Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 136

Brexit's Front Pages

As British voters head to the polls in the European Union membership referendum on Thursday, the country’s major newspapers are marking the historic vote with special front-page spreads.

The Guardian, which supports staying in the EU, made its preference clear through a slight alteration to its logo

Guardian front page, Thursday 23 June: Last-ditch push to stay in Europe pic.twitter.com/fkYMfAvwu8

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 22, 2016

The Daily Mail, a longtime EU foe, tried to reiterate four final points in the campaign’s closing hours.

Thursday's @DailyMailUK #MailFrontPages pic.twitter.com/alTOC87Inn

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) June 22, 2016

The Daily Mirror, for its part, urged voters to choose Remain over risks.

Tomorrow's front: Don't take a leap into the dark, vote REMAIN today. #tomorrowspaperstoday https://t.co/YKybHtwDNr pic.twitter.com/k7BiV3JMDv

— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) June 22, 2016

The Sun, which also sided with the Leave campaign, took a page from pop culture.

Thursday's Sun front page:

Independence Day#Tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #EUref pic.twitter.com/xKWqYv3b47

— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) June 22, 2016

The Daily Express opted for the straightforward approach.

Thursday's Daily Express:

Your country needs you

Vote Leave today#Tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #EUref pic.twitter.com/tcd83UmtpP

— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) June 22, 2016

Traditional British iconography received the full-page treatment from the Telegraph.

Tomorrow's Daily Telegraph front page today: 'The time has come' #EUref pic.twitter.com/KjHpEa4gS3

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 22, 2016

And the Times, which backed Remain, combined space and Shakespeare.

Tomorrow's EU referendum special: Will Britain vote to Remain, or Leave? #EUref https://t.co/AG9hufhY5B pic.twitter.com/fi7jekeRkr

— The Times of London (@thetimes) June 22, 2016

Even one German newspaper got into the spirit. Bild’s front page says it will recognize a controversial goal during the 1966 World Cup final in which England triumphed over West Germany—but only if British voters opt to stay in.

If Britain stays, @BILD will acknowledge the Wembley goal #EUref #Tomorrowspaperstoday @suttonnick pic.twitter.com/DPxHo0IbK9

— Tanit Koch (@tanit) June 22, 2016

Congressional Lawmakers Reach a Zika Deal—Without Democrats

After less than a week of formal, bipartisan negotiations on Zika funding, congressional lawmakers have reached a deal. The Democrats, though, aren’t involved.

We “are not a party to any agreement,” Matthew Dennis, the communications director for Democratic House appropriators, said Wednesday night in reaction to the deal’s emergence. “This is an agreement between House [Republicans] and Senate [Republicans].”

Those lawmakers would give $1.1 billion in funding to fight Zika, the same amount the Senate approved last month. But unlike the Senate bill, the new deal would offset more than half, or $750 million, through spending cuts. Lawmakers have been battling for months over Zika funding, which would fuel research into vaccines, build diagnostic tools, and help local governments contain any virus clusters. Zika is spread by certain types of mosquitoes, and it can cause birth defects and an immune-system disorder.

Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Barbara Mikulski and Minority Leader Harry Reid are recommending that Democratic negotiators not sign off on the Republicans’ proposal when it’s circulated Wednesday night. Republican lawmakers want to file their conference report sometime Wednesday evening on the House floor, though it’s possible a sit-in currently being staged by House Democrats will complicate matters. A floor vote is expected Thursday or Friday.

STAT has more details about where the money would go:

The National Institutes of Health would receive $230 million to help with vaccine work, according to a summary provided to STAT. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would receive $476 million for work on mosquito control and other readiness and response activities.

The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development would receive $165 million to help prevent the spread of Zika-carrying mosquitoes in the United States, according to the summary.

The $1.1 billion in new funding would be partially offset by $750 million in spending cuts. The cuts would include $543 million from the Affordable Care Act’s transition fund for US territories, $100 million from another US Department of Health and Human Services fund and $107 million from the remaining Ebola emergency funding, according to a separate summary provided to STAT.

Select members of the House and Senate began official conference talks on a deal last Thursday. Lawmakers did not offer very many hints on what was to come, though they did express their opinions on offsets: Democrats said they did not want any included in an eventual deal, while House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers told reporters offsets would be needed. His office later clarified that offsets were simply part of Rogers’s “opening position.”

Senate Democrats are publicly bristling at provisions they say would damage women’s health and the environment. “I will not support the Republican Zika-Military Construction-VA conference report that limits needed birth control services for women in the United States and Puerto Rico, and includes a troubling pesticides policy rider that endangers clean water protections," Mikulski told Roll Call. Some Democrats have suggested Republican conferees are acting in bad faith. “It is deeply disappointing—in fact, it’s appalling—that after months of dragging their feet, Republicans now plan to introduce a hyperpartisan proposal that is more about throwing red meat to the Tea Party than actually tackling this crisis,” Washington Senator Patty Murray said in a statement Wednesday evening.

The conference talks themselves had been a long time coming: The Obama administration sent a $1.9 billion request to Congress for Zika funding back in February. In May, the House and Senate passed their own plans. Democrats did not love either of those proposals. In their view, the upper chamber’s $1.1 billion in emergency funding through 2017 wasn’t as satisfactory as the White House request. But they preferred it to the House’s offer: $622 million through the end of September, with offsets built in.

The new deal seems like a marriage of those proposals that congressional Democrats can’t condone. Neither can the White House. "This plan from congressional Republicans is four months late and nearly a billion dollars short of what our public health experts have said is necessary to do everything possible to fight the Zika virus and steals funding from other health priorities," Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement late Wednesday evening. Lawmakers had hoped to pass Zika funding before the July 4th recess or at least before the summer break, which starts in mid-July. But without Democrats on board, their plans look even more complicated than they did a week ago.

Vegas on Ice

Las Vegas will finally have its first professional sports franchise: hockey.

The National Hockey League on Wednesday officially announced that it would establish its 31st team in the Nevada city. The team will start playing next year.

The NHL has granted an expansion franchise to Las Vegas. The team will begin play in 2017-18. pic.twitter.com/USEEiOO3g2

— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) June 22, 2016

It took two years of lobbying and a $500 million expansion fee for billionaire businessman Bill Foley, the chairman of Fidelity National Financial, to get a team approved for Las Vegas. But the bond between the city and the NHL has been growing for many years, as ESPN reports.

The move to Las Vegas completes a longtime relationship with the city and the NHL. The NHL's postseason awards show, which will be held on Wednesday evening, have been hosted in Las Vegas since 2009. The Los Angeles Kings have played in several exhibition games in Las Vegas, including a 1991 outdoor game against the New York Rangers in the Caesars Palace parking lot.

The team, which has yet to be named, will play in the 17,500-seat T-Mobile Arena, right on the Las Vegas Strip. It will compete in the Western Conference, along with 14 other teams.

There have been several concerns about whether hockey could thrive in that city. As CBS Sports writes:

There's a lot of work to do when it comes to building up hockey in Nevada. According to USA Hockey's recently released membership report for the 2015-16 season, only 1,305 hockey players registered in the state of Nevada. That said, the presence of an NHL team led to massive growth in states like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, so there's definitely growth potential anywhere when the game has more exposure.

Quebec City is expected to be the next city to earn an expansion team or be a relocation city for a current NHL team.

When House Democrats Turned Out the Lights on Republicans

Nancy Pelosi joined her colleagues on the House floor early Wednesday and promptly decried Republican leaders for turning off the microphones and shutting down access to the galleries during the Democrats’ sit-in protesting the lack of a vote on gun-control legislation.

“Mr. Speaker, turn on this microphone,” she demanded.

The Republican majority had gaveled the House out of session when Democrats took over the floor, turning off the CSPAN cameras and the microphones. It’s the kind of response with which Pelosi, the House minority leader, is quite familiar: When Republicans staged a similar protest eight years ago, she went a step further and shut off the lights.

It was August of 2008, in the middle of another hotly-contested election, and Republicans—then in the minority—wanted to draw attention to the refusal of the Democratic majority to bring up “all-of-the-above” energy legislation at a time when gas prices were soaring to record highs. Pelosi was speaker then, and after Democrats gaveled the House out of session to begin Congress’s annual five-week summer recess, Republicans stayed on the floor to give speeches protesting Democratic inaction. Groups of lawmakers returned day after day for the length of the break, speaking into a dark and other empty House chamber.

“The speaker of this House has shut down the people’s House,” the future House Majority Leader Eric Cantor complained then. “Kept the cameras out, turned the lights off, turned the mics off, but yet we had a House full of members insisting that we open this House back up.”

“The speaker of this House has shut down the people’s House,” future House Majority Leader Eric Cantor complained then.

Democrats were furious at the GOP’s move then, called it a stunt. Politico reported at the time that Democratic aides called Republicans on the floor “morons” and chastised the press for covering it. Eight years later, Democrats are trying to cloak what is essentially the same attention-seeking maneuver in the weightier historical tradition of the sit-in. They’ve cast the issue at hand—gun control—as a matter of life and death, and as a front man for the protest, they turned to the civil rights legend Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who is beloved by members of both parties in Congress.

Minority parties in the House turn to these kind of protests because unlike in the Senate, they can’t simply draw attention or block floor action by staging a filibuster—which is what Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut did last week to force votes on gun legislation. The House runs almost entirely by majority rule, so the minority party must break the rules in order to disrupt the chamber.

Republicans seem to be taking the Democratic protest in stride, preferring—for the first few hours, at least—to keep quiet and wait out the sit-in. The lack of cameras may have forced Democrats to record their speeches with illicit photos and shaky Periscope feeds, but hey, at least Republicans didn’t shut off the lights.

Serena Is a Compelling Portrait of Greatness

In 2015, at a lunch celebrating her designation as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year, Serena Williams made a speech in which she acknowledged the criticism she’s faced during her extraordinary 21-year career. “I’ve had people look down on me, put me down because I didn’t look like them—I look stronger,” she said. “I’ve had people look past me because of the color of my skin, I’ve had people overlook me because I was a woman.” She concluded by quoting Maya Angelou: “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

The speech makes up the final scene of Serena, a documentary airing on Epix Wednesday night, and it’s a powerful summation of Williams’s determination to win, as well as her significance as an icon. At this point in history, with 21 Grand Slam wins, four Olympic gold medals, and more major singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles titles than any other tennis player in history, Williams has cemented her place in history as one of the greatest athletes of all time. But what makes Serena so compelling is the ways in which it captures the private reality of Williams’s success. Over the course of more than a year in 2015, the filmmaker Ryan White followed Williams on her quest to win all four Grand Slam titles at the age of 33, and his portrait of her behind-the-scenes struggles offers texture to the typical Hallmark-inspirational narrative of greatness, and some sense of what it actually costs to achieve it.

Williams’s motivation in giving White such access to her life, she said, was her desire to show a different side of herself, and from the opening scenes, there’s an endearing goofiness to her. She keeps her Olympic medals in Ziploc bags in a cabinet stuffed with odds and ends. She laughs hysterically when her pants split while she’s doing an aerial acrobatics class. She abandons a conversation at a karaoke bar (with Drake, no less) in mid-sentence to dance when a Gloria Estefan track comes on. She watches The Little Mermaid on Netflix while wearing a hairnet and clutching a toy monkey. “All my life, I’ve hated working out,” she confesses.

But as she begins her mission to win all four major tennis tournaments in a year—something only six players have achieved in history in singles tournaments—it also becomes clear how vulnerable she is.” Her muscles and joints ache. At the French Open, she catches the flu, and has to summon remarkable mental strength to fight back after losing the first set in a semifinal match against Timea Bacsinszky. Bookending the match are scenes of her crying and coughing, burying her face in her hands, and calling her mom to come take care of her.

Serena features interviews with the many members of “Serena Inc” who accompany her on the road: her family, her coach Patrick Mouratoglou, her agent Jill Smoller, her batting partner, her physiotherapist, all of whom offer insight into the mindset of a champion. Anger seems to motivate her better than anything else during a tough match, something for which she’s also long been criticized. (“I get angry on the court,” she shrugs. “So did McEnroe.”) But the thing that governs her above all, throughout the movie, is her own unfathomable will, something not even her closest confidantes seem to fully understand. “Who says 34 is too old for tennis?” she asks. “Who makes the rules? ... I will play, and I will fight, and when I feel like I’m done I’ll be done.”

“Who makes the rules? ... I will play, and I will fight, and when I feel like I’m done I’ll be done.”

If anything, her desire to succeed transcends tennis, which feels in parts more like a path to destiny rather than destiny itself. And yet there are glimpses throughout Serena of how much she’s come to define the sport on her own terms (in one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene, Roger Federer sneaks a picture of her on his phone while she’s warming up). The film intersperses scenes from 2015 with key moments from Williams’s career, notably at Indian Wells in 2001 when she was booed after her sister withdrew from their semifinal match against each other due to injury. For 13 years, Williams refused to play at the tournament, going back for the first time in 2015. It’s easy to forget what a hostile reception the Williams sisters faced when they started playing professional tennis, but Serena points at the coded bigotry she encounters to this day, including a New York Times story last year that seemed to criticize Williams’s figure. (“Her rivals could try to emulate her physique,” it read, “but most of them choose not to.”)

History, unfortunately, robs the ending of Serena of some of its suspense, at least for tennis fans. But its grasp on both the public significance of Williams and the private forces that drive her make it a fascinating look at the kind of personality that’s required to become the greatest of all time. In trying to win all four Grand Slams in a calendar year, Williams says she wanted to give people hope “to believe that they could do something impossible.” More than so many athletes of her caliber, she seems to feel the weight of what she represents to people: as a woman, as a person of color, as someone who learned to play tennis not at a country club, but on public courts in Compton. “I’m the ultimate perfectionist,” she said following a screening of the movie in New York. “When I don’t win, it’s my fault, because I have that opportunity. I have that talent.”

Gay Marriage in the U.S., After Obergefell v. Hodges

In the one year since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, the number of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans individuals married to a same-sex spouse has increased 22 percent.

A new Gallup poll released Wednesday estimates about 9.6 percent of LGBT adults are currently married to a same-sex spouse, up from 7.9 percent before the landmark court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges last June. Gallup estimates about 123,000 same-sex marriages have taken place since the ruling:

Gallup currently estimates 3.9% of U.S. adults are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and 0.4% of U.S. adults are married to a same-sex spouse. These figures can be used to estimate there are approximately 981,000 U.S. adults in a same-sex marriage and, thus, 491,000 same-sex marriages in the U.S. That latter estimate is up from roughly 368,000 a year ago.

At the time of the historic decision last year, gay marriage was already legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The Court’s decision struck down prohibitions in the remaining 13 states. Gallup reports the rate of same-sex marriage has grown in all states since, and significantly in those 13 states.

Before the ruling, 26 percent of same-sex couples living in states where gay marriage was illegal reported being married anyway; after the ruling, that number increased to 39 percent. Before the ruling, 42 percent of same-sex couples living in states where gay marriage was legal reported being married; after, the number rose to 52 percent.

The Gallup survey was based on telephone interviews, conducted throughout 2015 and 2016, with a random sample of U.S. adults 18 or older in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The poll has a margin of error of between 1 and 2 percentage points.

Gallup’s data suggests the growth that followed the ruling may level off soon:

The Obergefell v. Hodges ruling appears to have provided the impetus for an initial surge in same-sex marriages, but that surge only lasted a short while. Going forward, as the nation moves further away in time from that June 2015 decision, increases in the same-sex marriage rate may be more evident in the long term rather than in the short term.

This is especially likely given that the U.S. LGBT population is decidedly young, and many who one day want to marry a same-sex spouse are not currently at a point in their lives when they are likely to seriously consider marriage.

Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the decisive case, told the Washington Blade earlier this month “the thing that I have loved over the past year is just how much joy I see in people’s faces when they talk about having gotten married, or they talk about people they care about or love who’ve gotten married.”

The Largest Healthcare Fraud Takedown in U.S. History

In what the Justice Department is calling the largest takedown of healthcare fraud in U.S. history, federal authorities on Wednesday brought charges against 301 people for $900 million in false billings.

Among those charged includes 61 doctors, nurses, and other licensed medical professionals who, among other crimes, allegedly committed money laundering, identity theft, and Medicare Part D pharmacy fraud. Across the country, 23 states and 36 federal districts coordinated with the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to go after the alleged fraud schemes.

The defendants allegedly submitted Medicare and Medicaid claims the Justice Department said “were medically unnecessary and often never provided.” Some of the defendants were paid kickbacks for providing information for fraudulent bills. At least 28 doctors were among those charged on Wednesday.

Announcing the charges, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said:

“As this takedown should make clear, health care fraud is not an abstract violation or benign offense—it is a serious crime. The wrongdoers that we pursue in these operations seek to use public funds for private enrichment. They target real people—many of them in need of significant medical care. They promise effective cures and therapies, but they provide none. Above all, they abuse basic bonds of trust—between doctor and patient; between pharmacist and doctor; between taxpayer and government—and pervert them to their own ends.”

According to the Justice Department, federal authorities have now charged more than 2,900 people for $8.9 billion in false Medicare billings since the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, which led the investigation, was launched in March 2007.

The IMF's Warning to the U.S.

The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday cut its estimate for U.S. economic growth for this year from 2.4 percent to 2.2 percent, and urged several measures to reduce growing poverty in the country.

.@Lagarde flags the 4 forces undermining future US growth. https://t.co/MJLxbGsdRj pic.twitter.com/jy1KbVLQ8O

— IMF (@IMFNews) June 22, 2016

Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, said the U.S. economy was “overall, in good shape,” but she highlighted four areas of concern: declining labor-force participation, lower productivity growth, income inequality, and “very high levels” of poverty. Here’s more from her news conference:

Policies need to help lower income households – including through a higher federal minimum wage, more generous earned income tax credit, and upgraded social programs for the nonworking poor.

There is a need to deepen and improve the provision of reasonable benefits to households to give incentives for work, raise the labor supply, and to support families. This should include paid family leave to care for a child or a parent, childcare assistance, and a better disability insurance program. I would just note that the U.S. is the only country among advanced economies without paid maternity leave at the national level and U.S. female labor force participation is 12 percent lower than that for men. Sensible skills-based immigration reform could also raise the labor supply and boost productivity.

Boosting productivity growth is another policy imperative. Productivity gains must inherently be based in the private sector. But public policies can help. A better tax system, efforts toward more trade integration, better infrastructure, a stronger and more vocationally oriented education system would all support higher productivity growth.

You can read the IMF’s full release here.

The Promise of an Actually Fun Justice League

The competitive world of superhero movies fuels such a brutal news cycle of box-office numbers and insider gossip that a franchise film can no longer simply stand on its own merits. If a single movie debuts to poor reviews and weak ticket sales, loud online chatter can quickly become a referendum not just on that movie’s quality, but also on the future of its planned sequels. Such was the case with this year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which makes the news from the set of its sequel, Justice League, all the more compelling. Rather than assuming critics and the franchise’s powerful fandom will see the movie as a fresh start, the studio and the director are already trying to control the narrative around the film—even if that means openly admitting to and learning from past mistakes.

Justice League, due out in late 2017, was already in pre-production by the time Batman v Superman came out, with that film’s director, Zack Snyder, on board to continue the story of the DC Comics cinematic universe. But then Batman v Superman was pilloried by critics for being too dark, ponderous, and confusing; its box office also dipped markedly after one week of release, reflecting poor audience word of mouth. Justice League sees heroes like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Aquaman unite to do battle with unspecified forces of evil, but the difference is that Snyder seems to be directly responding to criticism by promising audiences more fun in the process.

Snyder has said something similar before—in interviews about Batman v Superman, he described that film’s summary execution of its Jimmy Olsen character as the movie “having fun,” which sums up both the film’s oppressive bleakness and its creator’s total misread of its audience. But what’s significant is that this time, he’s actively shaping viewers’ and critics’ earliest expectations for Justice League. The writers he assembled for a set visit do suggest some self-awareness on his part: They included journalists Devin Faraci, Mike Ryan, and Kyle Buchanan, who’ve all been loudly critical of his previous efforts.

“For me, it is a really personal movie,” Snyder told Uproxx of Batman v Superman and the negative reaction to it. “When [that movie] came out, it was like, ‘Wow, oof.’ It did catch me off guard.” Of the film’s sequel, he told Vulture, “I have had to, in my mind, make an adjustment. I do think that the tone of Justice League has changed because of what the fans have said.” The tone of Batman v Superman wasn’t totally surprising considering Snyder’s oeuvre—his past films, including the comic-book adaptations 300 and Watchmen, were similarly grim. But Warner Bros. has too much riding on these movies to let one flop define the franchise; hence, the damage control.

“We learned that people don’t like seeing their heroes deconstructed,” the Justice League producer Deborah Snyder (Zack’s wife and producing partner) told reporters, claiming the sequel would be a “more inclusive” film than Batman v Superman. Justice League will supposedly see Batman (Ben Affleck) running around the world as a changed man, trying to unite its various heroes—Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) into an evil-battling team. Superman (Henry Cavill) died in the previous film, but should be back in some way or form, and Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who’s biding his time in prison, will likely still be up to no good.

Warner Bros. has too much riding on these movies to let one flop define the franchise.

Anyone could have gleaned that information from the film’s IMDb page. But what the Snyders are trying to sell is the sense that Justice League will learn from its predecessors’ mistakes, tapping more into the joyful spirit of the hugely successful Marvel movies. A scene reporters were shown in which Batman tries to recruit The Flash was loaded with wacky humor, recalling a similar humorous meeting between Iron Man and Spider-Man in this year’s Captain America: Civil War. That film came out a month after Batman v Superman to much stronger reviews; it’s collected $250 million more at the box office so far, and its run is still far from finished.

No one seems more aware of this disparity between comic universes than Affleck, who has signed on to play Batman in many more sequels, including a standalone film he’ll direct himself. “There’s definitely room for more humor,” he told Faraci. “It’s about hope, and about working together, and the kind of conflicts of trying to work together with others. It’s a world where superheroes exist, so there’s comedy in that.” Comedy and hope—it’s a far cry from his character vowing to make Superman bleed in their last go-around.

When he was hired to direct Man of Steel, the 2013 Superman film that began the DC Comics franchise, Snyder was asked to set the tone for the series. But his gritty visuals and darker take on heroism, where Superman and Batman seem burdened by their do-gooder lifestyle, hasn’t caught on with fans, so he’s being forced to recalibrate. It’s not unprecedented for the studio to meddle with its big-budget products, of course, but Snyder’s efforts with Justice League seem bigger than that: He’s trying to appease a fandom, and a critical community, over a film that won’t even be released for more than a year. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, such preemptive PR campaigns may become the norm—as long as the internet continues to amplify the voices of viewers and critics alike.

Donald Trump Brings Back the Talk of Default

Donald Trump’s bold—and potentially dangerous—plan to default on the nation’s debt is back.

In an appearance Wednesday morning on CBS This Morning, the presumptive Republican nominee returned to an idea he floated back in May: that if the U.S. economy “crashed,” he would offer to pay U.S. creditors less than what they are owed. “You go back and say, hey guess what, the economy just crashed. I’m going to give you back half,” he told Norah O’Donnell.

When Trump first suggested this pay-less approach to the debt, he was filleted by no less than the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, who testified to Congress that the consequences of such a move would be “very severe.”

U.S. Treasury securities are the safest and most liquid benchmark security in the global financial system. They play a critical role in financial markets, and the consequences of such a default, while they're uncertain, I think there could be no doubt that it would be long-run harmful to the U.S. interests and, at a minimum, result in much higher borrowing costs for American households and businesses.

That assessment jibes with the warnings from other economist—both Democratic and Republican—who have said that the idea of defaulting, or trying to renegotiate, the debt would spook global markets and send the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

In truth, Trump’s suggestion is much more of a musing than an actual plan. His entire comments Wednesday morning on CBS were contradictory and at times incoherent. “I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt!” he said at first, embracing a label that Hillary Clinton seized on during her anti-Trump economic speech on Tuesday. “Nobody knows debt better than me. I’ve made a fortune by using the debt. If things don’t work out, I renegotiate the debt. That’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing.”

Trump’s argument: Debt is good, and so is renegotiating it. “You go back and say, hey guess what, the economy just crashed. I’m going to give you back half,” he said.

But then he switched, clarifying that what’s good for Trump is not necessarily good for the country. “I like debt for me. I don’t like debt for the country. I like debt for my company. I don’t like debt for the country,” he said. “We are sitting on a time bomb,” Trump continued, pointing out that the national debt has soared in recent years to more than $19 trillion. “We have to start chopping that debt down.”

Debt is bad. Got it?

Then Trump shifted again, emphasizing that “chopping that debt down” or offering to pay less was not renegotiating it. “I wouldn’t renegotiate the debt,” he said. “That’s a different thing. That’s just a corporate thing.”

“So I wouldn’t do that,” Trump added. “But I think it could be a good time to borrow, and pay off debt. Borrow debt. Make longer-term debt.”

The most charitable explanation of Trump’s idea is that he would seek to restructure the nation’s debt in a way that would benefit the economy just like he did with corporate debt as a businessman. But of course, at times during that interview he said he would do no such thing.

There are a couple of risks associated with Trump’s lack of clarity. The first is that in the financial world, idle speculation from current or would-be presidents can have actual effects on financial markets, which can cost real people real money. Trump’s low standing in the polls at the moment may mitigate any fallout, but the closer he gets to Clinton and the closer it gets to November, the greater the impact these comments could have. The second is that most U.S. voters are not financial experts, and Trump’s suggestion for restructuring, or renegotiating, or just not paying all of the nation’s debt sounds great in theory—especially when politicians of all stripes have made the debt ceiling sound like an average credit card. (Just make the minimum payment!)

Trump could help clear things up by putting out an actual plan and explaining how he intends to run the nation’s finances. But unless he commits to staving off an unprecedented default, he probably won’t satisfy economists or the markets, even if his tough talk and business savvy sounds appealing to regular people.