Michelle Goldberg

Even Michelle Obama, who is, according to a Gallup poll conducted in December, the most admired woman in America, has said that she feels it. “I share that with you because we all have doubts in our abilities, about our power and what that power is,” she told students in London in December.

Well, maybe not all of us. I’ve just finished Vicky Ward’s “Kushner, Inc.,” a scintillating investigation of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s White House sojourn, which comes out on Tuesday. It’s full of damning details: contempt for the entitled, venal couple may be the one thing that unites all of D.C.'s warring factions. Still, the first daughter and her husband remain psychologically mysterious, at least to me. Why don’t they have impostor syndrome, given that their total lack of qualifications for the jobs they are doing makes them actual impostors?

According to “Kushner, Inc.,” Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. “Her father’s reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty,” writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of U.S. foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him “to leave Mexico to him because he’d have NAFTA wrapped up by October.”

As political actors, the couple are living exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon that leads incompetent people to overestimate their ability because they can’t grasp how much they don’t know.

Partly, the Jared and Ivanka story is about the “reality distortion field” — a term one of Ward’s sources uses about Kushner — created by great family wealth. She quotes a member of Trump’s legal team saying that the two “have no idea how normal people perceive, understand, intuit.” Privilege, in them, has been raised to the level of near sociopathy.

Ward, the author of two previous books about the worlds of high finance and real estate, has known Kushner slightly for a long time; she told me that when he bought The New York Observer newspaper in 2006, he tried to hire her. She knocks down the idea that either he or his wife is a stabilizing force or moral compass in the Trump administration. White House sources told her they think it was Kushner who ordered the closing of White House visitor logs in April 2017, because he “didn’t want his frenetic networking exposed.” Ward reports that Cohn was stunned by their blasé reaction to Trump’s defense of the white-nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia: “He was upset that they were not sufficiently upset.”

Still, even if you assume that the couple are amoral climbers, their behavior still doesn’t quite make sense. Ward writes that Ivanka’s chief concern is her personal brand, but that brand has been trashed. The book cites an October 2017 survey measuring consumer approval of more than 1,600 brands. Ivanka’s fashion line was in the bottom 10. A leading real estate developer tells Ward that Kushner, now caught up in multiple state and federal investigations, has become radioactive: “No one will want to do business with him.” (Kushner resigned as CEO of Kushner Cos. in 2017, but has kept most of his stake in the business.)

To make sense of their motivations, Ward told me, you have to understand the gravitational pull of their fathers. Husband and wife are both “really extraordinarily orientated and identified through their respective fathers in a way that most fully formed adults are not,” she said.

Among the most interesting parts of “Kushner, Inc.,” are the chapters about Charles Kushner, Jared’s felonious father, and his plan to restore his reputation, with Jared’s help, after getting out of prison in 2006. Part of that rehabilitation project was the purchase of a flagship building in Manhattan, 666 Fifth Ave., for which the family paid a record amount at the height of the real estate market in 2007. When the recession hit, the building became a white elephant, its debt threatening the family fortune.

Ward’s book suggests that the search for someone who would bail out 666 Fifth has played a significant role in foreign policy during the Trump administration. Since the completion of her book, we’ve learned that Trump overrode intelligence officials, who were concerned about Kushner and his family’s ties to foreign investors, to give Kushner a security clearance.

In the end, the Kushner family seems to have gotten what it wanted. In 2018, Brookfield Asset Management, which has substantial investment from the government of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, came to the Kushners’ rescue. (The Qataris have denied any advance knowledge of the deal.)

“You’ll notice that the U.S. position toward Qatar changes when the Qataris bail out 666 Fifth Ave.,” said Ward, adding, “We look like a banana republic.” Maybe that’s why Jared and Ivanka appear so blithely confident. As public servants, they’re obviously way out of their depth. But as self-dealing scions of a gaudy autocracy? They’re naturals.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c830400d-f970-4fdd-b7b7-d57715a1e9bd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/jared-kushner-ivanka-trump-corruption.html">The New York Times</a>.

Many high achievers, particularly women and people of color, suffer from impostor syndrome, the fear that they don’t belong in the rarefied realm to which they’ve ascended and that they will soon be found out.

Who do Jared and Ivanka think they are?

<h1>Even if you’re an avid follower of the news, it’s hard to keep track of Donald Trump’s scandals. The president’s singular governing innovation has been to engage in grift so baroque, so galactically expansive, that trying to comprehend it all at once tests the limit of the human mind. </h1>

Revelations that would have been shocking in the world we all lived in a few years ago — for example, news that the president overruled his staff to insist on security clearances for his fashion designer daughter and her husband — now take up half a news cycle, at most.

Still, it’s worth trying to summon whatever is left of our pre-Trump sensibilities and pause to consider the epic sleaze of the unfolding story of Li Yang, also known as Cindy Yang.

Yang, in case you haven’t heard of her yet, is a Florida businesswoman whose family owns a chain of massage parlors that, as The Miami Herald put it, “have gained a reputation for offering sexual services.” Last month, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution at a spa Yang founded, Orchids of Asia. (She reportedly sold it around 2013, but online reviews indicate it was known as a place to buy sex before that.) Kraft pleaded not guilty. Authorities have said that Orchids of Asia is part of a major sex trafficking operation.

On Friday, The Herald reported that Yang attended a Super Bowl party at Trump’s West Palm Beach country club, where the president was cheering on Kraft’s team. It turns out that Yang was something of a regular in MAGA-land, posing for selfies with Trump, his adult sons, Kellyanne Conway and others. According to The Herald, she and her relatives donated $42,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee and more than $16,000 to Trump’s campaign. Last February, she was invited to the White House for an event put on by Trump’s Asian-American and Pacific Islander Initiative, an advisory commission.

Now, there’s nothing new about donors paying for photo ops. But Yang was more than just a hanger-on. Both Mother Jones and The Herald found evidence that Yang, who emigrated from China, ran a business, GY US Investments, selling Chinese executives access to Trump, his family and Republican officials. According to Mother Jones, she claimed to have gotten her clients into the most recent New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The Herald reported that Yang arranged for a group of Chinese businessmen to attend a Trump fundraising event in 2017 in Manhattan at which tickets, which foreigners can’t legally pay for, started at $2,700. Her Chinese-language website, which appears to have been taken down, said she was hosting a conference at Mar-a-Lago later this month; Trump’s sister was listed as the guest speaker.

News that the owner of a chain of dubious massage parlors was brokering foreign access to the president of the United States should be a big deal. It has the potential to be a sex scandal, an intelligence scandal and a financial scandal all at once.

“There are profound national security implications to this kind of relationship,” Jeffrey Prescott, a senior director on the National Security Council under Barack Obama, told me. “It goes to the obvious opportunities that foreign governments and interests are going to see to have influence over this president because of the way that he’s arranged his business practices.”

Mother Jones has reported that Yang is an officer in local branches of two groups tied to the Chinese government: the Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China and the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. It’s hard to know what to make of these connections. Chris Lu, a former deputy secretary of labor who was a co-chairman of the White House Asian-Americans initiative during the Obama administration, cautions against casually imputing dual loyalty to Yang or anyone else.

What’s clear, however, is that Trump owns a club where all sorts of characters can purchase access to him. Lu said that when he served in the White House, his rule was that “anyone who comes in contact with the president or is in the room with the president needs to be vetted. Who the hell is vetting people that are going into Mar-a-Lago?”

As Prescott points out, when Trump met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, a club member snapped photos as the two men discussed a North Korean missile launch. “If you were interested in information about how the president is conducting the public business while at the club, there are a number of routes in,” Prescott said.

This goes beyond Mar-a-Lago. On Friday, The Guardian reported on foreign nationals using shell companies to donate to the Trump inaugural committee. Sam Patten, a lobbyist, has pleaded guilty to illegally helping a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch buy inauguration tickets for $50,000. Under Trump, America’s leadership and its secrets are for sale. Maybe that’s why the news about Yang hasn’t been earthshaking. When it comes to Trump’s clubs, she seems like someone who would fit right in.

This article originally appeared in <a id="4bec3090-d5b3-47eb-a8d5-9e9ea2180e10" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/cindy-yang-trump-corruption.html">The New York Times</a>.

The massage parlor owner and Mar-a-Lago [newsstandhub]

Still, it’s worth trying to summon whatever is left of our pre-Trump sensibilities and pause to consider the epic sleaze of the unfolding story of Li Yang, also known as Cindy Yang.

The massage parlor owner and Mar-a-Lago

<h1>In 1983, married sociologists Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang published “The Battle for Public Opinion,” a book that sought to explain how Americans, in less than two years, went from overwhelmingly re-electing Richard Nixon to largely supporting his impeachment.</h1>

The Watergate scandal, after all, wasn’t a complete surprise. There was evidence of a White House connection to the break-in before the 1972 election; a George McGovern campaign ad featured a montage of damning Watergate headlines while a narrator intoned: “This is about hidden funds. This is about deception. This is about the White House.” But somehow, the story didn’t stick. “The problem it signified was outside the range of and remote from most people’s immediate concerns,” the Langs wrote. The details were confusing, “their import difficult to fathom.”

The television broadcast of two series of congressional hearings helped change that. First there was the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, widely known as the Ervin committee, starting in May 1973. These hearings didn’t result in a profound swing against Nixon, but they transfixed the public and caused people to take the administration’s misdeeds more seriously. By the time they were over, “Watergate” had transformed from shorthand for a bungled burglary into a metonym for a much wider range of administration corruption.

Then came the House Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment in 1974. Its final deliberations weren’t a trial, but according to the Langs, viewers experienced them that way, so that public debate came to revolve around the question of Nixon’s guilt or innocence. On Aug. 5, definitive proof of his guilt emerged: the “smoking gun” recording of Nixon agreeing to a plan to have the CIA ask the FBI to stop investigating Watergate. After that, wrote the Langs, “the inexorable logic of the facts” led to the president’s downfall.

We are about to find out whether facts still have an inexorable logic. The outlines of Donald Trump’s venality and fundamental civic disloyalty have been obvious since the 2016 campaign; Hillary Clinton warned us about him just as McGovern had warned about Nixon. But so far, neither Democrats nor prosecutors have woven the various threads of presidential wrongdoing into a coherent picture, showing how Trump’s shady business practices, opaque finances, vulnerability to blackmail, abuses of power and subservience to foreign autocrats all intersect.

Now, however, Democrats have begun a full-spectrum public investigation of the president. Michael Cohen’s blockbuster testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week was just an opener.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee took the first steps in an inquiry into obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power by the Trump administration. In an operatic legal fusillade, it sent document requests to 81 people and entities, including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the National Rifle Association and Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. They have two weeks to respond. (Ivanka Trump is not on the list, but the requests that went out call for numerous documents about her, and the committee has said that more requests could be forthcoming.)

“To me it’s a thrilling moment,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told me. Finally, he said, “we have an opportunity to discover what has been happening in our country over the last two years and several months.”

Not long after news of the document requests broke, the heads of three committees — Oversight, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence — released letters to the White House acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seeking documents related to Trump’s communications with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. They’re seeking to interview Trump’s translators and anyone else privy to his talks with Putin. Should the White House refuse those requests, a legal fight could ensue. “We’re willing to take it as far as we need to get the answers,” Rep. Adam Schiff, head of the House Intelligence Committee, told me.

Next week, Schiff’s committee will conduct a public interview with Felix Sater, a felon with ties to both organized crime and American intelligence agencies who was at the center of negotiations for a proposed Moscow Trump Tower. “We’ve chosen to focus early on the Moscow Trump Tower deal because it’s among the most graphic examples of how a candidate or president’s focus on making himself money can come at the cost of what’s in the best interests of our country,” said Schiff.

Given the polarization in our politics, there’s no reason to expect the coming hearings to change many minds. What they can do, potentially, is put the question of Trump’s criminality at the center of political life, just as the Watergate hearings did with Nixon. They can create a narrative that even a reality TV impresario can’t control.

It’s too early to know whether these investigations will lead to Trump’s impeachment. The important thing is that they lead to his exposure. Unlike Nixon, Trump lost the popular vote, and the majority of the country has consistently disapproved of him. He thus can’t afford even a small erosion of support.

“You have to think of the Trump phenomenon as a religious cult surrounding an organized crime family,” said Raskin. “But at the outer perimeters, people are starting to melt away. And Michael Cohen’s departure is a signal moment in the evolution of the Trump phenomenon. He is the innermost sycophant to break ranks.” Soon America will be tuning in to find out who’s next.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5a254497-50dc-499f-9136-dee91764c6c3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/trump-investigation.html">The New York Times</a>.

The television broadcast of two series of congressional hearings helped change that. First there was the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, widely known as the Ervin committee, starting in May 1973.

Trump's TV trial

<h1>It’s hard to say what’s a bigger taboo in American politics: being a racist, or calling someone one.</h1>

Sure, the Republican Party will occasionally try to distance itself from one of its more egregiously hateful members, like Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who lost committee assignments after seeming to defend white nationalism. But mostly, right-wing politicians and their media allies pretend, to the point of farce, that the primary racial injustice in America involves white people unfairly accused of racism. This makes talking openly about the evident racism of our president harder than it should be.

To see how this works in microcosm, consider the House Oversight Committee hearing at which Donald Trump’s former consigliere Michael Cohen testified Wednesday. Cohen said, in his opening statement, that, in addition to being a con man and a cheat, Trump is a racist. This should be clear to all people of good faith, given that Trump was a leading figure in the birther movement, defended white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville,and claimed he couldn’t get a fair hearing from a judge of Mexican heritage, to mention just a few examples.

But Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., strenuously objected to Cohen’s description, and came up with what he seemed to think was an airtight rejoinder. Meadows, who is white, had Lynne Patton, an African-American woman and longtime Trump employee now at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, stand behind him, and quoted her saying that she would not work for a racist. Checkmate!

In the past, one person who would often publicly vouch for Trump’s non-racism was Omarosa Manigault Newman, the “Apprentice"-star-turned-White House aide. Then Manigault Newman came out with a book calling Trump “a racist, a bigot and a misogynist.” As part of her promotional tour for that book, she released an audio recording of a conversation she hadwith Patton and another African-American Trump supporter, Katrina Pierson, strategizing about how to handle the fallout should a tape surface of Trump using a racist slur. On the recording Patton, the person Meadows called upon as a character witness for the president, didn’t seem doubtful that Trump could have said such a thing.

Many liberals were agog at this stunt by Meadows; on the left it’s largely accepted that responding to charges of racism by pointing to black friends — never mind black employees — is clueless at best. Some white conservatives, however, seem convinced that you can’t be racist if you have an affectionate relationship with a person of color. And so when Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called out Meadows toward the end of the hearing,he was so aggrieved he nearly melted down.

The “fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself,” said Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American. Red-faced, indignant and seemingly on the verge of tears, Meadows demanded that Tlaib’s words be stricken from the record, turned the charge of racism back on her, and said that he has nieces and nephews who are people of color. In a stunning dramatization of how racial dynamics determine whose emotions are honored, the hearing momentarily came to a halt so that Tlaib could assure Meadows that she didn’t mean to call him a racist, and the committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, who is African-American, could comfort him. “I could see and feel your pain,” Cummings told him.

So Meadows emerged as the victim. There was, however, another twist. It turns out that in 2012, Meadows said some very racist things about Barack Obama, promising, on at least two occasions, to send the American president “home to Kenya or wherever it is.” As recordings of these comments ricocheted through the news, Meadows didn’t quite apologize, but he did tell reporters that his words were “not the way that I should’ve answered the questions.” (In only one instance did he appear to be responding to a question.) “I can tell you that anyone who knows me knows that there is not a racial bone in my body,” he added.

I don’t know Meadows, or what a “racial bone” is, but I suspect he may not be the best arbiter of what constitutes bigotry. Then again, when it comes to Trump, no arbiter is really needed. Why, after all, was Meadows’ rediscovered birtherism so newsworthy, automatically understood as pertinent to a debate about his racism, or lack thereof? Because there’s a mainstream assumption that it is racist to say that Obama secretly hails from Africa. This should, but somehow doesn’t, translate into a mainstream assumption that Trump, who rode birther conspiracies to political prominence, is an unrepentant racist. He should be shunned as Steve King is shunned, but he can’t be shunned because he is the president.

This contradiction is behind some of the madness of our public life right now. Normalizing Trump, which has become a central mission of the Republican Party, depends on denial about what racism is. Not for the first time, Tlaib got in trouble for pointing out the obvious — the president is a bigot, and that in bringing out Patton to exonerate him, Meadows only demonstrated his own gross insensitivity.

On Thursday, Tlaib and Meadows reportedly had a warm conversation on the House floor; according to a CNN reporter, they hugged. I’m glad; given how much she’s been demonized in her short time in Congress, it’s probably in her interest to make Meadows feel better about their earlier exchange. Who knows, if she’s friendly enough, maybe he’ll be able to cite their relationship next time he’s caught saying something awful.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b0138bac-cb09-443a-ab4a-9a4f407c792c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/meadows-tlaib.html">The New York Times</a>.

To see how this works in microcosm, consider the House Oversight Committee hearing at which Donald Trump’s former consigliere Michael Cohen testified Wednesday.

Republicans' race to the bottom

<h1>In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly. On the surface, the Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary successor to America, is a place of totalitarian religious austerity. </h1>

But as the book’s enslaved narrator discovers, the society’s leaders also maintain a brothel, Jezebel’s, full of women who couldn’t fit into the new order. It’s the inevitable flip side of a regime that dehumanizes women, reducing them to their reproductive organs. “Nature demands variety, for men,” says a character called the Commander.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates. This can make it hard to focus on the unprecedented lengths the administration is going to curtail American women’s reproductive rights and enrich the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around 4 million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

The rule is meant to cut Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of Title X recipients, out of the program. But for many women who rely on Title X, there are no alternatives. Planned Parenthood’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, told me that in Wisconsin, as of 2017, Planned Parenthood served 80 percent of Title X patients and was the only Title X provider in seven counties. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood was the only Title X provider in nine counties. “We know that when patients cannot access their provider of choice, they delay care,” or they end up forgoing care altogether, she said.

The administration appears to think that religious anti-abortion groups, including those opposed to contraception, will fill some of the gaps. The new regulation jettisons a requirement that Title X clinics provide “medically approved” family planning services. That means that funds that once went to Planned Parenthood could flow instead to anti-abortion groups that promote so-called natural family planning. Unless the courts halt the new policy, struggling women who need refills on their birth control pills could get federally funded lectures on the rhythm method instead.

This move to turn a lifesaving women’s health program into pork for the religious right should be major news. Instead, it’s been overshadowed by a series of scandals, each offering telling glimpses of the sexual ethics of Trumpworld’s golf-shirted Commanders.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors working under former Miami U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, broke the law in the process of making an inexplicably lenient plea deal with financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d been accused of sexually abusing underage girls.(Trump once counted Epstein as a friend, saying of him: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”) Acosta would have already been forced out of any normal administration, but so far he seems secure in this one.

Then, on Friday, news broke that Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was being charged with soliciting prostitution, part of a wide-ranging Florida sex-trafficking investigation. One of the 100 richest men in the country, Kraft was allegedly a patron of a strip-mall massage parlor staffed by women who, according to police, were virtual prisoners, forced to service up to 1,000 men a year. It’s hard to imagine why a man with Kraft’s resources would visit such a place unless the squalor, and the women’s evident powerlessness, were part of the point. (Kraft has denied the allegations; the police reportedly have video evidence.)

On Monday there was another minor sex scandal involving Trump himself, when Alva Johnson, a former Trump campaign staffer in Florida, sued the president and his campaign,claiming, among other things, that he’d given her an unwanted kiss while she was at work.To Trump, the suit says, “Ms. Johnson was nothing more than a sexual object he felt entitled to dominate and humiliate.” The Trump camp denies Johnson’s charges, but the behavior she described is in keeping with Trump’s self-description on the “Access Hollywood” tape: “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” More than 22 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

Now Trump, payer of hush money to a pornographic film actress, employer of Bill Shine, a man forced out of Fox News for his role in abetting sexual harassment, is putting himself between more than a million poor women and their doctors. It’s ugly, but I’m not sure it’s hypocritical. Ultimately, the patriarchs of the fictional Gilead and the dreadfully real Mar-a-Lago share an ethos: harsh restrictions for powerless women, unbounded license for powerful men.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f1ca02b9-c5f5-454b-ab7a-b19413b861d5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/opinion/trump-planned-parenthood-abortion.html">The New York Times</a>.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates.

The Republicans of Gilead

<h1>Last October, after a crude mail bomb was found in George Soros’ mailbox, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is now House minority leader, tweeted, “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg to buy this election!” </h1>

The tweet, since deleted, was referring to Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, both of them, like Soros, Jews who are often the object of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Speaking on CNN, Steyer, who had also been sent a mail bomb, described McCarthy’s tweet as a “straight-up anti-Semitic move.”

So it was a bit rich when, last week, McCarthy posed as the indignant defender of the Jewish people, threatening to force congressional action against two freshman Democratic representatives, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, for their criticism of Israel.

It would have been easy enough for either Omar or Tlaib to point out McCarthy’s cynical hypocrisy. Instead, Omar responded with a blithely incendiary tweet quoting Puff Daddy’s ode to the power of money: “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” When an editor at The Forward, a Jewish publication, asked who Omar thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, she responded, “AIPAC!,” meaning the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States’ most prominent pro-Israel lobby.

Consciously or not, Omar invoked a poisonous anti-Semitic narrative about Jews using their money to manipulate global affairs. This came just weeks after she’d had to apologize for a 2012 tweet in which she said that Israel had “hypnotized” the world, phrasing that also recalled old canards about occult Jewish power. Her words were a gift to Republicans, who seek to divide the Democrats over Israel, even as their president traffics in anti-Semitic imagery and stereotypes. The knives were out for Omar and she ran right into them.

On Monday afternoon, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic leadership rebuked Omar and called on her to apologize for her “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters.” It was a depressing fall from grace for someone who just weeks ago was being feted as a path breaker, a refugee from Somalia who, alongside Tlaib, rose to become one of America’s first two Muslim congresswomen.

Omar herself has been subject to vicious Islamophobic smears, and has also come under attack for supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic pressure to secure Palestinian rights. Perhaps such criticism is why she’s sometimes seemed unwilling or unable to distinguish between disingenuous political pile-ons and good-faith calls to respect Jewish sensitivities. But whether from carelessness or callousness, her weekend tweets damaged her political allies and squandered some of her own hard-won power.

After I tweeted about Omar on Monday, an anti-racist activist sent me a message expressing genuine confusion about why I found the congresswoman’s words offensive. After all, it’s hardly radical to point out that lobbyist money has pernicious political effects. (AIPAC doesn’t make direct contributions to candidates, but it does rally donors on their behalf.) And I certainly have no problem with denunciations of AIPAC, which plays a malign role in pushing American policy in the Middle East to the right.

But at a moment when activists have finally pried open space in American politics to question our relationship with Israel, it’s particularly incumbent on Israel’s legitimate critics to avoid anything that smacks of anti-Jewish bigotry. And the idea of Jews as global puppet masters, using their financial savvy to make the gentiles do their bidding, clearly does.

In 2017, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a left-wing, broadly anti-Israel group, put out a guide to help progressives understand anti-Semitism. It describes how in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the early-20th-century Russian forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination, “Jews are depicted as shadowy figures with a lot of money, top-level access, ready to betray the nations of our residence (and our neighbors) in service of an unseen authority.”

In truth, while AIPAC’s influence is extensive, no one needs to pay off conservatives to make them support Israel. Evangelicals, a far bigger constituency than American Jews, tend to be pro-Israel for religious reasons; some believe that the return of Jews to their biblical homeland is a precondition for the rapture and the second coming of Christ. Plenty of others on the right love Israel because it’s a nationalistic, pro-American power in the middle of the Middle East. You can’t blame Jewish money for Kevin McCarthy’s terrible politics.

Not long after Pelosi’s statement, Omar released one of her own, apologizing “unequivocally.” She wrote, “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.” Personally, I’m happy to accept her apology. Progressive American Muslims and Jews should be natural allies; our mutual future depends on deepening this country’s embattled commitment to multiethnic democracy. Prejudice helps bind the modern right together, but unchecked it can rip the left apart.

This article originally appeared in <a id="80cdd501-c3ee-4343-b67f-7308ebf2f7c2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/ilhan-omar-antisemitism.html">The New York Times</a>.

So it was a bit rich when, last week, McCarthy posed as the indignant defender of the Jewish people, threatening to force congressional action against two freshman Democratic representatives, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, for their criticism of Israel.

Ilhan Omar's very bad tweets

<h1>Since the early 1970s, the pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House, founded in 1941 to mobilize American public opinion against Nazism, has published an annual survey evaluating political freedoms and civil liberties in countries around the world. Using 25 indicators, including electoral processes, individual rights and the rule of law, nations are scored on a 100-point scale.</h1>

For decades, both Republican and Democratic leaders saw the values championed by Freedom House, which is partly funded by the United States government, as quintessentially American, and the United States has generally scored quite high on Freedom House’s index. Recently, however, that has begun to change.

The latest edition of “Freedom in the World,” Freedom House’s flagship report, has just been released. For the second year in a row, the United States had a score of 86, down from 94 in 2009. According to Michael Abramowitz, Freedom House’s president, it’s the lowest score for the United States since the survey began.

Though still ranked as free, America now falls below not just Canada and the Nordic countries, but also Greece, Latvia and Mauritius. “The current overall U.S. score puts American democracy closer to struggling counterparts like Croatia than to traditional peers such as Germany or the United Kingdom,” the report said.

Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, American democracy has in many ways proved fairly resilient. Several of the criminals who helped Trump get elected either have gone to prison or soon will. Democrats won control of the House in 2018 and have already started checking the president’s power. The courts have blocked some of Trump’s more egregious nativist policies, including his effort to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Trump’s attempts at racist demagogy often end up mobilizing public opinion against him. There has been a revival of civic activism; according to Freedom House, the United States’ score for freedom of assembly has actually improved in the last year.

But the Freedom House report gives us at least two reasons for continuing alarm.

The first is that it usually takes more than two years for a democracy to collapse. “Elsewhere in the world, in places like Hungary, Venezuela or Turkey, Freedom House has watched as democratic institutions gradually succumbed to sustained pressure from an antidemocratic leadership, often after a halting start,” the report said. Abramowitz told me that an increase in corruption and a decrease in transparency — both hallmarks of this administration — are “often early warning indicators of problems in a democracy,” undermining public faith in the legitimacy of the system.

Second, if Americans increasingly ignore Trump’s words, foreign leaders don’t. Authoritarianism is on the rise all over the globe — according to the Freedom House report, this is the 13th consecutive year that global freedom has declined. Trump’s presidency is a consequence of this trend, but it’s also become an accelerant of it.

There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about the idea — once a consensus view in American foreign policy — that it’s the sacred duty of the United States to promote democracy around the world. One of the pretexts for America’s war in Iraq, after all, was that it would spread democracy in the Middle East. Under Trump, however, we’re learning that an American approach to the world that is completely amoral and transactional creates its own dangers.

All over the globe, autocrats have learned that they will pay no serious diplomatic price for repressing or even killing reporters. In 2017, Cambodian strongman Hun Sen said of journalists, “Donald Trump understands that they are an anarchic group.” Later that year his government forced one of the country’s most prominent independent newspapers to close. The Trump administration remained loyal to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince despite the CIA’s assessment that he ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.

As Abramowitz pointed out, laws have been proposed or passed in at least 17 countries to censor the internet in the name of fighting “fake news.” “They didn’t come up with this on their own!” he said.

If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to move beyond this foul moment and forgive those who were complicit in it. We’re not good at holding elites to account in America; the architects of both the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis have gone largely unpunished.

Still, I hope we can summon the political will for a reckoning with how thoroughly this administration has betrayed America’s highest ideals. We’ll need a full accounting of all the institutional corrosion the Trump presidency has caused, and all the money Trump and his associates have made off it.

The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived. America may never again be taken seriously as the global champion of liberal democracy. But perhaps it could at least figure out a systematic way to repudiate illiberalism. We’re not the only country that’s going to need it.

This article originally appeared in <a id="257e81e4-f9a0-42d6-b23b-938b994ecebf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/freedom-house-trump-democracy.html">The New York Times</a>.

For decades, both Republican and Democratic leaders saw the values championed by Freedom House, which is partly funded by the United States government, as quintessentially American, and the United States has generally scored quite high on Freedom House’s index.

Latvia above us, Croatia below

<h1>Unlike Donald Trump, former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz is a genuinely successful businessman who built a company that’s become part of the daily lives of people across America. For this, those of us who are horrified by Trump’s relentless grifting should be grateful. It gives us something concrete to boycott should Schultz decide to launch a narcissistic spoiler campaign for president.</h1>

In an interview with Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Schultz decried “extremes on both sides” and said he’s considering a run for president as a “centrist independent.” He hasn’t yet made up his mind, and perhaps the overwhelmingly negative reaction from almost all segments of the Democratic Party, as well as some NeverTrump Republicans, will dissuade him. There’s a danger, though, that the reality-distorting effects of being a billionaire will warp his judgment, convincing him that his business acumen is transferable to the realm of politics. If so, he could end up helping Trump get re-elected.

Shultz appears to share the conviction, endemic among American elites, that the country hungers for a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative. After all, if you’re rich, you probably know a lot of people like this. “I’m a socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House,” a chief executive of a major bank, who wanted to remain anonymous, recently told Politico, lamenting Michael Bloomberg’s poor odds in a Democratic primary.

But this frustrated executive’s politics aren’t widely shared by people who haven’t been to Davos. In a 2017 study, political scientist Lee Drutman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade. Only 3.8 percent of voters fell into the socially liberal/economically conservative quadrant.

Indeed, Trump’s campaign demonstrated that the truly underserved market in American politics was voters who are socially conservative but economically liberal — the photonegative of what Schultz is offering. Such voters — the type who might resent both immigrants and Wall Street — make up 28.9 percent of the electorate, according to Drutman’s study.

Schultz makes much of the fact that around 40 percent of Americans identify as “independent.” But as anyone who has spent 15 minutes Googling should know, independent is not the same thing as centrist. Most independents lean toward one party, and as the Pew Research Center has demonstrated, in the past two decades independents have grown more ideologically polarized, not more moderate. America has two independent senators. One of them is Bernie Sanders.

Even if there were a latent constituency of modern Rockefeller Republicans longing for the leadership of an enlightened plutocrat, third-party presidential campaigns are terrible vehicles for building political power. America’s two-party system, unfortunate as it is, is an inevitable result of the winner-take-all nature of our elections. It cannot simply be wished away.

There are policies that could potentially break the two-party stranglehold on our politics. Ranked-choice voting, which Maine used for the 2018 congressional elections, lets voters select candidates in order of preference. One by one, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated. Their supporters’ votes are apportioned to those voters’ next-highest choice, until someone emerges with a majority. If Schultz were serious about challenging party monopolies he might invest some of his fortune in efforts to pass similar reforms elsewhere.

Absent such changes, his candidacy would threaten to siphon away enough votes to give Trump a second term. In 2015 and 2016, Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman whose politics are much like Schultz’s, considered mounting an independent campaign for president. His team looked closely at poll data and focus groups, and found he’d be potentially competitive only in blue states. “All of the results were very consistent,” Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s political adviser, told me. “An independent with Mike’s profile would have merely resulted in Trump’s election.”

Obviously, Trump won anyway, but Bloomberg’s research underscores the folly of Schultz’s trial balloon. On Monday, Bloomberg, who is contemplating a 2020 run as a Democrat, put out a statement that seemed aimed at Schultz, though it didn’t mention him by name. “In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the president,” wrote Bloomberg. “That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now.”

By flirting with such a risk, Schultz is demonstrating a level of megalomaniacal recklessness that is itself disqualifying. “I think all American citizens should be worried about the possibility of Donald Trump being re-elected with 40 percent of the vote,” said Wolfson.

Then again, on “60 Minutes,” Schultz likened Democratic proposals for universal health care to Trump’s border wall. Perhaps from his vantage point, re-electing this president doesn’t seem uniquely catastrophic when set against the danger of European-style social democracy. He recently set out on a nationwide tour, so hopefully he’ll hear from Americans who disagree. Meanwhile, among the challenges we’re called upon to meet in this moment of profound democratic crisis, finding another place to get a latte is an easy one.

This article originally appeared in <a id="93386c81-6be1-462a-a76e-b6da4e6b6d5f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opinion/howard-schultz-president.html">The New York Times</a>.

Howard Schultz, please don't run for president

In an interview with Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Schultz decried “extremes on both sides” and said he’s considering a run for president as a “centrist independent.”

<h1>On Thursday morning, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — a man whose extraordinarily shady financial history doesn’t get the attention it deserves — appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to talk about the government shutdown. He expressed bafflement at the idea of unpaid federal workers suffering financial hardship, wondering why they don’t just take out loans.</h1>

“There really is not a good excuse why there really should be a liquidity crisis,” he said. “True, the people might have to pay a little bit of interest, but the idea that it’s paycheck or zero is not a really valid idea.” Told that some workers have been relying on food banks, he said, “I know they are, and I don’t really quite understand why.”

A few hours later, Larry Kudlow, director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, told reporters that federal employees forced to work without pay were “volunteering.” He added, as he stumbled to clarify, that they’re doing it out of their love of country “and presumably their allegiance to President Trump.” (If they don’t work they can be fired.)

These officials’ comments were just the latest examples of the blithe let-them-eat-steel-slats attitude that people connected to this administration are showing toward victims of the shutdown. On Monday, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and the host of an online pseudo-newscast funded by his re-election campaign, said the sacrifices of unpaid federal workers are a small price to pay for a border wall. “It’s not fair to you, and we all get that,” she said in an interview. “But this is so much bigger than any one person.”

In an interview that aired two weeks ago on PBS, Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, suggested that furloughed workers were fortunate not to have to use vacation days over the Christmas holidays. “And then they come back, and then they get their back pay. Then they’re — in some sense, they’re better off,” he said.

Trump himself has been unable to feign empathy for the 800,000 federal employees who haven’t been paid in more than a month, or the hundreds of thousands of government contractors who likely won’t be paid at all. This month he retweeted a Daily Caller piece, ostensibly by an anonymous member of his own administration, arguing that the work of most federal employees is worthless. “We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them,” it said. On Thursday afternoon, Trump told reporters that grocery stores will “work along” with people who can’t pay for food.

One effect of this government shutdown, now in its second month and without immediate end in sight, is to reveal the sham of Trump’s purported populism. It’s true, he’s able to connect culturally with some economically precarious parts of America. Despite being expensively educated, his worldview is basically that of Archie Bunker. He eats fast food, likes pro wrestling and has the terrible taste in interior design common to arriviste dictators. His vulgarity creates a kinship with people who purport to hate elites.

Yet in purely financial terms, Trump is as elitist as they come. Though he campaigned as a candidate of (white) workers, he has governed as a shameless oligarch. He has proudly surrounded himself with millionaires and billionaires, seeing their wealth as evidence of their worth. At a rally in 2017, speaking of his economic advisers, he said, “But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” He has gone out of his way not to hire anyone who would actually understand the plight of the workers he’s holding hostage.

Contrary to Ross’ assumptions, it’s not easy for working people without significant collateral to walk into a bank and get a personal loan. “I don’t think a bank is going to lend to them, or it would be very difficult,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told me. “To think that credit is the way out for these government workers is at best a real stretch.”

Some workers are members of credit unions, some of which are offering low-interest loans. Those who own homes might be able to borrow against them. Others, however, will be forced to rely on credit cards, which can charge double-digit interest rates. And then, worst of all, some will resort to payday loans, which can trap people in an asphyxiating cycle of debt.

Gary Rivlin, author of “Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business,” explained to me how payday loans usually work. If you take, for example, a $400 loan, two weeks later you’ll owe $460. “If the government is still shut down, you take out a $500 loan to pay back the $460, and now you owe $575,” he said. Some online outfits charge even higher interest.

As people miss payments on their bills, the financial aftershocks could stay with them long after the government reopens, assuming it eventually does. Diane Standaert of the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending says there’s a risk of “long-term devastation to people’s financial security.” A missed rent payment or bill can damage someone’s credit report for years, which in turn can make it harder to get a mortgage or rent an apartment. Some employers even check applicants’ credit history when making hiring decisions.

Ordinarily, one might expect a presidential administration’s leading economic figures to understand something of these financial realities. But if they cared about people who aren’t rich, they wouldn’t be working for Trump in the first place. The shocking thing isn’t their indifference to the misery they’re causing. It’s that they can barely be bothered to hide it.

This article originally appeared in <a id="83598f2b-bd1e-48c6-8bee-496d43cf8d8b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/opinion/shutdown-ross-kudlow-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

A few hours later, Larry Kudlow, director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, told reporters that federal employees forced to work without pay were “volunteering.”

Who needs a paycheck anyway?

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