David K. Shipler's Blog

                                                            By David K. Shipler 

            If you gainaltitude higher than the daily run of the news and look down from, say, 30,000feet, you see a logical progression in the demise of American democracy. Stepby step, the constitutional structure is being dismantled, and the limits ofthe public’s acceptance are being tested. In seven months, in the first phaseof his project, Donald Trump has caused remarkable damage without encounteringsuccessful resistance. Now, a new phase has begun. Let’s call it Phase Two. Itcontains three main elements:

1)    GettingAmericans used to seeing camouflage on the streets by ostentatiously postingnational guard troops in the nation’s capital and allowing police to “dowhatever the hell they want,” inTrump’s words, with threats of the same in other cities. This is a steptoward the militarized state that Trumpists favor.

2)    Hiringright-wing ideologues to fill key mid-level vacancies created by the massfirings from federal agencies. The purge was not so much to save money—little wassaved—as to open opportunities for zealots to weaponize government and stifleexpertise and debate. Recruitment by the Heritage Foundation has been going onfor years. New hires will remake federal law enforcement into a tool of Trumpby expanding ICE with politically-vetted agents, possibly from the ranks ofwhite nationalists. The FBI will nolonger require a college degree and extensive training for its agents, whowill also be subjected to ideological screening.

3)    Subvertingelections. Trump has prepared the ground for arrests of Democratic candidatesin close races or, at the least, having the Justice Department publicize unprovenallegations to damage their reputations. Several elected Democrats, havealready been arrested on exaggerated charges during altercations. “Weare arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general,” afederal agent on the phone with Washington said of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whowas attempting an oversight visit to an immigration center in New Jersey. DemocraticRepresentative LaMonica McIver was also arrested while jostled; she was chargedexcessively with assaulting a federal officer. In addition, Trump wants to controlelections, saying he’s going to ban mail-in ballots, citing advice from thatchampion of democracy, Vladimir Putin. (So far, that power rests with Congress,not the president alone.)

Underlying these and other measuresis Trump’s constant stream of hyped-up declarations of emergencies, as if theUnited States faced perpetual crises: at the border, in energy, in its cities.No doubt his extreme rhetoric falsely picturing bloodthirsty gangs maraudingthrough his country’s significantly nonwhite cities strikes a chord with hiswhite rural base. But, as usual, he manufactures a problem for which the onlysolution—also fictitious—is his tough hand at the top.

Phase One, initiated immediatelyafter his inauguration January 20, overcame the checks and balances among thethree branches of government that the Framers of the Constitution had soingeniously created to avoid the scenario that is now unfolding 238 yearslater.

Trump and his comrades swept asidefunding duly authorized and appropriated by the legislative branch. Theyignored and evaded some orders from the judicial branch restoring governmentgrants and immigrants’ constitutional rights to due process. They took thefirst steps in imposing their ideological doctrine on civil society byweaponizing federal funding and law enforcement against independent thinking,speech, teaching, and advocacy in universities, museums, theaters, law firms,and corporations.

            TheTrumpists have normalized breaches of legal and ethical standards to the pointof danger—the danger that the outrages will no longer seem outrageous. Thethreshold at which shock and opposition are triggered has been raised higherand higher.

Some citizens complain and mobilizeto fight back, of course, but not as a broad movement. Americans have grownaccustomed to masked ICE agents hauling off peaceful international students andessential foreign workers, locking them up without recourse. Americans are nolonger surprised by the purges of websites and archives of historical facts,the removal of books on race and gender from military libraries, the subjectionof data to political filtering, the screening of government workers forideological conformity.

Experts who know their fields areridiculed and fired. That’s to be expected now. If there are objections, theyare raised increasingly in private. The Trumpists scare many Americans awayfrom dissent and into silence, for fear of retribution that could includevigilante violence, perhaps by those January 6 rioters Trump pardoned. The fearextends even to Republican members of Congress. “We are all afraid,” saidRepublican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Many fear speaking out or demonstrating.

Most leading institutions in theUnited States are also afraid and have been complacent and compliant. Congressis supine, controlled by the Republican Party that Trump hijacked and twistedaway from traditional conservatism. District federal judges have tried torestrain the administration, sometimes overreaching, but Trump appointees inappeals courts and the Supreme Court have reversed many of those restraints,unleashing Trump with extraordinary powers to usurp the role of thelegislature.

If a leftist president iseventually elected, those powers can be invoked to swing the country wildly inanother direction, creating a pendulum of instability akin to the worstauthoritarian states in the non-industrialized world.

Americans learned in Phase One howmuch of their constitutional democracy is voluntary, how much it rests in thevalues and courage and selflessness of the citizens. As Judge Learned Hand saidin 1944: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there,no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it liesthere it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Does liberty lie in the hearts ofAmericans? It is a serious question now. With notable exceptions, leadinginstitutions and citizens have failed to rally for the free society that theysay they value. Or, they have resisted only in their own parochial interests,not in the larger interest of the nation at large. Companies, universities, andmajor media conglomerates try to flatter the mercurial, narcissistic presidentand cut separate deals rather than negotiate broadly for the preservation of apluralistic system.

The victims are not uniting. EvenHarvard, which mounted a strong court case in the face of Trump’s arbitrarycutoff of funding for valuable research, is on the cusp of a deal that wouldreward the president’s dictatorial impulses. Some big law firms caved whentheir largest corporate clients were poised to abandon them, while others arefighting, and pro bono attorneys have organized to help targeted individualsand institutions. Big media conglomerates, which had strong cases againstridiculous libel suits filed by Trump, capitulated and bought him off with hugesums, while other respected news organizations persist in reporting truthfully.

Trump is dividing and conquering.That’s been Phase One.

Phase Two will almost surely seegovernment fabricating statistics or withholding negative numbers, as theSoviet Union did. Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of LaborStatistics for the customary correction of previous job-creationnumbers—downward, as it happened. So, who’s going to tell the truth when youcan get fired for it? Dictatorships are chronically good-news systems, whereonly the positive gets passed up the chain of command until the man at the top(it’s always a man) holds power at a pinnacle of ignorance.

Steven Levitsky and other scholarsof dying democracies believe the United States is descending into “competitiveauthoritarianism,” in which elections are held but with such restraints onthe opposition that it cannot gain power. That has been the case in Turkey andHungary, for example, whose leaders have gained effusive praise from Trump.  

As the United States enters PhaseTwo, then, the question arises: Is this just a bad moment that will pass, or anew chapter in American history? What will Phases Three or Four include?

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In hisacerbic 1776 pamphlet Common Sense,Thomas Paine skewered the British monarchy with a broad assault: “Society isproduced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotesour happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY byrestraining our vices.” Government was a necessary evil, he thought, “a moderendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”

            Moralvirtue vs. imperious oppression: that was Paine’s picture. Yet those oppositepoles of the human personality represent not just a conflict between societyand government but within government itself, especially in the modern era.

On the one hand, as President Trumpis demonstrating, government can be a cruel enforcer of political and socialconformity, with punishment for dissident speech and policy differencesreaching into the distant reaches of civil society.  But government can also act as a facilitatorof the common good, mobilizing resources to channel society’s generosity and vision,with protection for the economically vulnerable and stewardship of research invast fields of science, engineering, education, and beyond.

It is precisely that second,beneficial dimension of government that is being dismantled by Trump, hisaides, his Republican members of Congress, and his like-minded Supreme Courtjustices. What remains, enhanced, is the most threatening facet of government,its absolutist power to frighten, arrest, deport, and close down space for theintricate play of ideas and debate.

In crisis, ironically, the modernsociety turns to government, either to blame for failure or to beseach forhelp, as in the aftermath of the Texas floods that swept away girls in ariverside summer camp. Rescues and searches were done by many volunteers, yes,but calls for future preventive measures were directed at government, not atprivate enterprise. It is government that has the power to pool and directfunds, and thereby amplify the caring of the community. Good government harmonizeswith people’s needs.

Trump’s government, however, ishostile to people’s needs, both immediate and long-term. He cuts funds forrescue and repair emergencies such as the Texas flood. He cuts Medicaid fundingfor the poor, which will also jeoparize health care for the rural non-poor,whose hospitals will struggle to survive without the government aid. He cutsfood subsidies for low-income children whose malnutrition will cause lifelongcognitive impairment.

He ends funding and thereby hobblesAmerica’s advantage over China in alternative energy and other fields. Heyields his country’s lead in medical advances to others and frightens talentedforeign researchers away. He forfeits his country’s affluent compassion inaddressing famine, conflict, health crises, and other suffering abroad, therebydiminishing American global influence. He disrupts the future prosperity of theUnited States, its credit rating, and the strength of its currency by toyingimpulsively with tarriffs, robbing the intricate worldwide trade mechanisms of predictability,that essential prerequisite for economic investment.

What he leaves intact are the worstelements of government: its totalitarian impulses, its arbitrariness, and itsbullying penchant for political oppression: Watch, the ground is being laid forDemocratic candidates to be arrested on trumped-up charges, as in Turkey andother semi-authoritarian systems.

Remarkably, little is being done topreserve the genius of the Framers’ constitutional system—its separation ofpowers—which is being abandoned by the legislative and judicial branches (atthe Supreme Court level), leaving Trump’s executive with exorbitant authorityto ride roughshod over the checks and balances that have kept Americandemocracy functioning for more than two centuries. That makes the Trumpists andhis acolytes in Congress and the Supreme Court anything but “conservative.”They are not conserving. They are regressionists, not revolutionaries in ThomasPaine’s meaning. In 1776, they would have been British loyalists, monarchists.They are staging a counter-revolution, and the country is letting them get awaywith it.

Perhaps understandably, mostAmericans have been slow to recognize what is happening.  Comparing the early days of Trump with theearly days of Vladimir Putin, a Russian told an American friend several fewmonths ago, “You guys are caving faster than we did.” That was probably becausethe Russians knew what was coming; they’d been there. Americans do not. They donot yet know how terrifying government can be. Immigrants are learning.Citizens are next.

What Trump and his followers arecreating fits Thomas Paine’s characteristic of “intolerable” government, inwhich “our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means bywhich we suffer.” Under Trump and his successive followers, the United Statesis likely to become less free, less prosperous, less healthy, less safe, lesseducated, less just, less stable, less influential, less admired, lessconnected with the world, and less happy and comfortable for Americans’children and grandchildren.  

To invert Paine’s dictum, Trump’sgovernment has become an instrument of our vices, not a restraint. Itrepresents society’s worst impulses, which coexist with its generous decency.The question going forward is whether American society, by “uniting ouraffections,” can someday remake government into a collective effort of virtuethat reflects whatever caring resides in the civic culture of the country.

                                                             By David K. Shipler            

            Every November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution,the Soviet Union staged a parade of drill-perfect troops and intimidating weaponrythrough Red Square. And every November 7, the frigid breath of the comingMoscow winter made the hours there a hardship. But I went in every one of thefour years I lived in Moscow, partly because it was my job as a New YorkTimes correspondent, partly because I’m a sucker for parades, even those ofmy country’s adversary.

            I grew upwith Fourth of July parades of fire engines in my hometown. And on the Maineisland where I spend summers now, I know a lot of the folks who roll by intheir decorated pickups, plus the vegetable gardener on her riding mower. (She makesthe world’s best pickles and relish.)

So, I went to the Army’s 250thanniversary parade along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., partly becauseit’s my habit to be curious, partly because I’m a believer in the power ofobservation, even of killing machines. What I observed was less political and morecomplicated than generally expected, not a Moscow-style display ofmilitarization.

There at the grass roots, we couldn’tsee President Trump and could barely hear his invited guests cheer his arrival.We could not hear him swear in new recruits with an oath to the Constitutionthat he violates hourly. His move to use the military inside his own country tosmother dissent, a step toward ideological totalitarianism, operated in a distantdimension, real enough but confounded by a second dimension, the one you stillremember before the Trumpists came to power.

The mood was Fourth of July, acrowd of people friendly with those they’d never met, laid back with no sign ofjingoism, families out for a pleasant day. Around me on Constitution Avenue,they were almost entirely white—a rarity for DC—but sporting only a few MAGAhats and a few more army and veterans’ caps and T-shirts. Many seemed to bemilitary buffs, having served themselves or, as one guy put it in a small sign:

YAYARMY

F… TRUMP

HEREFOR

TANKS

Nobody bothered him, as far as Icould tell, nor did they challenge the fellow walking back and forth among theonlookers holding a big poster saying, “TRUMP IS A RAPIST.” Trump’s threat thatany protests on his big day (also his birthday) would be “met with very bigforce” turned out to be hot air, at least as far as DC police, army MPs anduniformed Secret Service agents were concerned.

Such a threat in Moscow would havebeen swiftly executed, of course, had any Russian waved a dissenting sign. Yet unlikeConstitution Avenue, where anybody could go, no ordinary Russians withoutspecial passes could get to the Red Square parade through the series ofcheckpoints. Non-credentialed people saw it only on TV.

In person, it was spectacular. WithRussians’ flair for pageantry, Moscow could surely win a theater critic’s awardover Washington, even Trump’s Washington. While the ageing Politburo was linedup on the rust-red Lenin Mausoleum (equipped with heaters, we assumed), thousandsof troops in uniform great coats and fur hats goose-stepped in preciseunanimity across the vast plaza, with not a step out of tempo or a leg offangle.

By contrast, ragged marching characterizedmost of the US Army units along Constitution, perhaps because they were actualcombat forces. The Soviet soldiers looked suspiciously like trained drill teams.Or maybe the Soviet army spent more time learning how to march than how to fight,which has carried over to Russia’s flawed military performance in Ukraine.

Whatever the case, those troops inRed Square, chins raised in a pose of haughty superiority, seemed formidable astheir chants, “Hoo-RAH! Hoo-RAH!” reverberated off the Kremlin walls. (Rumorhad it that they were recorded and amplified. But still!) On Constitution, however,American soldiers marched practically in silence, with only the occasional lonevoice of a senior sergeant’s commands, none of those semi-musical cadence calls,joined by all the troops, that you’re supposed to learn in boot camp.

The Soviet parades featured themost ominous weapons of all, various nuclear-capable rockets, includingenormous international ballistic missiles dragged through Red Square on huge vehicles.That missile-rattling show was abandoned for a while after the Soviet Unioncollapsed but was performed most recently this spring to mark the 80thanniversary of the end of World War II. As a statement of patriotic pride and internationalmenace, it gets the message across as Russia bogs down in its attempt toconquer Ukraine: Remember, we’re a nuclear power.

Washington’s parade seemed less scarybecause it contained no missiles, just a few unarmed mobile launchers. (The Armydoesn’t have ICBMs, which are controlled by the Air Force and Navy.) It feltcarefree and almost benign as drivers and gunmen waved and smiled from theturrets of their tanks and other deadly vehicles. One nearby father kept tryingto whip up enthusiastic awe in his small son,—“Buddy, look at that! That’s the101st! See that? Special Forces!”—but we won’t know for about adecade if it worked on the young man. From my grassroots post, this parade didnot live up to its ominous billing as Trump’s militarized swagger towardauthoritarianism.

It was essentially a celebration ofthe Army’s history, a retrospective of marchers and bands clad in colonial-erauniforms, then those from the Civil War and updated as helmets changed shape throughWorld War I and II, Korea and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The evolution included humans’capacity to develop imaginative tools of death, and the crowds alongConstitution were captivated by the long succession of olive-drab armoredvehicles, including the behemoth of all—the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank—which is toobig to be very useful in much modern warfare. It’s not clear whether it damagedthe capital’s streets as predicted, but I saw no harm being caused on venerated ConstitutionAvenue. The reason, as a young fellow who’d spent eight years in the 82ndAirborne explained to me, was that the tanks were heading straight, and treadstear things up mostly when they turn. Steel plates had been installed atcorners.

            Thatguy gave me short courses on nearly every weapon that passed by, plus the bestand worst kinds of helicopters to jump from, the most and least maneuverable kindsof parachutes, and the obsolescence of most of what we were seeing. Two smallsurveillance drones flying along Constitution were the future of warfare, as weboth agreed, having watched Ukraine’s inventive use of them.

            He asked ifI’d been in uniform. I said I’d been in the Navy—one hat I wear thatestablishes an instant bond with people I might profoundly disagree with. But Ididn’t ask him about his politics. In our dimension, it didn’t feel like apolitical day. I didn’t ask him how he felt about Trump using the military for domesticpolicing. I was being a very bad reporter. I did wonder to myself, watching theranks of young troops in camouflage, how they would react to a clearly illegalorder, and what thoughts were going on inside their minds about what washappening to America’s precious democracy.

Instead, having heard that he’dmade 45 jumps as a paratrooper, I asked him about his knees. “They’re broken,” hesaid with a wan smile, as if acknowledging fate.   

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Twoprominent themes of racial and ethnic antagonism have found their way intoofficial government policies under the Trump administration. One is the longstandingbelief that nonwhites are mentally inferior to whites, a stereotype dating fromslavery. The other, generated more recently, is the notion that whites are thereal victims, suffering discrimination under the banner of racial preferences.

            PresidentTrump has displayed both assumptions in personal remarks and symbolic acts, andhis aides have incorporated them into federal funding and programming. Notsince the years of legal segregation, before the civil rights movement, has governmentbeen so dominated by the ideology of white supremacy. Not in the decades ofwork toward a more open society have its leaders repudiated the progress so venomously.

            Trump hasdemonstrated skill at tapping into the ugliest attitudes in his country, givingthem voice, and cementing them in policy. Before any investigation of the fatalmidair collision of an army helicopter and a passenger jet near Washington’sNational Airport, he speculated that “it could have been” caused by diversityin the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s DEI program, Trump claimed inan executive order, “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in theFAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

His executive orders ending DEI—thediversity, equity and inclusion programs that have opened broad opportunitiesto minorities—ride on one of the most durable stereotypes in American culture: theinsidious belief that people of color, Blacks in particular, are inherently lesscapable than whites. That age-old image, which has fostered racial bias inhiring and promotions, now finds a comfortable home in the White House.

Since victims of racial prejudice havebeen favored, it seems, some whites have been competing for that victim badge,seeing themselves as deprived of the level playing field so loudly advocated byliberals fighting discrimination. A bitter grievance is nursed by some whitesin or near poverty when they hear about the “white privilege” that frees themajority race of the burdens of prejudice. The resentment took on a sharp edgeas whites fell into economic hardship during the Great Depression of 2008. Theymight have made common cause with Blacks who suffered similarly, but racialdivides overcome class affinities in America.

 Trump is clever at exploiting the theme ofwhite victimization. It’s part of what got him elected. And now it has beenelevated to diplomacy based on fantasy. In recent days, he has used the OvalOffice to dramatize the hallucination that whites in South Africa are victimsof genocide at the hands of Blacks. He even showed a video of a ranting Blackracist politician to South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, thedistinguished lead negotiator of the end of apartheid.

The show followed Trump’s theatricalgrant of refugee status to whites from South Africa after denying it to Afghansand others who face danger, some for helping the US military.

            At the sametime, he was making American Blacks more vulnerable. His Justice Department’sCivil Rights Division announced its abandonment of an effective tool inrectifying police misconduct: lawsuits producing judge-approved consent decreesthat reduced racial profiling and brutality. Police violence against Blacks hasbeen a chronic American problem, a source of riots in the 1960s, and a featureof misery in many impoverished communities. Without federal monitoring andintervention, it is now likely to worsen.

One dropped case involvesMinneapolis, which is about to mark the fifth anniversary of its police murderof George Floyd. Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck sparked protestsacross the country and around the world, Black Lives Matter demonstrations thatTrump and his cohorts detested.

            Adding tothe flurry of assaults on racial justice this week, the head of the Civil RightsDivision, Harmeet Dhillon, launched an investigation of the city of Chicago forpossible hiring violations. Why? Mayor Brandon Johnson tolda church congregation proudly that unprecedented diversity had been achieved byincreasing the number of Black officials in senior positions.

The concepts of “diversity,” alongwith “equity” and “inclusion,” (DEI) might have once sounded noble, but havebeen tagged as sinful and illegal by the Trump administration’s speech police. Useof the words alone trigger retribution. Rough threats and punishments fromWashington have cowed some private universities, corporations, and foundationsinto deleting or masking their efforts to open their ranks to minorities.

The Trumpist goal is to invertcivil rights enforcement from its longstanding protection of groups that havesuffered discrimination to a novel defense of the white majority. Instead of targetedenforcement where a white might have been rejected because of race (and it doeshappen), the effort is a broad assault on proven remedies for the country’shistoric ailment of pro-white bias.

As an executor of the project, HarmeetDhillon is a paradoxical figure. Born in India, she would not obviously benefitfrom the white supremacist system that her policies are supporting. Yet in1988, she publishedand defended antisemitic satires of Dartmouth College’s Jewish president,James O. Freedman, when she was editor-in-chief of the conservative studentnewspaper, The Dartmouth Review. It was a scandalous event that drewnational attention and condemnations from the Anti-Defamation League, the Boardof Trustees, and faculty members.

A column in one issue of the paper,and a drawing in the next, likened Freedman to Hitler, using a Hitler quote toportray the Dartmouth president as an dictator bent on a “ ‘Final Solution’ ofthe Conservative Problem,” a “holocaust” in which campus conservatives were “deportedin cattle cars in the night.”

Dhillon saw nothing antisemitic in thecolumn or the caricture. She called it a comment on “liberal fascism” andblamed critics for “trying to twist the issue to their own ends.” She told TheNew York Times that she was “very surprised” by the reaction. Given herblind spot, at least then, she might have trouble detecting the antisemitismthat the Trump administration is citing as a pretext for investigating anddefunding universities (although not Dartmouth so far). If time were conflated,she would have to investigate herself.

Of course, antisemitism is afeature of the right-wing white nationalism that has mustered support for Trump.That wing of American society also finds harmony with Trump’s vilification ofswarthy immigrants as bringing violence and “poisoning the blood of our country.” He and Vice President J.D. Vance havestereotyped them as primitive. During the campaign, they repeatedly endorsed afabricated slander that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating pet dogs andcats.

Vance struck the same theme a fewdays ago, in different terms, asserting that immigrant communities are rifewith “pre-modern brutality.” Ina podcast with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, he also claimedthat they undermine America’s virtuous cohesion:

“I really do think that socialsolidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly, and sothat’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’sbecause I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are aunified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too muchimmigration too quickly.”

So, preserving “something” in hisown country does not mean celebrating its remarkable array of cultures, races,religions, and ethnicities. It’s too bad Douthat didn’t ask him how he reconciledthat with the background of his wife, Usha, born in the US of Indian immigrants.Well, perhaps they came here slowly.

 

By David K. Shipler 

There is nothing sadder than fear.

                                     --Isabel Allende  

     A newdivide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist theauthoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread yourway between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keepyour head down to present less of a target?

            All thosetactics are being used by a citizenry devoid of the skills needed to keep alivea dying democracy. By and large, Americans don’t see what’s coming. Only a fewhave experienced dictatorships (abroad) and fewer still have lived undergovernments with totalitarian aspirations.

In modern America, the native-born havenot been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned bymasked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not beendictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Governmentofficials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for politicalloyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyondgovernment into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats toprivate organizations that do not comply.

The country has enjoyed a happy,complacent spirit of assumptions about the permanence of the constitutionalsystem. That is now being swept away by the Trump maelstrom, its place taken byan unfamiliar fear—cleverly implanted by the president and his apparatchiks.

What opposition has developed hasbeen fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy thathas already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is nowgoverned largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt globalmarkets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workersjobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissentingvoices.

He has cowed huge law firms, richcorporations, major foundations, news organizations, and prominentuniversities—some of each—by imposing financial fear in various forms. A few imaginethat they can buy the favor of the bully. They must have lived a charmed lifeof never having encountered a bully, a mafia boss, a dictator.

The charmed life of the UnitedStates has ended. Yet what opposition exists has been fragmented. No masscoalition of resistance has taken shape across the country’s vast landscape ofclass, profession, religion, ethnicity, and party. Most dissent has beenparochial: university presidents defending universities, law firms defendinglawyers, immigrant rights groups defending immigrants, news media defendingnews gathering, business defending trade. They need to join to defend oneanother, and the country.

As Kamala Harris noted in her firstmajorspeech since losing last year’s presidential election, Trump and hisenablers think “if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chillingeffect on others. But what they have overlooked is that fear is not the onlything that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”

Courage is also dangerous—acutely dangerousto the dictator, and obviously dangerous to the outspoken. That is why very fewpeople in autocracies hold the flame of freedom. The risks are high. And theyare getting higher in the United States.

As a triumvirate of scholars whohave written on dictatorships notedyesterday, the “simple metric” testing whether a country has crossed intoauthoritarianism is “the cost of opposing the government. . .  When citizens must think twice about criticizingor opposing the government because they could credibly face governmentretribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, Americahas crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.” They definecompetitive authoritarianism as a system where “parties compete in electionsbut the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing fieldagainst the opposition,” as in Hungary, India, Serbia, and Turkey.

The United States has long beenpockmarked with injustices, and its history is stained with chapters of shame.Perhaps it is reassuring to look through the legacy of the wrongs that havebeen acknowledged and overcome: the slaughter of Native Americans and theirculture, the enslavement of African Blacks, the Civil War, the hatefultreatment of immigrants, the political prosecutions of labor leaders andantiwar activists, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the witch-hunts ofMcCarthyism, the legal segregation of the races, and on.

The Trump chapter looks different.It is structural, expanding executive power in the service of a totalistideological remaking of the society. It has the hallmarks of an aspiringtotalitarianism, absent the mass political arrests of citizens, so far. Evensome who fear the Trumpists’ assault speak of a phase that will end, a pendulumthat will swing back, a cycle that will turn. Republicans will finally object.Business will finally bring pressure. Voters will turn the House to theDemocrats next year.

But that hopeful reasoning lies whollywithin a constitutional framework that Trumpists evade, which makes this anasymmetrical struggle. Those who resist operate within a set of laws, rules,mores, and values that—we have discovered—rely largely on voluntary complianceand trust, the way you trust drivers to stick to the right and stop at redlights, even when cops aren’t around.

But Trumpists are working outsidethe constitutional framework, where no rules apply, not even judges’ commands. Theonly institution mounting consistent opposition to the assaults has been thejudiciary—not the legislature—and Trump has set an early pattern of ignoring orweaseling around court orders. When the last refuge of justice is overrun, fearwill rule.

History is still in the hands ofthe people, for a time. Whether this enters American history as a passing phaseor a fundamental turning point will depend on whether Americans mobilize tomake courage contagious. “In a free society,” said Abraham Joshua Heschelduring the civil rights movement, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Saigon fellto the North Vietnamese army 50 years ago today, yet “wars never end,” saysNguyen Phan Que Mai, an eloquent novelist and poet who has kept alive thebeauty and suffering of her native Vietnam.

She was speaking recently inWashington, DC, alongside the photographer Peter Steinhauer, who was captivatedin childhood by pictures of Vietnam taken by his father, a US Navy oral surgeonstationed in Danang during the war. As an adult, the son traveled there, thenlived there, and has made part of his profession the celebration in images of thecountry’s landscapes and architecture. Marc Knapper, the current US ambassadorto Vietnam, is the son of a Vietnam War veteran.

And so it goes, through multiplegenerations. Vietnam does not release you easily. For Vietnamese who fled intoexile, the natural pull of the homeland’s culture remains. For many Americans,too: Vietnam is still embedded in their lives, whether they went to fight thewar or to write about it, to profit from it, to study it, or to oppose it bygiving benevolent aid.

I am among those who have carriedVietnam with me all these years. My new novel, The Interpreter,is inspired by a Vietnamese translator who gave me essential help when Ireported for The New York Times. It is dedicated “to those who interprettheir countries’ wars for audiences who watch from safety.” Interpreters,“fixers,” are behind every story you read or hear or see.

Like many interpreters, my semi-fictionalcharacter flies above the political categories imposed by wars. He translateswords and interprets his culture. “I give the words true meaning,” he says. AsNorth Vietnamese tanks approach Saigon, he must choose whether to leave for safetyin the US or stay at risk in his beloved country—a choice made every day by peoplein upheavals across the globe.

My late wife, Debby, used to saythat Vietnam was her favorite of our overseas assignments. Her creation ofEnglish-language classes for children slated for adoption by American familiesbrought her warm friendships with Vietnamese teachers—and with the kidsthemselves. We came to love a nine-year-old boy whose mother wanted him adoptedso he could get an education in America, as she told the adoption agency. Morethan a decade later, when I was asked to give a commencement address atMiddlebury College, I got to hand Jonathan Shipler his diploma. It was a highpoint in my life.

I know an aging ex-Marine in Mainewhom I’ve never seen without his Vietnam Vet baseball cap. At Bangor airport,veterans used to form welcoming lines for troops coming home from Iraq. Theywere not going to let those young Americans be vilified.

But some others who fought inVietnam won’t talk about it. They won’t revive the trauma, drawing a curtain ofsilence across the pain and often through their families. Such an account cameto me some years ago in a stunning vignette composed by a student in a writingworkship I taught in Nebraska. Every Fourth of July, his father and a closebuddy, both veterans of the war, gathered for a barbecue under a big Americanflag. The father wouldn’t tell his son about the war, but he gained solace fromhis friend’s company.

Then his friend committed suicide.After that, the student’s father didn’t fly the flag or do the July 4 barbecueanymore.

War wounds fester or heal invarious ways. The late Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Hanoi for fiveand a half years, ultimately pressed for diplomatic relations with CommunistVietnam and visited the “Hanoi Hilton” where he’d been held. President DonaldTrump, who avoided military service because of purported bone spurs in his heels,ridiculed McCain when he was alive and this week ordered senior Americandiplomats to boycott all ceremonies in Vietnam marking the anniversary of thewar’s end. History, too, either heals or festers.

The war was still politically toxicnearly three decades after the North Vietnamese victory, when Republican-fundedads making false accusationsdamaged the 2004 presidential candidacy of Senator John Kerry. a Navy swiftboatcaptain who became a forceful critic of the war. Claims that he showed poorleadership and did not deserve the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heartshe was awarded were apparently motivated by ex-servicemen resentful of hisantiwar activity.

For his part, Kerry campaigned moreon his service than his doubts. He forfeited the chance to lead Americans intoa serious discussion about the trap of misguided warfare, although the wars inAfghanistan and Iraq were ongoing at the time. The lessons of the Vietnamdebacle had evidently expired, and Kerry did little to teach them again. 

Correspondents who covered Vietnamshare a continuing bond. We tell war stories over lunches and dinners, and thewar still reverberates into the professional work of some. My brother-in-law,Arnold R. Isaacs of the Baltimore Sun, who was flown out as Saigon wasfalling, has written two of the finest books on the subject: WithoutHonor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, and VietnamShadows: The War, its Ghosts, and its Legacy. He debunks theMIA/POW myth that Americans are still secretly held prisoner in Vietnam,another legacy of the American trauma.

During the war and for some timelater, the voices we heard were almost entirely American. And they spoke mostlyabout Americans, not Vietnamese. Only gradually did Vietnamese voices breakthrough in the United States to tell the Vietnamese stories of the war: Le LyHayslip in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, a book made into a filmby Oliver Stone. Nguyen Phan Que Mai, who wrote The Mountains Sing and DustChild, and is out with a new book of poetry, The Color of Peace. VietThanh Nguyen, who won a Pulitzer for The Sympathizer. And others, atlast.

I needed somehow to write about theVietnamese-American interaction between interpreter and correspondent, thatcritical place where the world looks from afar. Important parts of myVietnam story remained mostly untold until now. I was there only a year and ahalf, a young, green reporter with no dreams of writing a book. But as Idiscovered, writing for a newspaper leaves a lot unsaid, even when thenewspaper is as great as The Times. And fiction can reach deep truthsthat are beyond the rigorous precision of nonfiction.

So, I reached as far as I could in TheInterpreter, whose hero’s work I described this way: “He spoke to themgleefully at first, then soberly, delicately, almost tearfully, seducing hisproud and pummeled countrymen to give up their inner torments to theAmericans.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

            PresidentTrump thinks that car exhaust doesn’t harm the environment. He believes that Ukrainestarted its war with Russia. He thinks that the US has given $350 billion inaid to Ukraine, more than Europe. (It’s $174 billion, less than Europe.) What’smore, he remains sure, even after being corrected in public, that the Europeanaid is all loans to be paid back, although both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyand French President Emmanuel Macron tried to set him straight. 

            Trump thinksthat French opposition leader Marine Le Pen is “in prison.” (Her sentence forembezzlement includes no jail time.) Trump believes that the American economyis a “sick patient,” ripped off by trading partners. (The US economy is theworld’s biggest, with the highest per capita GDP.) He thinks American carcompanies aren’t allowed to sell in other countries. (They are, and China hasbeen a big market for GM.) He believes that Canada charges 250 to 300 percenttariffs on US dairy products and forgetsthat he got those eliminated in his first term. (They never kicked in anyway,because Canadian imports never reached the triggering threshold.)

He thinks that the US never chargedtariffs on Chinese goods until he became president, when “I took in hundreds ofbillions of dollars.” (The figure was $75 billion during his first term, and tariffshave been levied on imports from China since 1789.)

            He thinksthe country is reeling under a crime wave by immigrant gangs. (Crime rates havebeen falling for years and are lower among immigrants than Americans.) Hebelieves the men deported to an El Salvador prison are in violent gangs. (Fewif any have been convicted, and some are demonstrably innocent.)

            And on andon and on. In an autocracy, which is developing under Trump, the leader’s flawsand whims and fantasies are replicated by his underlings out of either zealousloyalty or fear for their jobs or their freedom. Even casual assertions at thetop, whether factual or not, become doctrine. From below, contradictions of thenarrative do not reach the highest authority; they are filtered out by subordinatesunwilling to sacrifice themselves. So, a leader like Trump sets his own trap.He grows insulated and unaware, existing in a feedback loop that amplifies hisfalsehoods. The alternative reality he creates forms the basis of policy, whichoften has immense impact.

            A recent illustrationgot less attention than it deserved. When Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlanticwrote about being inadvertently invited into a Signal chat on attack plansagainst the Houthis in Yemen, Trump was not told by anybody in White House orCabinet. He learned it from a reporter’s question in a press pool. He seemed genuinelysurprised and said he didn’t know anything about it.

The ensuing uproar legitimately focusedon the security lapse, but Trump’s ignorance was telling. He is the architectof a structure of deceit. Unlike his first term, when more mainstream officialswere willing to set him straight, he and the Heritage Foundation have populatedagencies with ideologues who command loyalty to Trump personally and “hisagenda” above the country or the Constitution. That loyalty includessubordination of the truth. The most recent case: the Justice Department lawyerjust suspended for saying honestly in court that an error had been made indeporting a Maryland man legally in the US under an immigration judge’s protectiveorder.

            Since everypresident learns something from reporters’ questions, press pools can leak informationto the president, embarrassing him with his own ignorance. So, Trump’s WhiteHouse has taken from the correspondents’ association the power to choose who’sin the press pools in the Oval Office, Air Force One, and elsewhere. A banwould surely be put on any reporter who might dare to ask this question, forexample: “President Trump, do you know that you’re lying, or do you believe thelies you tell?”

Various answers suggest themselves,but the accurate one might lie beyond Trump’s reach. During last year’scampaign, when he wandered aimlessly through speeches, early dementia wasraised as a possibility. Whether or not it’s dementia, Trump appears to sufferfrom some form of cognitive impairment.

It has been obvious for years thatTrump, either by design or inability, does not absorb facts and analyze thepatterns of contradiction and nuance that compose reality. That could be deliberateand calculated, or it could be a neurological defect. The fabrications havecertainly worked for him politically, and they align with his and his closestadvisers’ radical views. He has a transactional relationship with the truth,just as he does with individuals, institutions, and countries: If they suit hispurpose, he’s with them. If not, he spurns them. Truth, too, can be embraced ofdiscarded as it helps or hurts him. Perhaps, in his own mind, he negotiateswith the truth. We don’t know. The public knows his mouth, not his brain. Whathe hears himself saying, true or not, seems to be what he believes and what allhis acolytes think and act on.

In other words, Trump might sufferfrom a grave disability. It would be sad enough for him, but his autocraticstyle transmits this disability throughout his staff and the ideologicalsubordinates who now populate government agencies. So, the disabled presidentis disabling the country and much of the world.

What’s more, Trump’s cognitiveimpairment, if that’s what it is, has been codified into an ideology ofignorance, now implemented by battalions of aspiring totalitarians. When Trump officialsdismiss reality as inconvenient, watch out. Immigrants are first, now being deportedunder legal-sounding lies. The same method of fabricated charges can be used tojail citizens. Political opponents can be labeled enemies and charged as supportersof terrorism, audited by the IRS, threatened by pardoned Proud Boys, fired byfearful employers.

The totalitarian mindsetunderstands that information is power. Even in the US, which is still pluralistic,government collects and keeps huge stores of data, which are designed to informsensible policy. Under Trump, information is now being subjected to suppressionand manipulation. Offices that test and survey are being abolished, and statisticalsets are being taken offline.

Trump has set out to destroy the openforums of honest inquiry, the very institutions that have been jewels in thecrown of American brilliance: universities, museums, libraries, privatefoundations, institutions honored with Nobel Prize-winning research. VicePresident JD Vance has called universities the “enemy.” Free universities arealways a threat to autocracies.

Those running the federalgovernment are like counter-revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow the country’sdecades of progress in almost every area of achievement. They are working to facilitatethe creation of alternate “realities” to serve a broader takeover of Americanthinking in economics, medicine, social science, history, and other fields.

Whether or not thiscounter-revolution will succeed is an open question. But it is making headwayas Trump’s illness becomes America’s illness.

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            This is astory about high-handed Maine state officials proposing to jeopardize islandresidents’ emergency access to mainland hospitals. It is a local outrage, smallin comparison to the sweeping outrages that are uprooting global security and underminingAmerican democracy. But its significance is immense, because it’s a case studyin how anti-government sentiment can be generated among good citizens whodepend on key services. Nationwide, that disaffection has been a key element inthe country’s dramatic political shifts.

            The issueis straightforward. For 65 years, since the state launched car ferry service,the boats have docked overnight on four islands, which don’t have hospitals butare populated year- round and have a surge of summer residents. So, the Maine StateFerry Service provides sleeping quarters on the islands for the crews, who canbe roused if there’s a medical emergency in the middle of the night. An island ambulancedrives onto the ferry and drives off on the mainland.

That system might be scrapped forthree of the islands in two or three years, if the state has its way. Thecommissioner of transportation, Bruce Van Note, and the director of the ferryservice, William Geary, say they’re considering docking the ferries overnighton the mainland. They are in the Democratic administration of Governor JanetMills, whose press secretary, Ben Goodman, did not answer my emailed requestfor an explanation of her position.

Under the proposal, there would beno transportation by ambulance between the last ferry run of the day and thefirst the next morning. I’m biased, because I spend four to five months a yearon Swan’s Island: I’ll try to arrange my stroke or heart attack in the daytime.

            There areother ways to get off the islands. LifeFlight has highly equipped helicopters,but only five for the whole state. If there’s one available, it can fly in atnight, but here’s the catch: not in thick fog, which is endemic in Maine.

            Lobstermenand other island residents have boats, of course, and when things get tough,people step up to help. The Coast Guard might come, and state officials havementioned small rescue boats as an option. But an ambulance couldn’t drive onto any of them. Getting a stretcher-bound patient down a steep ramp to afloating dock and onto a mostly open boat is a dangerous, tricky exercise,especially on an icy winter night with rough seas and freezing wind. Andoutside an ambulance with medical equipment and trained emergency volunteers, apatient in an acute condition runsa high risk. Watch thisvideo of the transfer of a patient via lobster boat from the island ofNorth Haven.   

             North Haven, Swan’s, and Islesboro would losetheir overnight boats under the plan. The fourth island, Vinalhaven, is servedby two boats, so one could still spend the night there. (Two other islands,Frenchboro and Matinicus, get only infrequent runs by state ferries, and boatshave never berthed there overnight.)

            The state citestwo reasons for mainland docking: First, it would save money on crew quartersbecause workers could live at home and commute. But many crew live too far fromthe mainland terminals to make daily drives, and some have told islanders thatthey’d quit—this during a shortage of able-bodied seaman qualified to staff theboats.

            The secondargument holds that new boats will be hybrid diesel-electric, whose batteriescannot be charged on islands, which get electricity via submarine cables andhave insufficient power infrastructure. Can’t that be upgraded? Let’s pretendwe’re living in the 21st century!

            Aside fromthe medical issue, islanders are worried about their children, many of whom commuteby the first morning ferry at 6:45 to high school on the mainland. Somestudents board with families on the mainland instead of going home every night,which might become unavoidable under the state’s docking plan.

            Frictionbetween island communities and the state ferry service is longstanding, mostlyabout rising fares, breakdowns, and missed runs because of crew shortages. Butwhat might be even more important than the nuts-and-bolts of particulardisputes is the sense of powerlessness among folks utterly dependent on adistant agency that seems to listen to them reluctantly, if at all. The stateferry service is essentially a monopoly, and it’s not fun when you have tomobilize to obtain basic respect for your dignity.

On the other hand, the ferries areheavily subsidized by the state government, and no private company could runthem at the existing fares, which don’t cover the rising costs of fuel, wages,and maintenance. You don’t hear rhapsodies of gratitude for this fact on theislands, though, because the fares are high enough to cause pain. The stateraised them by 15 percent last summer and wants another 15 percent increasethis year. Summertimeroundtrip rates for a passenger to most islands would be $23 for a 40- to60-minute journey, and $55 for a vehicle and driver. That means $78 to take aloved-one for chemo, for example, a hardship for a good many islanders.

The ferry service holds hearings,as the law requires, but some legislators listening to the uproar from theirisland constituents aren’t taking any chances. A bill requiring nighttimedocking on the islands has been introduced by eight state legislators—four Democratsand four Republicans—in a region that is politically divided. Swan’s Island,for example, lies in a district that gave its one electoral vote to Trump(Maine splits its electoral votes), and yet is represented by a DemocraticHouse member in Washington, DC.

Ferry schedules are but one assaulton people’s well-being. Health care in Maine and elsewhere is being damagedmore broadly by Republicans in Washington. The cuts they are considering toMedicaid, the insurance program for low-income citizens, would hurt everyone,not just recipients. Because many rural hospitals and clinics rely on Medicaidpayments, some would have to reduce services or even close. And the Trumpadministration’s sudden, chain-saw halt of medical research into antiviraldrugs, cancer, heart disease, and the like will cause long-term harm to the nation’sfuture health.

            Nevertheless, tamperingwith islands’ lifelines to hospitals has an immediacy that everyone across thepolitical spectrum can understand. If Democrats want to win back rural, working-classvoters, this would be a good place to start. That includes you, Governor Mills,wherever you are.

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            Back in thebad old days of Soviet Communism, a dissident in Moscow wassummoned for interrogation by the KGB, the secret police. As the agentticked off a list of charges, the dissident rebutted each by citing one guaranteeafter another in the Soviet Constitution, which protected free speech, privacy,and other rights. “Please,” the KGB agent interrupted. “We’re having a seriousconversation.”

            I havetreasured that story since I heard it decades ago. It dramatized the differencebetween the Soviet and American systems, between a constitution of fictionalrights and one of actual rights. Whenan American political scientist, Robert Kelley, taught for a semester at MoscowState University, he used to tell his students that if the United States had astate religion, it would be constitutional democracy.

            No more.

            PresidentTrump and his zealous aides do not blatantly mock the Constitution in words,but they do so in actions. They are ignoring some of its central principles,particularly the separation of powers, defying both the legislative andjudicial branches. And while I’m always diffident about drawing parallels sinceno analogy is perfect, I am feeling an uneasy sense of familiarity asWashington spirals down into a darker and darker place. Trump and hisallies—plus Americans who are capitulating in their businesses, politics, anduniversities—would have fit comfortably in Moscow, where they would havesurvived and prospered.

            The essenceof the American idea is the din of ideas, exactly what Soviet leaders founddistasteful, and what American leaders are now trying to muffle. There was away of thinking in the Soviet Union, which continues today in Vladimir Putin’sRussia, that eschewed pluralism and imposed conformity. Only a single truth wastolerated. Disagreements and debates were considered antithetical to thehistorical progress that Communist theory envisioned. Political irreverencemight be heard quietly around the kitchen table, but elsewhere it was punished.

            Thatcompulsion to dictate obedience was more about holding power than upholdingMarxism. In authoritarian structures, the high perch can seem so precariousthat legitimate disputes below look dangerously anarchic. Therefore, politicalloyalty is a prerequisite for key positions, which is Trump’s demand and erodesexpertise. An American scientist who grew up in Moscow told me recently thatTrump’s assault on academia reminded him of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when“scientists were replaced by political appointees, which led to Chernobyl amongother disasters.”  

Even such loyalty can be empty. Beingaccepted into Communist Party membership was more careerist than communist;without that party card, you couldn’t be an editor, history professor, factorymanager, hospital director, and the like. As a result, cynicism prevailed. “Nobodybelieves in anything,” a 17-year-old girl told me in 1978. She was right. Sovietideology had become a hollowed-out shell that could not keep the country fromdisintegrating in 1991.

            Russia’sautocracy soon returned, though; its long authoritarian history prevailed. TheUnited States is only at the beginning of this chapter, which marks either anepisode or a turning point, depending on how devoted to democracy Americans proveto be. So far, it doesn’t look good. In merely weeks since Trump’sinauguration, committed ideologues with dogmatic views  have penetrated most government agencies,operating under a personality cult unique in the American experience. Like mostdictators, Trump covers his thin skin with toughness. He has forged an amalgamof lust for personal authority, revenge toward his opponents, white supremacy, anda totalitarian mindset that seeks a much broader remaking of America than isconventionally understood.

What is important tograsp—something the mainstream press has mostly missed—is that the beliefsystem reaches far beyond government spending cuts. It seeks to saturate theentire society with a set of worldviews, as outlined in the HeritageFoundation’s Project2025. Harnessing the investigatory power and funding leverage of multipleagencies, the Trumpists are using government to dictate behavior and speech touniversities, businesses, and law firms, and are gearing up to pressure newsorganizations, social media, secondary schools, and the arts.

All that was easier for Sovietofficials, because the government owned every institution and means ofproduction—every college and school, every newspaper and broadcaster, everystore and restaurant and mine and factory. The Kremlin could turn off citizens’phones, deny them travel abroad, fire them from jobs, and ultimately imprisonthem.

American society is not as easilytamed unless Americans allow it. But the goals are similar, and the USgovernment turns out to have more intrusive power than many citizens realizedover universities dependent on federal research grants, theaters reliant onarts funding, law firms depending on security clearances, businesses survivingon government contracts, hospitals kept afloat by Medicaid.

Trump’s zealots, who had four yearsout of office to prepare for this opportunity, are pulling those levers effectively,curtailing funds in one area to get changes in another. They threaten funds forlearning-disabled children in secondary schools to force anti-historicalteaching on race. They cut off medical research funds to force universities to suppressfreedom of speech and to abandon programs that combat anti-minoritydiscrimination. They ominously demand detailed data on minority and LGBTQ+ hiringat law firms. They sift digital files for the use of certain words by federalemployees, contractors, and immigrants, just as certain terms are avoided byAfghans under the Taliban.

These and many other Trump actionsare such obvious violations of the Constitution’s various protections thatmultiple federal judges, nominated by both Republican and Democraticpresidents, have peppered the administration with adverse rulings. There havebeen blatant violations of the Article I empowerment of Congress, the FirstAmendment’s protection of free speech, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’srequirement for due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. Noneof the cases have yet reached the Supreme Court for substantive judgment.

Undermining an independentjudiciary is a key step in dismantling a democracy, as seen in Hungary,Venezuela, and elsewhere. And Trump seems intent on doing that. He and hisofficials have railed against judges, called for their impeachment, and ignoredmost of their rulings.

We are learning how little musclethe courts have to enforce their decisions. In the Soviet Union, judicial powerlessnesswas sardonically called “telephone justice,” meaning that the judge would callthe local Communist Party secretary for instructions in key cases.

In the US, the tactic is outright disobedience.That might produce a different form of acquiescence, one that evadesconfrontation with an executive branch that seems intent on defiance. As inmost power relationships, the American rule of law has depended on an unwrittencompact of willing acceptance of judicial authority between the courts on theone hand, and citizens and officials on the other. That voluntary relationshipis being shredded by Trump and his apparatchiks.

Acquiescing to the newauthoritarian norms, higher courts could rule on narrow grounds: that those whobrought the suits don’t have standing, or that the administration based itsaction on a legal basis different from the one the lower judge considered. Or,in certain areas, right-wing justices might give Trump victories, large andsmall, either because they agree to a so-called “unitary executive” withextensive authority or simply because they want their ruling obeyed.

Outside the myriad lawsuits,Americans have not shown much courage so far. Currying favor has emerged as atactic in the private sector. For example, Columbia University, attempting toget Trump to restore $400 million in funds suspended because of antisemitismand anti-Israel protests, hasagreed—at least on paper—to regulate demonstrations, combat antisemitismmore firmly, enlarge the campus police force with the power of arrest, scrutinizeand derecognize student groups for unspecified behavior, and increase the“intellectual diversity” of the faculty—which probably means hiring moreconservatives.

Some lawyers have also caved. Underauthoritarian regimes, it’s hard to find lawyers willing to defend the victims,and so Trump is intimidating firms that represent his opponents or sue thegovernment. He has issued a memorandumto the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “seek sanctions againstattorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatiouslitigation against the United States.” He has removed security clearances andaccess to federal buildings from some firms, which have lost important clientsas a result. One of them, Paul, Weiss, agreedto do $40 million worth of pro bono work to support Trump’s agenda.

            Giving in reinforces autocracy. Without broadresistance, the day could come when an American citizen complains to anofficial about a violation of the Constitution, and the answer will be:“Please, we’re having a serious conversation.”

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the late1970s, Israel’s former general Ariel Sharon used to call Jewish settlements inthe occupied Palestinian territories “facts on the ground.” As agricultureminister then, he provided the roads, wells, and power lines that madesettlements possible. They would anchor the Israeli presence, he argued, makingit hard to dislodge.

            He wasaccurate as far as the West Bank was concerned. Those settlements,proliferating over the decades, have balkanized the land that would be theheart of any Palestinian state.

But he himself dislodged theIsraeli presence from the Gaza Strip. He still had a general’s mindset as helater became defense minister and then prime minister, and by 2005 had come tosee the densely-populated territory as more liability than asset. His mostnotable and controversial act as prime minister was to end the occupation bywithdrawing the army and sending Israeli soldiers to forcibly evict Israeli Jewsfrom Gaza settlements.

The resentment and backlash byIsrael’s religious right, combined with the area’s rapid takeover by Hamasmilitants, demonstrated the limitations of pure military calculations, whichrarely consider politics, emotions, or the human quest for dignity. Israelis’willingness to consider a Palestinian state was virtually obliterated by Hamasrockets.

Sharon was known for brutalretaliation, so if he were still alive and in power, he would surely be decimatingGaza as thoroughly as Israel has done since the intimate atrocities by Hamasfighters during their invasion of Oct 7, 2023. The resulting “facts on theground”—some 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed or damaged, the bones oftens of thousands in the earth, a health care system and infrastructure inruins, systematic sexual violence, over 2 million traumatized Palestiniansstruggling to survive—define a new reality not easily dislodged.

Most Palestinian Arabs in Gaza arepowerless. They have never governed themselves in an open democracy. Theirleaders have been ineffectual or violent, compensating for helplessness bymilitarizing their territory into a hotbed of terrorism against Israelicivilians. Israel has mostly walled them off, and fellow Arabs in nearbycountries have wanted only the rhetoric of their cause, not the peoplethemselves.

Compounding their misfortune, Gazafamilies are now at the mercy of the two worst governments imaginable, in theUnited States and Israel. Both are run by extreme anti-Arab radicals who carenothing for those caught in that miserable reality. President Trump, indulginghis impulsive and mercenary fantasies, urges ethnic cleansing—voluntarily, hesays—under the euphemism of luxury real estate development along Gaza’sMediterranean beaches. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amplifying hiscabinet’s most excessive hatreds, smiles appreciatively at Trump’s dream of beingrid of all those Palestinian Arabs.

It might be logical to assume, asTrump does, that many Gazans would rather be somewhere else instead of campingin the rubble. Departures through Egypt have been popular among youngPalestinians, and even over the years before the current war, significantminorities of 26 to 48 percent told pollsters thatthey considered emigrating, according to the respected Palestinian Center forPolicy and Survey Research. Turkey was the most favored destination, followedby Germany, Canada, the United States, and Qatar. And that was before October 7.Presumably, the numbers have risen since.

But here’s where facts on theground get in the way. First, leaving is seen as a statement of retreat orbetrayal—betrayal of the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination.Second, Hamas, which seeks the Jewish state’s destruction, has been diminishedby Israel’s onslaught but not eliminated. We’ve seen the videos of masked,armed fighters surrounding Israeli hostages being released.

Third, while the vast majority ofGaza residents are descendants of refugees from inside what is now Israel,uprooted during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, a good number have toldreporters of their attachment to their towns and neighborhoods of Gaza. Uprootingthemselves again would feel like a repeated exile.

Fourth, nobody will take hugenumbers of Palestinians—not Egypt, not Jordan, not Saudi Arabia, and certainlynot Trump’s United States. At least half of Jordan’s population has Palestinianheritage, and as Jordan’s King Abdullah surely made plain to Trump during aWhite House visit, his pro-American monarchy would be destabilized by a hugeinflux of Palestinians from Gaza. The same for Egypt, whose alignment withWashington would be jeopardized.

Palestinians have not been integratedinto any Arab countries except Jordan, where most Palestinian have citizenship.They remain stateless in Lebanon and Syria, for example, where they are largelyconfined to longstanding slums that still bear the label “refugee camps.”

The one silver lining to Trump’sfantasies of relocation is its provocation: Arab countries have been provokedto counter with a five-year, $53.2 billion reconstructionplan for Gaza. But the proposal has two conditions that Israel rejects: theright to a Palestinian state, and “the full return” to Gaza of the PalestinianAuthority (PA), which has weak oversight in parts of the West Bank. The PA,created by the 1993 Oslo accords, could be the embryo of statehood, so Netanyahuhas spent years undermining its viability, partly by permitting millionsin funds from Qatar to flow to the PA’s chief rival: Hamas. Yes, you readthat right.

Trump is a new fact on the ground. Hisinfluence so far is contradictory. On the one hand, he is so eager to chalk upa victory by extending the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire and winning the release ofremaining Israeli hostages that he broke with precedent and sent an aide tonegotiate directly with Hamas. Netanyahu’s government was infuriated. But itcan count its blessings on the other hand, since Trump is unleashing Israel to beas harsh as it wants against Palestinians. Whatever mild restraints the USplaced on the Israelis—and they weren’t many—seem to have vanished.

Trump’s new ambassador inJerusalem, Mike Huckabee, is a right-wing Christian who favors Israeliannexation of the West Bank, which Israeli settlers call by its biblical namesJudaea and Samaria, connoting ancient Jewish title to the lands. Expect theState Department to adopt those terms. Annexation of Jewish settlements there wasproposed in the first Trump administration.

If Israel’s radical government movesto take the entire territory, Trump probably won’t object—unless he wants creditfor another victory. That would be the establishment of Saudi-Israelirelations, similar to his first administration’s Abraham Accords, which wonIsrael ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. TheSaudis, anxious to counter Iran and eager for US security guarantees, were onthe brink of following suit with Israel when Hamas attacked. The Israeli atrocitiesin response hardened the Saudi demand for eventual Palestinian statehood, whichWest Bank annexation would block.  

Beneath those obvious impedimentsto both Trump’s grandiose scheme and the prospect for a near-term peacefulresolution of the conflict lie the facts of trauma and grief and humiliationvisited upon both Israelis and Palestinians. These are active wounds asobstinate as any settlement of concrete and mortar.

 Israeli women and men taken hostage into Gazawere sexually abused and assaulted, asreported by a doctor who treated them after their release. During theOctober 7 attack, gruesome gang rapes and murders of Israeli women fueled afire of revenge that burned through Gaza when Israel retaliated.

Sexual violence and humiliationhave been the “intentional policy” of Israeli authorities, according to areport published last week by a United Nations Independent InternationalCommission of Inquiry for the Human Rights Council. Multiple interviews and videoswere cited to document alarming findings:

Israel troops forced men to stripin front of their families—to make sure they weren’t hiding weapons, Israelisauthorities explained. They forced religious women to remove their veils andeven undress to their underwear in the company of male soldiers and other men. Sexualassault of female prisoners “included kicking the women’s genitals, touchingtheir breasts, attempting to kiss them, and threats of rape.” Male prisonerswere also raped, the commission said.

 A November 2023 attack on a center for survivorsof violence against women “appeared to have a clear gendered dimension,”judging by the soldiers’ graffiti in Hebrew: “We came here to fuck you, you andyour mothers, you bitches,” accordng to the report, and, “The dirty pussies ofyour prostitutes, you ugly Arab you ugly, you sons of bitches, we will burn youalive you dogs.”

The commission does not entertainthe possibility that the individual incidents are ad hoc aberrations typical inevery war. Instead, it projects them onto a big screen of nefarious policy. “Sexualand gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel todestabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people,” itconcludes.

For example, in recounting theshelling of the Al-Basma IVF Centre in December 2023, the report says thatabout 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples were destroyed. The center carrriedout 70 to 100 in vitro fertilization procedures monthly. “Satellite imageryindicates that the area around the clinic was extensively damaged due to thehostilities,” the commission notes. It presents no evidence that the center wasintentionally targeted instead of being part of widespread collateral damage.

Yet that attack becomes ground for thereport’s most damning conclusion: “The Commission finds that the Israeliauthorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of thePalestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended toprevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute andthe Genocide Convention.”

“Genocidal acts.” Were they? Whatevernarrative each side constructs about this war, beliefs are also facts on theground, not easily overcome.