Chris Hedges's Blog, page 541

Schumer Urges Public to Oppose a Trump Anti-Abortion Court Pick

WASHINGTON—The Senate’s top Democrat tried Monday to rally public opposition to any Supreme Court pick by President Donald Trump who’d oppose abortion rights, issuing a striking campaign season call to action for voters to prevent such a nominee by putting “pressure on the Senate.”

With Trump saying he’ll pick from a list of 25 potential nominees he’s compiled with guidance from conservatives, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said any of them would be “virtually certain” to favor overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that affirmed women’s right to abortion. They would also be “very likely” to back weakening President Barack Obama’s 2010 law that expanded health care coverage to millions of Americans, he said.

Schumer said that while Democrats don’t control the Senate — Republicans have a 51-49 edge — most senators back abortion rights. In an unusually direct appeal to voters, he said that to block “an ideological nominee,” people should “tell your senators” to oppose anyone from Trump’s list.

“It will not happen on its own,” the New Yorker wrote in an opinion column in Monday’s New York Times. “It requires the public’s focus on these issues, and its pressure on the Senate.”

Trump has said he is focusing on up to seven potential candidates, including two women, to fill the vacancy of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on the nine-member court. He’s said he’ll announce his pick July 9.

Schumer’s column appeared a day after Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she would oppose any nominee she believed would overturn Roe v. Wade. Collins said she would only back a judge who would show respect for settled law such as the Roe decision, which has long been anathema to conservatives.

“I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law,” Collins said.

Such a judge, she said, “would not be acceptable to me because that would indicate an activist agenda.”

Trump spent the weekend at his New Jersey golf club conferring with his advisers, including White House counsel Don McGahn, as he considers his options to fill the vacancy that might make precedent-shattering court decisions on abortion, health care, gay marriage and other issues.

McGahn will lead the overall selection and confirmation process, the White House said Monday. He played the same role in the successful confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch last year.

The White House said it is putting together a team for the confirmation process. Spokesman Raj Shah will take leave from his role in the press office to work full time on “communications, strategy and messaging coordination with Capitol Hill allies.” And Justin Clark, the director of the Office of Public Liaison, will oversee White House coordination with outside groups.

Trump was beginning his search in earnest this week at the White House and said the process could include interviews at his golf club before he reaches a final decision following the Fourth of July holiday.

During his 2016 campaign and presidency, Trump embraced anti-abortion groups and vowed to appoint federal judges who will favor efforts to roll back abortion rights. But he told reporters on Friday that he would not question potential high-court nominees about their views on abortion, saying it was “inappropriate to discuss.”

Without Kennedy, the high court will have four justices picked by Democratic presidents and four picked by Republicans, giving Trump the chance to shift the ideological balance toward conservatives for years to come. Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick to the high court, have indicated more broadly that they respect legal precedent.

On Sunday, Leonard Leo, an outside adviser to Trump on judicial nominations, said he expected Trump to select a nominee who is mindful of precedent but who is also more “originalist and textualist.” That judicial approach typically involves a more literal interpretation of the Constitution, and not reading into the Constitution language that doesn’t explicitly appear. Roe, for instance, relied on a right to privacy, which is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Possible nominees being eyed include Thomas Hardiman, who serves alongside Trump’s sister on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Raymond Kethledge, a federal appeals court judge who clerked for Kennedy. Also of interest are Amul Thapar, who serves on the federal appeals court in Cincinnati; Brett Kavanaugh, a former clerk for Kennedy who serves on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.; and Amy Coney Barrett, who serves on the federal appeals court in Chicago.

Republicans hold a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate, and it’s even closer because of the absence of ailing Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Even though McConnell changed Senate rules last year to allow confirmation by simple majority, if Democrats hold together, he cannot afford defections. Vice President Mike Pence can be called on to break a tie.

Collins appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” Leo spoke on “Fox News Sunday” and Graham was on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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Associated Press reporters Mark Sherman and Alan Fram contributed.

Donald Trump Is No Deal-Maker in Chief

Trump promised to be America’s dealmaker in chief, touting his “extraordinary” ability to negotiate. But so far – whether he’s dealing with foreign governments or with Congress – Trump has shown that he can’t make a deal. Here’s the list:

1. No deal with North Korea. Following his June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un, Trump declared on Twitter that “there is no longer a nuclear threat” from North Korea. But in fact, there’s no deal. Trump gave Kim what Kim wanted – a photo op showing an American president granting North Korea co-equal status, and the cancellation of joint military exercises with South Korea. Yet Kim conceded nothing on weapons and missile programs. In fact, recent satellite imagery shows the North is actually improving its nuclear capability. Instead of surrendering its nuclear stockpile, American intelligence officials say North Korea is considering ways to conceal it at secret production facilities. A new report from the Defense Intelligence Agency concludes that North Korea is unlikely to denuclearize.

2. No deal on Nafta. Mexico and Canada insist they won’t budge.

3. No deal with China on trade. In November, Trump lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping of China after a one-on-one meeting in Beijing, during which Xi offered no concrete concession on trade. Now, we’re on the brink of a trade war with China, which is retaliating against U.S. tariffs.

4. No deal on steel and aluminum imports. Europe has imposed retaliatory tariffs on several products exported from the U.S. to Europe, including motorcycles (inducing Harley-Davidson to announce it’s moving some production to Europe), and causing GM to claim American jobs will suffer as a result.

5. No deal on the Qatar blockade.

6. No deal on Syria.

7. No deal on Russia. Even though Trump and Putin will soon meet, Trump has given away his bargaining leverage: Over the past few weeks he’s called for Russia to be readmitted to the Group of 7 industrial powers, suggested it has a legitimate claim to Crimea because many Russian speakers live there, and continued to sow doubts about whether Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election — or if it did, whether the sabotage actually benefited Hillary Clinton.

8. No deal on Iran. On May 8, Trump announced America’s exit from Iran nuclear deal. Since then, no negotiations. America’s allies insist that no new deal will replace it.

9. No deal on climate change. Trump simply pulled out of the Paris accords. There have been no negotiations since.

10. No deal on Pacific trade. No new negotiations since Trump exited from the Pacific Trade pact.

11. No deal with Group of 7 leading economic powers. Instead, in a pique of irritation at Canada’s prime minister, Trump refused to sign a communiqué his own team had agreed to. Since then, nothing.

12. No deal on DACA or immigration. Early this year Trump promised to sign what he called a “bill of love” to extend protections to 800,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children. But since then he has thrown in the towel on such protections.

13. No budget deal. Trump promised he wasn’t “going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” But in February he proposed cuttingSocial Security disability programs. And he proposed a 2019 budget that would slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, transportation and other essential government services, all while increasing the federal deficit. So far, no deal on any of this.

14. No deal on replacing the Affordable Care Act. Trump and the Republican Congress never agreed to a new plan, so Trump is quietly repealing the ACA administratively without a replacement. It’s estimated that at least 5 million people will lose coverage.

15. No deal on gun control. After the Parkland shooting, Trump promised to tighten background checks for gun buyers and said he’d consider raising the age for buying certain types of guns. On March 11, he abandoned his promise, bowing to the National Rifle Association and embracing its agenda to arm teachers.

Bottom line: Trump can’t make deals. He can only pull out of deals already made, or pretend he’s made deals that soon evaporate. He’s perfected the art of the no deal.

It’s Time to Use the ‘F’ Word to Describe Trump

Is Donald Trump a fascist? With each passing news cycle, more people here and abroad are asking the question.

On a trip to Berlin in early June, my wife and I were pressed for answers in spontaneous encounters with cab drivers, waiters, hotel clerks and sundry others. Regardless of occupation, everyone closely followed U.S. politics, and most had come to the conclusion that the American president had long ago crossed a dark ideological line.

The Berliners we spoke with (all fluent in English) were social-democratic types. Among them there were no members of the Alternative for Deutschland, the ultranationalist group that is now the third largest political party in Germany.

None were alive during the Nazi era, although a tour guide disclosed that her 99-year-old grandfather was still ticking and remained very much an admirer of the Third Reich. Some, however, had lived on the east side of the city during the Soviet era, which they recalled as a period of austere, soul-crushing conformity. They weren’t fans of capitalism, they said, but they understood the dangers of autocracy, past and present. How was it, they wondered, so many Americans did not?

We assured them that some Americans were, in fact, very worried about Trump, and a solid majority disapproved of him and his policies. I told the tour guide that as a columnist I had been comparing Trump with Benito Mussolini since the early days of his presidential campaign. Still, we conceded that for the most part, whether out of ignorance, timidity or a naive belief in the myth of exceptionalism, Americans were reluctant to consider whether their head of state actually is a fascist.

No more.

The issue of Trump’s fascism has finally reached center stage in the U.S., sparked by the administration’s shameful treatment of Central American refugees and its Gestapo-like “zero tolerance” policy on unauthorized border crossings.

On June 17, protesters at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., heckled White House aide Stephen Miller, widely credited as the principal architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, as a fascist. Two days later, another group hurled similar epithets at Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who like Miller had cluelessly chosen to dine Mexican.

Even liberal media pundits are throwing down the “F” word. Michelle Goldberg, for example, referred to “Trump’s fascist instincts” in her June 21 New York Times column on the separation of immigrant families.

In a June 24 op-ed for the Duluth News, iconoclastic writer and entrepreneur John Freivalds, who was born in Latvia and now lives in Minnesota, went further, charging, “[I]n every dictionary definition I have come across, the president is a fascist. This label is not so much a pejorative as a fact.” It doesn’t get much more heartland than the Duluth News.

Not everyone agrees with Goldberg and Freivalds, of course. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans stands at 87 percent. By and large, Republicans still see him as a champion of grass-roots democracy and an antidote to predatory corporate globalism.

Ironically, the president also has a small number of occasional defenders on the progressive left, who continue to view him, as some did during the campaign, as more likely to steer the world away from nuclear Armageddon than his defeated Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Because of the gravity of the issue, debates about Trump’s fascism invariably devolve into heated emotional affairs, cleaved along racial and politically tribal lines. You’re either a patriot and support Trump’s promise to “make America great again” or you’re the opposite for failing to condemn him.

It may be impossible to set emotions aside entirely, but it’s not impossible to arrive at the truth, or at least to search for it through honest discourse. Although fascism, historically, is a complex ideology, it is as real today as a mass movement and a theory of governance as it was when Mussolini popularized the term in 1919.

Any rational discussion has to begin with a definition, and when it comes to fascism, there are many to examine. Among the most instructive is the one proffered by political scientist Robert Paxton in his classic study “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004):

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Drawing on the work of Italian novelist and professor Umberto Eco, Cameron Climie, a Canadian economist, listed 14 fluid characteristics of fascism in an essay published last year by the website Medium.com. They are:

A cult of traditionalism.
A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
A fear of difference.  … Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity.
A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that it claims to speak for.
A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

Reasonable minds can differ about whether Trump, now in the middle of the second year of his presidency, is a full-blown fascist or, to be more precise, moving in a fascist direction.

In a May 2017 article in Harper’s Magazine, Paxton contended that Trump had even by then displayed numerous “fascist staples,” such as his “deploring national decline, which he blames on foreigners and despised minorities; disdaining legal norms; condoning violence against dissenters; and rejecting anything that smacks of internationalism, whether it be trade, institutions, or existing treaties.” Nonetheless, he concluded that Trump’s pursuit of “unchecked executive power indicates generic dictatorship” and “plutocracy” rather than fascism in particular.

Perhaps the best way of understanding Trump’s fascism is as a work in progress, or a form of “pre-fascism.” As journalist Fintan O’Toole asserted last week in an Irish Times column:

To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialed is fascism—a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist”—what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. …

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to start talking about Trump’s fascism, and holding him fully accountable under that rubric.

Were Recent Nationwide Protests Pro-Immigrant or Anti-Trump?

Over the past weeks, there has been a series of major protests against the mistreatment of immigrants. Hundreds were arrested after blocking DC streets and sitting-in at a Senate office building.  Two weeks ago, there were #FamiliesTogether rallies across the United States that forced Trump to end child separation and return to the Obama-era policy of incarcerating immigrant families. People are taking action for immigrant rights and protesting the separation of children from their families as well as the indefinite detention of immigrant families.

Protesters are holding policymakers personally accountable. This includes protests against Homeland Security director, Kirstjen Nielsen, outside her home playing tapes of immigrant children as well as in a restaurant. The White House staffer, Stephen Miller, who is behind many of Trump’s most racist policies was also protested at a Mexican restaurant and outside his condo in Washington, DC. Popular Resistance believes in holding individuals accountable with carefully planned protests as an essential activist tool.

The occupation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices by mothers and children, holding that agency specifically responsible for abusive law enforcement practices, and the burgeoning #OcccupyICE protests, beginning in Portland, are putting pressure on ICE. Microsoft workers called for Microsoft to cancel contracts with ICE. And, people marched on tent city prison camps where children and immigrant families are being held. These build on efforts in court to hold ICE accountable.

Many cities have chosen to be sanctuary cities by refusing to use their law enforcement to do the work of ICE. Cities that welcome immigrants and have non-discrimination policies have fewer deportations and less insecurity. This is also having the result of making those cities safer in general because immigrants have less fear of reporting crimes.

While sanctuary and humane treatment of immigrants bring security, raids on immigrants leave misery and broken communities. Here is one account of the terror and hardship caused by an ICE raid on a business last month in Ohio. And the issue of racist and violent policing is still a problem because some cities make a distinction between protecting “law-abiding” immigrants versus those who break a law, as determined by racist police.

There are divisions over immigration within the enforcement community. In March, an ICE spokesperson resigned rather than continue to put out false information about immigrants. This week, top leaders of Homeland Security enforcement wrote a letter that was made public claiming ICE is making their job of protecting the country from real threats more difficult. Calls for abolition of ICE are now being made by activists and the list of Democrats calling for the abolition of ICE is rapidly growing.

Are the Protests Pro-Immigrant or Anti-Trump?

The protests against immigration policies in the Trump-era are different than protests against abusive immigration policies in the Obama-era. There were mass protests against Obama’s immigration policies, which led to deportations at levels that Trump has still not approached, but in the Obama-era, the protests were organized and led primarily by immigrants. In the Trump era, there are protests by immigrants, especially around protecting the Dreamers, but they are also being organized by non-immigrant protesters with a focus against President Trump. These protests began almost immediately with the election of Trump and focused on his policies of stopping immigration at airports, Trump’s Muslim ban.

The protests remind us of the immense anti-war protests during the George W. Bush presidency, which turned out in hindsight to be more anti-Bush than anti-war as they dissipated when President Obama was elected. The Bush wars continued under Obama, as did coups and other efforts to reverse the pink tide in Latin America. President Obama expanded militarism using robotic-drone warfare, new military troops and bases throughout Africa and mass destruction and slaughter in Libya, yet there were no mass anti-war protests against him as were seen in the Bush era.

Democratic Party-aligned groups used the anti-war sentiment to stir up their voter base in opposition to President Bush and the Republicans, but were noticeably silent during the Obama administration in order to protect the Democrats. Is immigration being used similarly as an issue to elect Democrats? It appears to be the case.

Democratic Party-aligned groups like MoveOn and the Women’s March have led some of the organizing efforts. MoveOn reported on the mass protests yesterday, writing in an email:

In Washington, D.C., today, 35,000 demonstrators braved 96-degree temperatures to march on the White House and send a crystal-clear message: Families Belong Together. There were 30,000 participants in New York, 60,000 in Chicago, more than 70,000 in Los Angeles, and huge turnouts from Orlando, Florida, to Austin, Texas, to Boise, Idaho. We were everywhere.

Here’s the eye-popping map of all the protests, one dot per demonstration, spanning all 50 states, as hundreds of thousands of us gathered in cities from Antler, North Dakota, to Lake Worth, Florida:

More than 750 cities. One message. This is what it looks like when a nation speaks with one voice.

While abuse of immigrant families and their children are important reasons to protest, it is critical to be non-partisan or the pro-immigrant movement risks going the way of the anti-war movement, which is still struggling to rebuild. If the protests are framed as anti-Trump, then voters may conclude that electing Democrats will solve the problem. Both major political parties have failed immigrants in the US. We need to build national consensus for pro-immigrant policies that hold whomever is in power accountable.

Facing the Roots of Abusive Immigration Policies: Racism and Profit

The connection between immigration policies and racism and profit-seeking is being exposed. Stirring up racist hatred against immigrants benefits the ruling elites by keeping people focused on fighting each other while the rich get richer. The federal government has spent $4 billion since the start of 2017 fiscal year on contracts and grants for private prisons, security firms, the tech industry and child “protective” agencies and non-profits, as well as the budgets of federal agencies including Homeland Security, ICE and the US military, which is building prison camps for 120,000 immigrants. Abusing immigrants means high profits for some and plays on the divide-and-rule racism politicians use to control people.

The broader context is that today’s immigration policies of separating and mistreating families have deep roots. The colonizing founding of the United States treated imported African slaves in brutal ways, including family separation. There has been a similar mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, separating families and putting children into brainwashing, abusive boarding schools. And, racist-based mass incarceration results in fathers and mothers being removed from their families and communities, particularly for black and brown people.

The duopoly parties ignore the root causes of mass migration, which are due in large part to US economic policies including the injustice of corporate trade agreements on behalf of transnational corporations that abuse people and steal resources throughout the world, as well as US empire policies of militarism, regime change, and imperialism. We wrote two weeks ago about how to protect the human rights of immigrants, the US must end the policies that drive migration.

The United States Needs a Pro-Immigration Policy to Correct Abusive Treatment of Immigrants

The beginnings of a pro-immigration policy in the United States is developing. Indeed, that word “pro-immigration” needs to become part of the political dialogue. We heard the call for a pro-immigrant policy at the Maryland State Green Party meeting this weekend. It was a phrase we had not heard in the political dialogue, but we are pleased to see it brought out into the open. Unlike the corporate duopoly, the Green Party of the United States has an excellent platform on immigration.

A critical area of information that has been suppressed is the positive impact of immigration on the economy. Research shows that the presence of immigrant workers has a small positive impact for US-born workers. Immigrants tend to work in different sectors or hold different jobs within the same sector than US-born workers. They also make significant contributions through taxes. Mapping shows how immigration has helped build the economy across the United States.

The US needs to recognize the positive impacts of policies that protect the human rights of people to move across borders. Research published this week shows that free movement of people could expand the global economy by $78 trillion.

It is time to end the failed policies of abusive immigration policy, militarized law enforcement and a militarized border and build a positive approach to immigration that protects human rights and builds the economy from the foundation up by using the best of each person who comes to the United States or who already live here.

If the $4 billion spent on abusive immigration enforcement in the last year had been used to build the foundation of the US economy with a positive approach to immigration, we would all be better off. A positive immigration policy will increase security and build the economy for all people.

America the Failed State

TORONTO—Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry. Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rouge law enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed. A depressed and enraged population, trapped by chronic unemployment and underemployment, is overdosing on opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in acts of nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar to those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize American existence. And presiding over it all is the American version of Ubu Roi, playwright Alfred Jarry’s gluttonous, idiotic, vulgar, narcissistic and infantile king, who turned politics into burlesque.

“Congress works through corruption,” Saul, the author of books such as “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” and “The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World,” said when we spoke in Toronto. “I look at Congress and I see the British Parliament in the late 18th century, the rotten boroughs. Did they have elections? Yes. Were the elections exciting? Yes. They were extremely exciting.”

Rotten boroughs were the 19th-century version of gerrymandering. The British oligarchs created electoral maps through which depopulated boroughs—50 of them had fewer than 50 voters—were easily dominated by the rich to maintain control of the House of Commons. In the United States, our ruling class has done much the same, creating districts where incumbents, who often run unchallenged, return to Congress election after election. Only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are actually contested. And given the composition of the Supreme Court, especially with Donald Trump poised to install another justice, it will get worse.

The corruption of the British system was amended in what Saul called “a wave upwards.” The 1832 Reform Act abolished a practice in which oligarchs, such as Charles Howard, the 11th Duke of Norfolk, controlled the election results in 11 boroughs. The opening up of the British parliamentary system took nearly a century. In the United States, Saul said, the destruction of democracy is part of “a wave downwards.”

The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do not debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street, punishing austerity measures, assaulting basic civil liberties through wholesale government surveillance and the abolition of due process, and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay rights and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is anti-politics.

The Republican Party built its political base in these culture wars around Christian fascists, nativists and white supremacists. The Democratic Party built its base around those who supported workers’ rights, multiculturalism, diversity and gender equality. The base of each party was used and manipulated by elites. The Republican Party elites had no intention of banning abortion or turning America into a “Christian nation.” The Democratic Party elites had no intention of protecting workers from predatory corporatism. Everyone was sold out. The ascendancy of a populist right, dominated by racists and bigots, is the inevitable product of the corporate coup d’état, Saul said. He warned we should not be complacent because of President Trump’s imbecility. Trump is immensely dangerous. “The insipid,” Thomas Mann wrote in “The Magic Mountain,” “is not synonymous with the harmless.”

“How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers evolve into other than a coalition of professional groups?” Saul asked in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “How, then, could the individual citizen not be seen as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has been obscured by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract notions which are divorced from any social reality and presented as values.”

“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way,” he wrote in another section of the book. “The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites.”

All despotic regimes, Saul said, carry out their final battle for control by contending against public officials and government bureaucrats, the so-called deep state, which views the rise to power of demagogues and their sleazy enablers with alarm. These traditional courtiers, often cynical, ambitious, amoral and subservient to corporate power, nevertheless engage in the decorum and language of democracy. A few with a conscience win minor skirmishes to slow the rise of tyranny. Despots see these courtiers and democratic institutions, no matter how anemic, as a threat. This explains the assaults on the State Department, the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the courts. Despots use their appointees to undermine and destroy these institutions, mocking their existence and questioning the loyalty of the professionals who staff them. The reviled and neutered public employee surrenders or walks away in despair. Last year, the entire senior level of management officials resigned at the State Department. Resignations continue to bleed the diplomatic core, as they do at other agencies and departments, and last week included James D. Melville Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, and Susan Thornton, the nominee to be assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.

“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” Melville said in the post that announced his resignation.

Once a process of deconstruction is complete, the system calcifies into tyranny. There remain no internal mechanisms, even in name, to carry out reform. This corrosive process is being played out daily in Trump’s Twitter rages, lies, smears and the barrage of insults he levels against public servants, including some of his own appointees, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as institutions such as the FBI.

Witnessing this, Saul berates the American press too, which he said willingly plays its part in the charade for ratings and advertising dollars.

“Trump gives these astonishingly Mussolini-ish press conferences,” he said. “He says to the press, ‘Shut up. Stop!’ The press screams at him like a mob, a bunch of cattle. How can they be taken seriously? It is like the end of the Roman Republic. Important political leaders from the Senate, along with their rivals, would move around Rome with 50 people to protect them. Scenes, exactly like Trump’s interactions with the press, defined the end of the Roman Republic. Nobody knew what was going on. There was no dignity. You can’t have a democracy without a level of respect and dignity. You only have chaos. This chaos eventually leads to a call for autocratic order. Trump benefits from the confusion, even though he resembles a cartoonish figure out of a funny novel, a character from Jean Genet’s ‘The Balcony,’ although without the self-awareness.”

Trump’s decision to launch a trade war—Canada will impose punitive measures on $12.63 billion worth of imported American goods in response—is an example of the damage a despot who has little understanding of the economy, politics, international relations or law can do. These self-inflicted wounds, Saul warned, see despots intensify attacks on the demonized and the vulnerable, such as Muslims and the undocumented. Despots frantically scapegoat others for their mess, often inciting violence among their supporters to placate an inchoate rage.

“I’ve always opposed trade deals not because I oppose trade,” Saul said, “or because I thought they were about getting a fair balance in the trade, but because the trade deals were about something else. They were about deregulation. They were about handing power to corporations and banks. They weren’t about trade. Trump has again and again attacked the Canadian dairy system. Nobody has stopped to ask him, ‘Why are you opposing this instead of adopting it for yourself?’ A lot of American dairy farmers would like to have the Canadian system.”

“The free market approach to agriculture produces a surplus that drives prices down and destroys the income of farmers,” Saul said. “There are two ways of responding to this. One of them is subsidizing. Europe, following the old social democratic approach, subsidizes their agricultural sector. This drives down the income of farmers, so [the governments] subsidize [agriculture] more. They have enormous surpluses. Periodically, they’re throwing millions of tomatoes on the streets.”

“The United States claims it embraces the free market, but it does the same thing as the Europeans,” Saul said. “It too heavily subsidizes the agricultural industry. This leads to American dairy farmers producing too much milk. This economic argument says the way to win is to mass-produce cheap goods. This is the Walmart argument. You’re not selling your milk or cheese for enough to make a living. The end result is, even though you subsidize them, the farmers go bankrupt. They commit suicide. You have terrible unhappiness in the [U.S.] dairy community.”

“We have a very efficient management system in Canada that keeps the prices up, not so high that working-class people can’t buy milk and cheese, but it keeps the prices up high enough that farmers can make a proper living,” Saul said. “Because farmers can make a proper living they’re not committing suicide. What Trump is saying to Canadians is that they should give up a system that works so Canadian farmers can commit suicide with American farmers.”

“The problem with the Western world is surplus production,” Saul said. “We’re in surplus production in almost every area. But there is a terrible distribution system where people around the globe suffer and die from starvation. This is a distribution problem, not a production problem.”

Saul said the imposition of tariffs and the crude insults Trump uses against American allies—he called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak”—are rapidly destroying America’s clout and standing in the global hierarchy. This behavior is having very negative political, economic and social consequences for the United States.

“The whole world, the Western world in particular, invested enormously in the idea that the United States is the leader,” Saul said. “The idea that the United States is to be admired. What’s sad about it is Americans take it for granted that the world loves them. They’ve never analyzed the responsibilities that come with being the leader. It’s what you expect from a good parent. You act in a certain way. People want to identify with the United States. It’s been that way since the Second World War. All this is being thrown away. Like or dislike Obama, he rebuilt a great part of the world’s admiration for the United States. I know what his failures were. But I also know his strengths. He was a president who was capable of acting and talking like the intelligent, civilized American that everyone wants to admire.”

“But there’s always a shadow to the bright tower,” Saul went on. “Trump’s feeding that shadow. ‘Americans are stupid. Americans are corrupt. Americans are not educated. Americans can’t be trusted.’ The whole list. The longer the chaos goes on, the worse it gets.”

The collapse of the legislative and executive branches of government has now been accompanied by the collapse of the judiciary. The loss of an independent judiciary, Saul warned, is especially ominous.

“The biggest problem in the United States is a very powerful and deeply corrupted Supreme Court,” Saul said. “This will set patterns for decades. It will be hard to undo the evil being put into place.”

Saul despaired, at the same time, over the Trump administration’s attack on public education, which he called “the most fundamental service of government when it comes to a democracy.”

“What holds democracy up?” Saul asked. “What makes democracy work? Public education is number one. A well-educated citizen. [Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos is undoing that. There is a special place for her in hell.”

U.S. trading partners and allies such as Canada and European states will, he said, reduce their dependence on the American market. The traditional strategic and political ties to Washington will be steadily weakened. And when the next financial crash comes, and Saul expects one to come, the United States will be bereft of partners when it needs them most.

“If you treat your closest allies as a threat, who is going to stand with you?” he asked.

Border Patrol Arrests Drop Sharply in June

MCALLEN, Texas—Border Patrol arrests fell sharply in June to the lowest level since February, according to a U.S. official, ending a streak of four straight monthly increases.

The drop may reflect seasonal trends or it could signal that President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute every adult who enters the country illegally is having a deterrent effect.

The agency made 34,057 arrests on the border with Mexico during June, down 16 percent from 40,344 in May, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the numbers are not yet intended for public release. The June tally is preliminary and subject to change.

Arrests were still more than double from 16,077 in June 2017, but the sharp decline from spring could undercut the Trump administration’s narrative of a border in crisis.

Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, declined to comment on the numbers, saying it doesn’t discuss them as a matter of policy until public release “to ensure consistency and accuracy.”

The administration announced in early May that it was prosecuting every illegal entry, including adults who came with their children. The separation of more than 2,000 children from their parent sparked an international outcry and Trump reversed course on June 20, ordering that families should stay together.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told agents to temporarily stop referring illegal entry arrests to the Justice Department for prosecution if they involve parents unless they had a criminal history or the child’s welfare was in question. His edict came “within hours” of Trump’s directive to avoid splitting families.

McAleenan told reporters last week that border arrests were trending lower in June but said he wouldn’t provide numbers until their public release in early July.

“I believe the focus on border enforcement has had an impact on the crossings,” McAleenan said.

Rising temperatures could also be a major influence, discouraging people from walking in the scorching and potentially lethal heat in much of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Arrests fell from May to June in four of the previous five years, last year being the exception.

Still, the month-to-month percentage decline is notable. It fell in the low single digits in 2014 amid a major surge in illegal crossings and in 2015. Declines approached 20 percent in 2016 and 2013.

The numbers do not reflect activity at official crossings. The Border Patrol polices between ports of entry, not at them.

GOP Senator Wouldn’t Back a Court Nominee Hostile to Roe v. Wade

WASHINGTON—Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a key vote on President Donald Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, said Sunday she would oppose any nominee she believed would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

The White House is focusing on five to seven potential candidates to fill the vacancy of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on the court. The Maine senator said she would only back a judge who would show respect for settled law such as the 45-year-old Roe decision, which has long been an anathema to conservatives.

“I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law,” Collins said.

Such a judge, she said, “would not be acceptable to me because that would indicate an activist agenda.”

Trump spent the weekend at his New Jersey golf club conferring with his advisers, including White House counsel Don McGahn, as he considers his options to fill the vacancy that might make precedent-shattering court decisions on abortion, health care, gay marriage and other issues.

The president told reporters Friday that he was homing in on up to seven candidates, including two women, and would announce his choice on July 9.

Trump is expected to begin his search in earnest this week at the White House and said the process could include interviews at his golf club before he reaches a final decision following the Fourth of July holiday.

During his 2016 campaign and presidency, Trump embraced anti-abortion groups and vowed to appoint federal judges who will favor efforts to roll back abortion rights. But he told reporters on Friday that he would not question potential high-court nominees about their views on abortion, saying it was “inappropriate to discuss.”

The Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, but anti-abortion advocates hope Roe v. Wade will soon be overruled if Trump gets the chance to appoint a justice who could cast a potentially decisive vote against it.

Without Kennedy, the high court will have four justices picked by Democratic presidents and four picked by Republicans, giving Trump the chance to shift the ideological balance toward conservatives for years to come. Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick to the high court, have indicated more broadly that they respect legal precedent.

On Sunday, Leonard Leo, an outside adviser to Trump on judicial nominations, said he expected Trump to select a nominee who is mindful of precedent but who is also more “originalist and textualist.” That judicial approach typically involves a more literal interpretation of the Constitution as compared to broader rulings such as Roe.

Possible nominees being eyed include Thomas Hardiman, who serves alongside Trump’s sister on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Raymond Kethledge, a federal appeals court judge who clerked for Kennedy. Also of interest are Amul Thapar, who serves on the federal appeals court in Cincinnati; Brett Kavanaugh, a former clerk for Kennedy who serves on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.; and Amy Coney Barrett, who serves on the federal appeals court in Chicago.

Echoing Leo’s view, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he didn’t think Trump would be overly focused on the Roe ruling.

“You don’t overturn precedent unless there’s a good reason,” Graham said. “I would tell my pro-life friends: You can be pro-life and conservative, but you can also believe in ‘stare decisis,'” he said, citing the legal term involving legal precedent that means “to stand by things decided.”

Republicans hold a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate, and it’s even closer because of the absence of ailing Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Even though McConnell changed Senate rules last year to allow confirmation by simple majority, if Democrats hold together, he cannot afford defections. Vice President Mike Pence can be called on to break a tie.

Collins appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” Leo spoke on “Fox News Sunday” and Graham was on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

6 Children Among 9 Injured in Idaho Mass Stabbing

BOISE, Idaho—A man who was recently asked to leave a Boise apartment complex is suspected of going on a stabbing rampage there that injured nine people, including six children, police said Sunday. Four of the victims have life-threatening injuries.

Timmy Kinner, 30, is facing nine counts of aggravated battery and six counts of injury to a child.

The Boise Police Department said they believe Kinner, from Los Angeles, was a temporary resident of the apartment complex but had been asked to leave on Friday. The complex houses many resettled refugee families, but Kinner is not a refugee. Police said they do not yet have an exact motive for the attack.

At 8:46 p.m. Saturday, police responded to a report of a man with a knife at the complex. When they arrived they found stabbing victims both inside the complex and in the parking lot; Kinner was arrested a short distance away.

“This incident is not a representation of our community but a single evil individual who attacked people without provocation that we are aware of at this time,” Boise Police Chief Bill Bones said during a press conference Saturday night.

He said the attack resulted in the most victims in a single incident in Boise Police Department history. “As you can imagine, the Wylie Street Apartment and our community is reeling from this attack,” he said.

Bones said police believe the knife used in the stabbing was discarded by the suspect before his arrest, and police searched around the apartment complex and in a nearby canal.

The apartment complex is just off of one of Boise’s busier streets, separated from the traffic by one of the many irrigation canals that run through the city. Police closed roughly a mile of the road during the initial investigation and later rerouted traffic to the lanes farthest from the complex using flares and barricades.

Early Sunday morning there were still dozens of police cars and officers at the apartment complex, with yellow evidence markers placed around the parking lot. Officers told some residents of the complex who were trying to go home that they should either find a motel or go to a nearby church for shelter, because the complex wouldn’t be opened to residents before daylight.

Victim witness coordinators and counselors were being made available to the victims, their families and friends and other residents of the apartment complex, Bones said.

“Our hearts go out to the victims who are in the hospital tonight, please keep them and their families in your thoughts and prayers,” he said.

Boise Mayor Dave Bieter condemned the attack on Twitter.

“Last night’s horrific attack does not represent Boise,” Bieter wrote. “Please join me in praying for the injured and their families. We must come together to condemn this vile act.”

Helicopter Carrying Commandos Frees Notorious French Inmate

PARIS—A notorious French criminal serving 25 years for murder made an audacious escape from prison Sunday after a helicopter carrying several heavily armed commandos landed in a courtyard, freed him from a visiting room and carried him away.

It was the second daring escape by Redoine Faid, who once blasted his way out of a different prison with explosives hidden in tissue packs.

His latest escape, from Reau Prison, took only “a few minutes,” France’s Justice Ministry said. Unarmed guards said they could do nothing to prevent it.

Dressed all in black, two commandos wearing balaclavas and police armbands entered the prison to look for Faid. They used a grinding machine to open the door to the visiting room, Martial Delabroye, a representative of the guards’ union, told BFM television.

The commandos set off smoke canisters to hide from video cameras, and the helicopter touched down in the only part of the complex that was not covered by anti-helicopter netting, said another union member, Loic Delbroc.

When the chopper arrived, Faid was meeting with his brother in the visiting room. A third commando was holding the pilot at gunpoint, union members said.

French media reported that the three men took the pilot hostage at a flying club in the Paris region. He was later released with no physical injuries.

The helicopter was found burned in the town of Garges-les-Gonesse, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Faid was believed to have left by car along with his accomplices.

French prosecutors opened an investigation into the escape. Investigators were questioning Faid’s brother on Sunday afternoon.

The 46-year-old Faid was serving time for the 2010 death of a young police officer killed during a botched robbery. In the 1990s, he led a gang involved in robbing banks and armored vans. He was arrested in 1998 after three years on the run in Switzerland and Israel, according to French media reports.

Faid was freed in 2009 after serving 10 years. At the time, he swore that he had turned his life around, writing a confessional book about his life of crime and going on an extensive media tour in 2010.

Still, he was the suspected mastermind of the attempted armed robbery in 2010 that led to a high-speed chase and a shootout with police that killed 26-year-old Aurelie Fouquet. He was arrested in 2011.

Restless Democratic Newcomers Bringing Change to Congress

WASHINGTON — Ready or not, change is coming to the House Democrats.

Across the country, a new generation is making its way to Washington. It’s not just that some of the Democrats, like 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are young and progressive. They are. Or that many are women entering politics who want to fight President Donald Trump. They do. Or even that some of them live in Trump country.

They also come to politics steeped in an era of resistance and revolt, like the tea party Republicans who rose against President Barack Obama and the so-called Watergate babies elected after President Richard Nixon.

If the newcomers provide the numbers to give Democrats control of the House, or even fall short and end up in the ranks of the minority, they will be a force to be reckoned with upon arrival. That holds especially true for Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the longtime House Democratic leader.

“There is a hunger for generational change, for a new generation of leadership,” said freshman Rep. Ro Khanna of California. “I think we’re going to see some of the most impressive young people being elected across the country, and it’s going to be, in my view, an extraordinary class, like the Watergate Class.”

Last Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez pulled off a stunning primary election romp in New York, toppling 10-term congressman Joe Crowley of Queens. He was once thought of as a possible successor to Pelosi, but has now become a symbol of how the party is being transformed in the Trump era.

The defeat of Crowley, the Democratic caucus chairman, opens up the fourth spot on the leadership rung. A robust contest is expected to replace him, but the leadership changes may not stop there.

Several Democratic candidates for Congress have said they would not support Pelosi as leader. And even some of those Democrats who want Pelosi to reclaim the speaker’s gavel, if Democrats retake the majority, have made clear that new approaches are needed.

Yet there remains no obvious replacement for Pelosi or the second-ranking Democrat, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, so many aren’t convinced there will be an immediate leadership shuffle after the election. But in the next few years, even newcomers “like Alexandria could be there,” said Khanna, who backed both Ocasio-Cortez and Crowley in the race. “The traditional rules of politics don’t apply.”

Pelosi has shown no signs of loosening her hold on leadership, however.

“We just want to win,” she told reporters this week. She recalled the questions she heard after the Women’s March in 2017, when people would ask how Democrats were going to use all of that energy. She said she told them, “It’s not a question of how we will use it. It’s a question about how they will use us.”

She added last week: “Everything is at stake in our country. People all see the urgency of it, they want to take responsibility for it. That gives us an opportunity to win.”

“So I just say, ‘Just win, baby,’” she said.

Two-term Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, an Iraq War combat Marine, is not one to discount the staying power of Pelosi and the other top leaders. But he is certain they will be tested by the new arrivals.

“Whoever the leaders are of this caucus, are going to have to be accountable to this new caucus that’s going in,” he said. “They’re going to have to come to caucus and give arguments — why they are in leadership and why they should stay in leadership.”

One traditional factor in leadership races has been fundraising. Pelosi has been the party’s top fundraiser, and Crowley has long been skilled at bringing donors to the table. But the younger generation of Democrats doesn’t value fundraising the way leaders do. At a time when candidates like Ocasio-Cortez can win a primary with a big social media presence and small-dollar donations, they don’t need to cozy up to the party power structure.

As far as traditional arguments to win leadership races, “that’s not going to fly with these incoming members of Congress,” Gallego said.

Other competing factors will be at play when House Democrats decide their leadership slate, including ideology and geography.

Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Democrats need “to make sure progressives are represented in leadership.” The primary elections are showing that “bold progressive messages work, and we’re hoping leadership will take that to heart,” he said.

Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, one of a dozen Democrats who represent districts that Trump won in the 2016 election, said it’s the corners of the country like her Midwestern stronghold that should have more voice in leadership. She wants the caucus to reflect the nation’s geographic diversity.

“Where we need more Democrats is in these districts that are a little tougher to navigate,” Bustos said. “And I think it’s very important that we don’t lose sight of that.”

As the top Democrat on the rules committee, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said he would like to loosen the process to give more rank-and-file lawmakers a chance to propose amendments. That would allow them to bring their ideas to the table.

McGovern said it recently took him two hours to shop for groceries back home because so many constituents stopped to talk with him. Voters, he said, want Democrats “to stand up to Trump’s racism and his bigotry and all his hateful policies.” But they also want them to make strides on Democratic priorities, he said.

“What people are looking for is not just for us to be right on the issues,” he said. “They want to know what we’re going to do to fight for these issues.”