regard. We lead.
God
bless America, awash in self-delusion. House Speaker Paul Ryan
responded to the horror in Las Vegas by saying that “what truly defines
us” are the acts of heroism we learned of, while the shooting itself “is
not who we are.” How does he figure that? Las Vegas was one of the
worst but hardly the first. And it demands more than the gauzy pieties
and press-a-button platitudes that too many politicians spout.
God
bless America, where the juxtaposition of two articles published by
this section of this newspaper on Monday said it all. The first was
pictorial, a calendar
that captured all the mass shootings in the United States since June
12, 2016, when gunfire ruptured the party in the Pulse nightclub in
Orlando, Fla. There had been 521 in 477 days. Last March was a curious
lull. Just 22 mass shootings then.
The second article
was by Steve Israel, a former congressman, and its transcendent point
was in its terrifying headline: “Nothing Will Change After the Las Vegas
Shooting.” That’s an outrageous forecast. In all likelihood, it’s an
accurate one, too.
God bless America, where the fact that we can’t be 100 percent sure that
a given new gun restriction would lessen the dying becomes an excuse
not to give it a try, though the stakes couldn’t be higher, the sirens
couldn’t be louder and each new marker surpasses the last.
In
Newtown, Conn., in 2012, 26 people perished, 20 of them children. In
Orlando four years later, 49 died. And in Las Vegas, the count so far is
59. What’s the trip wire for urgency and action? Triple digits?
God
bless America, where the Second Amendment seems to be getting a hell of
a lot more respect right now than the First. It has become totemic,
part of a larger culture war that blinds too many Americans to the
amendment’s conception in an entirely different era and context, long
before the efficient killing machines of today. There’s the right to
bear arms, sure, but there’s also the right to walk into a nightclub or a
concert — or to send a child off to school — without a sense of dread
that’s increasingly and fully warranted. Aren’t we entitled to that,
too?
God
bless America, where a whole class of sellouts, Donald Trump prime
among them, lack the character to stand up to the death merchants of the
National Rifle Association. At the group’s April convention, Trump told them:
“You came through big for me, and I am going to come through for you.”
Tit for tat and forget about the lives potentially sacrificed to the
deal. They will be accorded their pro forma moments of silence. They
will get the usual candlelight vigils. It will be pretty and it will be
almost pointless, because the band will play on.
God
bless America, where we’ve outsourced empathy and righteous anger from
the White House to television talk shows and learned to lean on the
comedians who host them. On Monday those jokesters seriously channeled
our emotions and sounded the appropriate alarms. Politics and
entertainment don’t merely overlap. In the Trump era, they’ve traded job
descriptions.
God bless America, whose partisan fevers are so corrosive that when the musician Caleb Keeter tweeted
that his presence in Las Vegas on Sunday had shown him “how wrong” he
was to oppose gun control, critics aplenty assailed the selfishness of
the epiphany. How about welcoming a convert to a just cause and using
his newfound passion as best we can? Wouldn’t that be more constructive?
God
bless America, with its sloppy ooze of agenda-driven misinformation. In
the hours after the shooting, posts that erroneously identified the
shooter and baselessly described him as a Trump-hating liberal or a
recent convert to Islam gained serious traction on Google and Facebook,
an echo of the fake news in the 2016 presidential election, an example
of the conspiracy theories that so many Americans embrace and an
illustration of the house of mirrors in which they now stumble around.
“We are working to fix the issue,” a spokesman for Facebook told The Times.
A spokesman for Google said, “We’ll continue to make algorithmic
improvements.” Pandora cackled. Her box is wide open, and it’s called
the internet.
God
bless America, with our boundless talent and galling complacency. If we
summon enough gratitude for the former to banish the latter, we just
might find our way forward.
The Trump administration is planning to disband the Labor Department
division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for
four decades, according to the White House’s newly proposed budget, part
of wider efforts to rein in government programs that promote civil
rights.
As outlined in Labor’s fiscal 2018 plan, the move would
fold the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, now home to 600
employees, into another government agency in the name of cost-cutting.
The
proposal to dismantle the compliance office comes at a time when the
Trump administration is reducing the role of the federal government in
fighting discrimination and protecting minorities by cutting budgets,
dissolving programs and appointing officials unsympathetic to previous
practices.
The new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has proposed eliminating its environmental justice program,
which addresses pollution that poses health threats specifically
concentrated in minority communities. The program, in part, offers money
and technical help to residents who are confronted with local hazards
such as leaking oil tanks or emissions from chemical plants.
Under
President Trump’s proposed budget, the Education Department’s Office of
Civil Rights — which has investigated thousands of complaints of
discrimination in school districts across the country and set new
standards for how colleges should respond to allegations of sexual
assault and harassment — would also see significant staffing cuts.
Administration officials acknowledge in budget documents that the civil
rights office will have to scale back the number of investigations it
conducts and limit travel to school districts to carry out its work.
[Obama, Biden rewrite the rulebook on handling sexual assault on campus]
And the administration has reversed several steps taken under
President Barack Obama to address LGBT concerns. The Department of
Housing and Urban Development, for example, has revoked a rule ensuring
that transgender people can stay at sex-segregated shelters of their
choice, and the Department of Health and Human Services has removed a
question about sexual orientation from two surveys of elderly Americans
about services offered or funded by the government.
The
efforts to reduce the federal profile on civil rights reflects the
consensus view within the Trump administration that Obama officials
exceeded their authority in policing discrimination on the state and
local level, sometimes pressuring targets of government scrutiny to
adopt policies that were not warranted.
Administration officials
made clear in the initial weeks of Trump’s presidency that they would
break with the civil rights policies of his predecessor. Attorney
General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of agreements to reform police departments,
signaling his skepticism of efforts to curb civil rights abuses by law
enforcement officers. His Justice Department, meantime, stopped
challenging a controversial Texas voter identification law and joined
with the Education Department in withdrawing federal guidance allowing
transgender students to use school bathrooms corresponding to their
gender identity.
While these decisions have been roundly
criticized by liberal activists, administration officials said that
civil rights remain a priority for the Trump White House.
“The
Trump administration has an unwavering commitment to the civil rights of
all Americans,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said in an emailed
statement.
But Vanita Gupta, who was the head of Justice’s civil
rights division from October 2014 to January 2017, said that the
administration’s actions have already begun to adversely affect
Americans across the country.
Labor’s
budget proposal says that folding its compliance office into the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission “will reduce operational redundancies,
promote efficiencies, improve services to citizens, and strengthen
civil rights enforcement.”
Historically, the two entities have
played very different roles. Unlike the EEOC, which investigates
complaints it receives, the compliance office audits contractors in a
more systematic fashion and verifies that they “take affirmative action”
to promote equal opportunity among their employees.
Patricia A.
Shiu, who led the compliance office from 2009 to 2016, said the audits
are crucial because most workers don’t know they have grounds to file a
complaint. “Most people do not know why they don’t get hired. Most
people do not know why they do not get paid the same as somebody else,”
she said.
Under
Obama, officials in the compliance office often conducted full-scale
audits of companies, examining their practices in multiple locations,
rather than carrying out shorter, more limited reviews as previous
administrations had done.
Some companies have questioned the more
aggressive approach, noting the office has consistently found since
2004 that 98 percent of federal contractors comply with the law.
But the compliance office also scored some major recent legal victories, including a $1.7 million settlement
with Palantir Technologies over allegations that the data-mining
company’s hiring practices discriminated against Asians. In a case
involving Gordon Food Service, which serves the Agriculture Department,
the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the office found the
company had “systematically eliminated qualified women from the hiring
process.” The firm agreed to pay $1.85 million in wages
to 926 women who had applied for jobs and hire 37 of them. Gordon Food
was also forced to no longer require women to take a strength test.
In Education Department budget documents,
the administration acknowledges that proposed funding levels would
hamper the work of that department’s civil rights office. The budget
would reduce staffing by more than 40 employees.
“To address
steady increases in the number of complaints received and decreased
staffing levels, OCR must make difficult choices,” the budget documents say.
“OCR’s enforcement staff will be limited in conducting onsite
investigations and monitoring, and OCR’s ability to achieve greater
coordination and communication regarding core activities will be greatly
diminished.”
Some critics of the civil rights office said school
districts often felt they were presumed guilty in the eyes of the
federal government.
“There was sort of this sense that . . . if
there was a complaint filed, there must have been done something wrong,”
said Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the National School
Boards Association. “But there’s usually two sides to a story.”
Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill said that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Candice E. Jackson,
who has been named as the acting head of the civil rights office, are
committed to protecting all students from discrimination.
“Each
civil rights complaint received by OCR is given due care and attention,
with OCR serving as a fair and impartial investigative office,” Hill
said.
Jackson’s
nomination has added to the anxiety of civil rights activists. Jackson,
a lawyer from Vancouver, Wash. and author of a book about women who had
accused President Bill Clinton of sexual assault, has written that
programs aimed at fostering a diverse student body dismiss “the very
real prices paid by individual people who end up injured by affirmative
action.”
Similar concerns have been raised about Trump’s likely selection of
Eric S. Dreiband to head the Justice Department’s civil rights
division. A former Bush administration official and veteran conservative
Washington lawyer, Dreiband has represented several companies that were
sued for discrimination. (Dreiband is representing the Washington Post
in an age and race discrimination case in federal court in the
District.)
With his attacks on judges, journalists and critics, U.S.
President Donald Trump is chipping away at the foundations of democracy.
Is the American Constitution strong enough to withstand the assault?
The man who has found himself on the United States president's bad side
this week bears the quaint name of William Horsley Orrick, a 63-year-old
who -- in his frameless glasses and side part -- has the classic look
of a civil servant. Orrick is a District Court judge in San Francisco
and on Tuesday, he blocked Donald Trump from penalizing those cities
that provide immigrants special protections, such as making it more
difficult for them to be deported. Trump had ordered that federal
funding be withheld from these so-called "sanctuary cities." But with
his ruling, Orrick has slapped a temporary stay on the order.
It was just the most recent defeat in the courts for the president,
following the suspension of his travel ban targeting the citizens of
several Muslim-majority countries -- and it didn't take long before the
president went public with his rage. The ruling, Trump wrote in one of
his early morning Twitter eruptions, is "ridiculous." He added: "See you
in the Supreme Court!"
Trump has never made a secret of his intense disdain for the
institutions that are necessary for a vigorous democracy: an independent
judiciary, a critical press and a healthy opposition. Essentially,
Trump would be happy to do away with all of that, or at least
marginalize it. Following the ruling from San Francisco, he indicated
that he is broadly dissatisfied with the federal judges there and
threatened to curtail their power.
The president's anger with people who contradict him and
institutions that stand in his way does not fade with time. On the
contrary, the more resistance Trump is faced with, the harder he fights
and the more deeply he believes that he is right. But in a democracy, it
is necessary to establish alliances and build coalitions. The
president, too, must defer to these constraints: He is reliant on
Congress, his power over the states is limited and judges are
independent.
Democracy lives from the ability to forge compromise, but that is a
skill that Trump appears not to possess. As such, his first 100 days in
office can be interpreted as an attack on the foundations of American
democracy.
The independent organization Freedom House, which monitors the
state of democracy worldwide, recently criticized the U.S. in its annual
report due to the erosion of democratic ideals. Trump's approach to
fundamental human rights, such as the freedom of opinion, was of
particular concern to the researchers.
The Risk of Authoritarianism
"The institutions have become more vulnerable," says Steven
Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University. Levitsky has
taken a closer look at the first months of the new administration and
concluded that there is a risk that the U.S. could become more
authoritarian under Trump's leadership. Levitsky speaks of "competitive
authoritarianism," a kind of top-down democracy, in which the president
controls state institutions and the media and the opposition is put at a
structural disadvantage. Levitsky has been researching autocratic
regimes for years and found that "periods of intense polarization are
often followed by the collapse of democracy." And there is hardly any
country in the West that is as deeply divided as the United States.
Trump exploited this polarization to get elected and is now doing the
same in office. He is able to do so in part because his supporters have
remained loyal no matter what he does. And the list of irregularities
is long: He has essentially transformed the White House into a family
fiefdom by installing his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared
Kushner in the halls of power; he has refused to release his tax returns
as has been standard practice for presidents since the end of the
1960s; and he has been decidedly half-hearted about separating himself
from his business interests, allowing him to profit from decisions he
makes in the White House.
The president's priorities were revealed particularly transparently
in the tax plan that he presented Wednesday. The heart of the tax-code
overhaul is a cut to the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent
to just 15 percent. It also calls for the elimination of the inheritance
tax in addition to income tax cuts. Together, the cuts would cost the
state $2 trillion in tax revenue every year -- an enormous hit to the
budget for a tax reform that primarily benefits the rich. People like
Trump and his family.
Worse, though, are the president's regular attacks on judges,
journalists and his opponents. Trump goes after his critics with
irascible fits of temper, yet he harbors admiration for autocrats. He
has often praised the leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin and
one of his first visitors in the White House was Egypt's president
Abdel Fattah el-Sissi. Furthermore, he could hardly congratulate Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fast enough following his victory in the
recent constitutional referendum that brought the country a giant step
closer to becoming a dictatorship.
'Going Bananas'
Trump's advisors and cabinet members are likewise scornful of all
who would dare stand in the way of the president. Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, of all people, recently criticized a judge in Hawaii for
blocking Trump's travel ban for people from majority Muslim countries.
"I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can
issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what
appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power," Sessions
said. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said simply that William
Orrick and his court were "going bananas."
Trump and his team can feel encouraged by the results of a February
survey which found that 51 percent of the president's supporters
believe he should be able to override judicial rulings he doesn't agree
with. When both the government and its people are united in their
disdain for democratic institutions, it represents a clear danger.
In
history, this is where Congress steps in. During the Vietnam War,
Watergate and the Iran-contra scandal, when a president’s actions or
policies crossed the line, Congress investigated and held the White
House to account. The time has come for it to do so again.
In
the last week alone, Americans have witnessed the firing of President
Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and learned with shock
and incredulity that members of Mr. Trump’s campaign and inner circle
were in repeated contact with Russian intelligence officials.
Coming on top of credible information from America’s intelligence agencies that Russia
tried to destabilize and influence the 2016 presidential campaign,
these latest revelations are more than sufficient reason for Congress to
investigate what Moscow has been up to and whether people at the
highest levels of the United States government have aided and abetted
the interests of a nation that has tried to thwart American foreign
policy since the Cold War.
Given
that context, one might expect Mr. Trump to be clamoring for details
that would eliminate any suspicion that his administration is in league
with an enemy. Instead he has waged an unhinged attack on the
intelligence agencies themselves, praising President Vladimir Putin of
Russia at every turn and pointing fingers everywhere but at himself,
while refusing to take a single step to resolve questions about his
administration’s ties to Russia.
Hence
the urgent need for high-level congressional intervention. The ideal
vehicle would be an investigative committee of senior senators from both
parties as well as members of the House. Some Senate Republicans are
beginning to step up. Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, has already said his committee will investigate
the election hacking. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the panel’s top-ranking Democrat, are asking for a briefing and transcripts of Mr. Flynn’s calls to the Russian ambassador.
Senators
John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Pat Roberts favor a broader
investigation. John Cornyn, the Senate majority whip, has also raised
the possibility of an investigation by Senate committees with
jurisdiction over the intelligence community.
The
Democrats would obviously be on board — Chuck Schumer, the Senate
Democratic leader, has also called for the Senate Intelligence Committee
to lead a bipartisan inquiry. The person who needs to make this happen
is Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. Whatever form the
committee takes, as Mr. Schumer said on Wednesday, all members must be
granted equal access to “intelligence officials, transcripts and
documents that they need to answer critical questions, and they must be
permitted to make their findings public to the maximum extent possible.”
Admittedly,
this is hoping for a lot from a Republican leadership whose natural
inclination is to protect the president. This week, for instance,
congressional Republicans closed off one avenue to forcing the release
of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which he has refused to divulge and which
could help prove to Americans that he is not indebted to Russian
financial entities. (It bears repeating, in this regard, that Mr. Trump
didn’t fire Mr. Flynn this week for chummily discussing American
sanctions on Russia with Moscow’s ambassador, or for lying about it. Mr.
Trump knew all that for weeks. He fired Mr. Flynn after both of them
got caught.)
With
or without the administration’s cooperation, Congress’s plain and
urgent duty, lest it be judged complicit, is to get to the bottom of
this crisis.
If America had a parliamentary system, Donald Trump — who spent his first full day in office having a temper tantrum,
railing against accurate reports of small crowds at his inauguration —
would already be facing a vote of no confidence. But we don’t; somehow
we’re going to have to survive four years of this.
And how is he going to react to disappointing numbers about things that actually matter?
In his lurid, ghastly Inaugural Address,
Mr. Trump portrayed a nation in dire straits — “American carnage.” The
real America looks nothing like that; it has plenty of problems, but
things could be worse. In fact, it’s likely that they will indeed get
worse. How will a man who evidently can’t handle even the smallest blow
to his ego deal with it?
Let’s talk about the predictable bad news.
First,
the economy. Listening to Mr. Trump, you might have thought America was
in the midst of a full-scale depression, with “rusted-out factories
scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” Manufacturing employment is indeed down since 2000; but overall employment is way up, and the unemployment rate is low by historical standards.
And
it’s not just one number that looks pretty good: Rising wages and the
growing number of Americans confident enough to quit their jobs suggest
an economy close to full employment.
What
this means is that unemployment probably can’t fall much from here, so
that even with good policies and good luck, job creation will be much
slower than it was in the Obama years. And since bad stuff does happen,
there’s a strong likelihood that unemployment will be higher four years
from now than it is today.
Oh,
and Trumpist budget deficits will probably widen the trade deficit, so
that manufacturing employment in particular is likely to fall, not rise.
A second front on which things will almost surely get worse is health care. Obamacare caused the percentage of Americans without insurance to fall sharply, to the lowest level ever. Repeal would send the numbers right back up
— 18 million newly uninsured in just the first year, eventually rising
to more than 30 million, according to Congressional Budget Office
estimates. And no, Republicans who have spent seven years failing to
come up with a real replacement won’t develop one in the next few weeks,
or ever.
On
a third front, crime, the future direction is unclear. The Trump vision
of an urban America ravaged by “the crime and the gangs and the drugs”
is a dystopian fantasy: Violent crime
is, in fact, way down despite highly publicized recent murder increases
in a few cities. Crime could, I suppose, fall further, but it could
also rise. What we do know is that the Trump administration can’t pacify
America’s urban war zones, because those zones don’t exist.
So
how will Mr. Trump handle the bad news of rising unemployment, plunging
health coverage, and little if any crime reduction? That’s obvious:
He’ll deny reality, the way he always does when it threatens his
narcissism. But will his supporters go along with his fantasy?
They might. After all, they blocked out the good news from the Obama era. Two-thirds of Trump voters believe, falsely, that the unemployment rate rose under Obama. (Three-quarters believe George Soros is paying people to protest Mr. Trump.) Only 17 percent
of self-identified Republicans are aware that the number of uninsured
is at a historic low. Most people thought crime was rising even when it
was falling. So maybe they will block out bad news in the Trump years.
But
it probably won’t be that easy. For one thing, people tend to attribute
improvements in their personal situation to their own efforts; surely
many voters who gained jobs over the past eight years believe that they
did it despite, not thanks to, Obama policies. Will they correspondingly
blame themselves, not Donald Trump, for lost jobs and health insurance?
Unlikely.
On top of that, Mr. Trump made big promises during the campaign, so the risk of disillusionment is especially high.
Will
he respond to bad news by accepting responsibility and trying to do
better? Will he renounce his fortune and enter a monastery? That seems
equally likely.
No,
the insecure egomaniac-in-chief will almost surely deny awkward truths,
and berate the media for reporting them. And — this is what worries me —
it’s very likely that he’ll try to use his power to shoot the
messengers.
Seriously,
how do you think the man who compared the C.I.A. to Nazis will react
when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first reports a significant uptick
in unemployment or decline in manufacturing jobs? What’s he going to do
when the Centers for Disease Control and the Census Bureau report
spiking numbers of uninsured Americans?
You may have thought that last weekend’s temper tantrum was bad. But there’s much, much worse to come.
Every morning in
the Philippines, a handful of bodies are found littering the streets.
Their faces are often covered in black plastic tape. Sometimes there are
signs of torture. Usually, they have been shot in the head. Few bother
police – they are usually suspected of being responsible. No
one, frankly, should be surprised that it is happening. The country’s
democratically elected leader, after all, was elected promising to do
just this, cracking down on what he has described as a “drug menace” in the country.
If
one world leader exemplifies some of the more alarming trends taking
place in politics this decade, it is Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte.
His election – and the policies he has pursued since entering office –
represent a comprehensive rejection of decades, if not centuries, of
hard-won moves toward respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Such
legal niceties, Duterte and those around him argue, have simply given
criminals and others too much space. It’s the sort of sentiment that has
sometimes also found its place in Donald Trump’s campaign – the U.S.
president-elect talked, after all, of getting “really nasty” against
Islamic State. In the Philippines, however, the death toll is already
believed to have run to more than 5000. Of these, 2000 were shot in armed confrontations with the police – with 3000 more suffering extrajudicial executions.
“The
number [of drug addicts] is quite staggering and scary,” Duterte said
in his inaugural State of the Nation Address. “I have to slaughter these
idiots for destroying my country.”
The Filipino leader has been in power barely six months. He has another five and a half years until he next faces the poll.
That
his rhetoric can gain traction among voters should not itself be a
surprise – the idea of vigilante justice clearly still has an appeal, if
only evidenced by the way in which it remains such a common Hollywood
theme. As mayor of Davao City for more than two decades, the Filipino
president reveled in such imagery – he was often referred to as “The
Punisher” or “Duderte Harry”, the latter a reference to the cinematic
vigilante “Dirty Harry” played by Clint Eastwood.
As
mayor, Duterte was repeatedly accused of involvement in death squads
targeting both criminals and political enemies. Earlier this year, a man
claiming to be a former associate accused the president of taking part
in some killings and ordering others, including having a man fed to a
crocodile in 2007. Nothing was ever proven, however –
and in those days, Duterte denied direct involvement. An official
inquiry published at the beginning of this year – and, unsurprisingly,
heavily criticized – said it found no evidence of the reported death
squad killings or Duterte’s own direct involvement.
Since
Duterte took the presidency in June, however, he has been much more
outspoken – as well as willing to take responsibility for what some
estimate could be several thousand deaths. This week, he openly
threatened to target human rights activists whom he accused of getting
in the way of the purge.
Such
tactics appear to have cost the Philippines its long-running alliance
with the United States – at least under the presidency of Barack Obama.
(The Filipino leader has said he hopes to have a rather better
relationship with Trump.) Duterte has talked openly of seeking alliances
with Russia and China instead; both countries are seen as more likely
to let the Philippines do whatever it wishes when it comes to internal
matters.
Duterte is
clearly an outlier. For now, however, his approach is serving him
relatively well when it comes to Filipino domestic politics – according
to one survey, he remains one of the most trusted leaders in Southeast
Asia.
But
he is also part of a wider trend – one that may well be accelerating.
There have always, of course, been leaders who have made a virtue of
“doing what it takes” to restore order and have been relatively happy to
get a reputation for sometimes brutal tactics, even if they publicly
deny them.
Rwandan
President Paul Kagame, for example, has always said his country needs to
sometimes take a tough line with those who try to destabilize it if
Rwanda is to avoid a repeat of the 1994 genocide. Sri Lanka’s
then-leaders used sometimes brutal measures to end the civil war with
Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009. After the chaos of the 1990s, Russian
President Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly traded off his reputation for
toughness, particularly in the long-running insurgency in Chechnya,
where Moscow’s forces have long been accused of unrestricted use of
force and widespread rights abuses.
Most
of those leaders, however, have always sought to deny outright
responsibility – or at least maintain a degree of deniability – when it
comes to unquestioned acts of extrajudicial murder. By being willing to
make it so explicitly a tool of government policy, Duterte has
significantly moved the goalposts of what might be deemed to be
acceptable in international affairs.
Where
he has been criticized, he has been outspoken in his response, even
threatening to leave the United Nations and join a new group – perhaps
Russian and Chinese-backed – that would also include African governments
keen to push back on some international human rights demands. Earlier
this year, South Africa and Burundi both announced they would
quit the International Criminal Court, set up in response to the
genocides of the 1990s, but which critics say has been selective in
which conflicts it chooses to investigate.
These trends are also, in some
respects at least, clearly evident in the West. Trump talked openly of
waterboarding and targeting the families of suspected militants during
his campaign, although it remains uncertain whether he will pursue such
policies in office. Far right European political parties and columnists
have periodically called for a much tougher approach to migration,
suggesting this might sometimes include the use of live ammunition to
maintain potentially overwhelmed borders.
What
this represents is an unraveling of the rules-based system – and in
many respects the essential concept of basic human rights – enshrined in
the United Nations charter signed by most progressive nations after
World War Two.
That
commitment was always imperfect – and frequently desperately
hypocritically imposed. Still, it has rarely been as pushed back against
as it is in the Philippines today.
Next
year may well see the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
reassert control in Syria and the unraveling of the unsuccessful
U.S.-backed policy of supporting ineffectual opposition fighters. The
United States and Europe will likely see a considerable political
reaction against what had been seen as relatively fundamental rights,
particularly when it comes to asylum and freedom of movement.
None
of those things are unnecessarily unreasonable. What the Philippines
reminds us, though, is just how short a journey it might be to really
tear up some of the most basic rules which had been seen as underpinning
a civilized society. Worse still, it can even be popular.
A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses. by Amanda Gefter
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our
perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal
of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find
ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that
what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s
best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of
an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a
reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us
out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but
surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman,
a professor of cognitive science at the University of California,
Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception,
artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his
conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our
perceptions is nothing like reality.
What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this
magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving
truth to extinction.
Getting at questions about the nature of
reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an
endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental
physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw
trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying
nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to
first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard
problem.”
On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange
fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in
space until we come along to observe them. Experiment after experiment
has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that
make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent
existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum
physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some
preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it
is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’
independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
So while
neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a
first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the
mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.
In short, all roads lead back to the observer. And that’s where you can
find Hoffman—straddling the boundaries, attempting a mathematical model
of the observer, trying to get at the reality behind the illusion. Quanta Magazine caught up with him to find out more. Gefter: People
often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions
accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching
onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a
long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a
tiger, I’m in trouble.”
Hoffman:
Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more
accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less
accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded
for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations
we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw
accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I
think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about
evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical
functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of
survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash
proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by
natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be
more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality
but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
Gefter: You’ve done computer simulations to show this. Can you give an example?
Hoffman:
Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify
how much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium
amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is
linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives
you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that
case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can
win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the
true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will
never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too
little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only
somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function
doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send
truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might
see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to
indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as
green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to
fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small
and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in
reality.
Gefter: But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?
Hoffman:
There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or
40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue
rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop —
does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in
the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are
the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it
has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available
to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything
in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting
thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the
computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And
yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my
behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know.
That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow
us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves
hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much
all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that
time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you. Gefter: So everything we see is one big illusion?
Hoffman: We’ve
been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take
them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t
pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved
these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But
it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we
also have to take it literally.
Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?
Hoffman:
Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective,
observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created
by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my
actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A
snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act
in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your
snakes and trains are your mental representations.
Gefter: How did you first become interested in these ideas?
Hoffman:
As a teenager, I was very interested in the question “Are we machines?”
My reading of the science suggested that we are. But my dad was a
minister, and at church they were saying we’re not. So I decided I
needed to figure it out for myself. It’s sort of an important personal
question—if I’m a machine, I would like to find that out! And if I’m
not, I’d like to know, what is that special magic beyond the machine? So
eventually in the 1980s I went to the artificial-intelligence lab at
MIT and worked on machine perception. The field of vision research was
enjoying a newfound success in developing mathematical models for
specific visual abilities. I noticed that they seemed to share a common
mathematical structure, so I thought it might be possible to write down a
formal structure for observation that encompassed all of them, perhaps
all possible modes of observation. I was inspired in part by Alan
Turing. When he invented the Turing machine, he was trying to come up
with a notion of computation, and instead of putting bells and whistles
on it, he said, Let’s get the simplest, most pared down mathematical
description that could possibly work. And that simple formalism is the
foundation for the science of computation. So I wondered, could I
provide a similarly simple formal foundation for the science of
observation?
Gefter: A mathematical model of consciousness.
Hoffman: That’s
right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains,
tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so
forth. So I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness
structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an
experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m
doing. So I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and
a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how
I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from
the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six
elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put
that out there so people have something to shoot at.
Gefter: But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?
Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W
out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a
circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of
arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world. Gefter: The world is just other conscious agents?
Hoffman: I
call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents,
just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and
have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction
also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is
telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new,
unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres
in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete
transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two
separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there
was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there
is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are
two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I
didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It
suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and
create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious
agents all the way down.
Gefter: If it’s
conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what
happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description
of the world.
Hoffman: The idea that what we’re
doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that
objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same
object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very
clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us
that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s
how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe
that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your
own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun
and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your
own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an
assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my
communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical
objects and objective science.
Gefter: It
doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are
thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling
block for those trying to understand consciousness?
Hoffman: I
think it has been. Not only are they ignoring the progress in
fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say
openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain
function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain
that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist
independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at
synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very
classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and
objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to
why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the
incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those
insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll
stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our
physics.”
Gefter: I suspect they’re reacting to things like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s model,
where you still have a physical brain, it’s still sitting in space, but
supposedly it’s performing some quantum feat. In contrast, you’re
saying, “Look, quantum mechanics is telling us that we have to question
the very notions of ‘physical things’ sitting in ‘space.’”
Hoffman:
I think that’s absolutely true. The neuroscientists are saying, “We
don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need
quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use
classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing
the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these
are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a
classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no
brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including
brains—don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature
of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky
quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But
most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This
is a really, really hard one to let go of.
Gefter: To return to the question you started with as a teenager, are we machines?
Hoffman: The
formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is
computationally universal—in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s
because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of
cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for
now I don’t think we are machines—in part because I distinguish between
the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a
conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological
primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that
experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday
life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that
really is the ultimate nature of reality. This post appears courtesy of Quanta Magazine.
Buoyed by Donald Trump’s election victory, white supremacists
who gathered at a conference Saturday called on him to implement a
50-year moratorium on “non-European immigration.”
Richard Spencer, a leading white nationalist
who heads the supremacist National Policy Institute and claims to have
coined the term “alt-right,” called the proposal “obviously possible,”
and said that “Trump has proven the power of these ideas.”
Spencer described his movement as an “intellectual vanguard that can
complete Trump.” Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of
Muslims entering the United States” in December, but later walked that
proposal back, calling for “extreme vetting” of immigrants from certain
Muslim-majority countries.
In response to a question from The Intercept, Spencer said that
undocumented immigrants and their children “have got to go home. And
they can go home again, they can connect with their real identity.”
When The Intercept followed up by asking about children of undocumented
immigrants who grew up in the U.S., Spencer insisted that even they had a
“real identity” that was other than American. “Reconnecting with who
you really are for a Mexican-American would be about being in Mexico.
For an African, it would be about being in Africa.”
Jared Taylor, a longtime white supremacist author and publisher,
called Muslim immigration a disease. “It’s amazing that these leftists
want this disease coming into society more than they want to protect
themselves,” he said.
Trump’s election has led to an explosion in anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, intimidation and violence. Swasitka graffiti has been reported on billboards, and in parks, public transit, and schools all across the country.
When asked to respond to these incidents, Spencer downplayed the
incidents, saying “I imagine that a lot of those might be hoaxes,” he
said.
He added: “I think we mostly condemn any direct threat of violence.”
White supremacists have seized on Trump’s election to take their
message to the masses. Discussions of how to take that message
“mainstream” dominated Saturday’s event, which was held just blocks from
the White House, and was sponsored by Spencer’s group, the National
Policy Institute — a leading peddler of “academic racism,” according to
the Southern Poverty Law Center.
White nationalist leaders have also celebrated the appointment of Steve Bannon — the executive chairman of Breitbart News — as the White House’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon has boasted that his news site — which spread “birther” conspiracies about President Obama — is a “platform for the alt-right.”
Spencer downplayed any direct connection the group may have to Trump
or Bannon, but he also said that their message will be better received
by a Trump administration. “We have a psychic connection,” said Spencer,
“a deeper connection with Donald Trump than with other Republicans.”
The New York Times reported
that later in the evening, Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in German,
and said “America was, until this last generation, a white country
designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our
inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
Throughout the day, a crowd of protestors circled the building, chanting “No Donald Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA.”
Spencer also defended Trump’s “grab-them-by-the-pussy” comments about women, saying “Women, deep down, do
want to be taken by a strong man.” The line met with vigorous applause
from the mostly male audience. The protagonists in romance novels tend
to be physically strong, “like cowboys and vikings,” Spencer said, as
opposed to “boring computer programmers.”
Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-semite described by the Southern Poverty Law Center
as “the Neo-Nazi’s favorite academic,” agreed with Spencer about Trump.
“If he comes on to women, I would say most women would probably like
that.”
Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime
in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely
exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes
he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United
States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I
couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But
newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled
to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver
so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.
Thanks
to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump
potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal
personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr.
Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his
returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic
presidential candidate for more than four decades.
Tax
experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York
Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous
provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the
edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever
loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any
recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the
nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the
early 1990s.
Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of
American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits on Mr. Trump for
losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money
investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in
Atlantic City.
As
that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump pressured his
financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he
could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to
Mr. Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with
the Internal Revenue Service. In the eyes of the I.R.S., a dollar of
canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Mr.
Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of
millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions
of dollars of taxable income.
But
Mr. Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply
avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I.R.S. “He’s getting
something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the
chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and
1994, said in an interview.
The
new documents, which include correspondence from Mr. Trump’s tax
lawyers and bond offering disclosure statements, might also help explain
how Mr. Trump reported a staggering loss of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns, portions of which were first published by The Times last month.
Photo
A line from one of Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns obtained by The New York Times.
United
States tax laws allowed Mr. Trump to use that $916 million loss to
cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. But tax experts have
been debating how Mr. Trump could have legally declared a deduction of
that magnitude at all. Among other things, they have noted that Mr.
Trump’s huge casino losses should have been offset by the hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxable income he surely must have reported to
the I.R.S. in the form of canceled casino debt.
By
avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place,
however, Mr. Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced
by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the
deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might
otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the
rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to
wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years.
Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article.
“Your
email suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional
misreading of the law,” Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a
statement. “Your thesis is a criticism, not just of Mr. Trump, but of
all taxpayers who take the time and spend the money to try to comply
with the dizzyingly complex and ambiguous tax laws without paying more
tax than they owe. Mr. Trump does not think that taxpayers should file
returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the I.R.S. And any tax
experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There
is no news here.”
Mr.
Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3
billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By
late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey
casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of
the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three
casinos had filed for bankruptcy, and bondholders were ultimately forced
to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least
part of their investment.
The
story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from
that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The
Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents
offer only a partial description of events, and none of Mr. Trump’s tax
lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article.
At
the time, Mr. Trump would have been hard-pressed to pay tens of
millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial
stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early
1990s when Mr. Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his
various bank accounts. He was so strapped for cash that his creditors
were apoplectic when they learned that Mr. Trump had bought Marla Maples
an engagement ring estimated to be worth $250,000.
It
is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Mr. Trump to dodge a huge tax
bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a
contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid
taxes created by canceled debt.
The
strategy, known among tax practitioners as a “stock-for-debt swap,”
relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60
million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining
$40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to
report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income.
Clever
tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would
simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This
way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid,
and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled
debt.
Best
of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was
considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an
effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even
in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations,
this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to
waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.
Alarmed
by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the I.R.S. made
repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry
before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while
policy makers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this
particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was
inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of
partnerships.
This
was the twist that was especially beneficial to Mr. Trump. Wealthy
families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through
partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all
three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement
that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax
returns when times were good.
But
what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could
not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And
what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t
that force the partnerships — i.e., Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of
millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?
Enter
the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that
taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for
debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company
stock for debt?
True
enough, the I.R.S. and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval
of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the I.R.S. commissioner
under George Bush, recalled in an interview that the I.R.S. frowned on
partnership equity-for-debt swaps for the same reason it objected to
corporate stock-for-debt swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership
interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a
contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a
legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence
of the Loch Ness monster.”
On
the campaign trail, Mr. Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes
and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more
about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust,
gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off
politicians and hire high-priced lawyers and accountants to rig the tax
system — just as, he claims, they rig elections.
That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a multimillion-dollar tax bill disappear.
Before
proceeding with his plan, Mr. Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do:
He sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written
by highly paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly
10,000 pages of ever-changing statutes that make up the United States
tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a
tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion
letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the
I.R.S. ultimately rules the strategy was improper.
The
language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning
understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer
writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by
the I.R.S., this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter
will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “M.L.T.N.” letter in the
vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75
percent chance the I.R.S. will not object. The gold standard, a “will”
letter, means the I.R.S. is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance
strategy.
But
the opinion letters Mr. Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie
Farr & Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters
bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion
that explicitly permitted Mr. Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of
definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote,
“substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax
consequences of the plan.”
One
letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr.
Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for
six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters,
the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers
believe the I.R.S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly
two-thirds of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were
telling him there were at least six different reasons the I.R.S. would
probably cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that
possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have
allowed Mr. Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years
if the I.R.S. ultimately balked.
It
is unclear whether the I.R.S. ever challenged Mr. Trump’s use of this
specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement
prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by the tax
authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds
of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect
tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown, and the agency
declined to comment on Monday.
Regardless
of whether the I.R.S. objected, Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance in this case
violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the
former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, who
later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and
Means Committee.
“He
deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that, Mr.
Buckley meant that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid
casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset
future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same
losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on
everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time.”
In
any event, Mr. Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just
as Congress acted in 1993 to ban stock-for-debt swaps by corporations,
it acted in 2004 to ban equity-for-debt swaps by partnerships.
Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
