The Risks and Benefits of Government

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In his acerbic 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine skewered the British monarchy with a broad assault: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.” Government was a necessary evil, he thought, “a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”

            Moral virtue vs. imperious oppression: that was Paine’s picture. Yet those opposite poles of the human personality represent not just a conflict between society and government but within government itself, especially in the modern era.

On the one hand, as President Trump is demonstrating, government can be a cruel enforcer of political and social conformity, with punishment for dissident speech and policy differences reaching into the distant reaches of civil society.  But government can also act as a facilitator of the common good, mobilizing resources to channel society’s generosity and vision, with protection for the economically vulnerable and stewardship of research in vast fields of science, engineering, education, and beyond.

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

In crisis, ironically, the modern society turns to government, either to blame for failure or to beseach for help, as in the aftermath of the Texas floods that swept away girls in a riverside summer camp. Rescues and searches were done by many volunteers, yes, but calls for future preventive measures were directed at government, not at private enterprise. It is government that has the power to pool and direct funds, and thereby amplify the caring of the community. Good government harmonizes with people’s needs.

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

He ends funding and thereby hobbles America’s advantage over China in alternative energy and other fields. He yields his country’s lead in medical advances to others and frightens talented foreign researchers away. He forfeits his country’s affluent compassion in addressing famine, conflict, health crises, and other suffering abroad, thereby diminishing American global influence. He disrupts the future prosperity of the United States, its credit rating, and the strength of its currency by toying impulsively with tarriffs, robbing the intricate worldwide trade mechanisms of predictability, that essential prerequisite for economic investment.

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

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

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

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

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

Constitution Avenue vs. Red Square

                                                             By David K. Shipler            

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

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

So, I went to the Army’s 250^th anniversary parade along Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., partly because it’s my habit to be curious, partly because I’m a believer in the power of observation, even of killing machines. What I observed was less political and more complicated than generally expected, not a Moscow-style display of militarization.

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

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

YAY ARMY

F… TRUMP

HERE FOR

TANKS

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

Such a threat in Moscow would have been swiftly executed, of course, had any Russian waved a dissenting sign. Yet unlike Constitution Avenue, where anybody could go, no ordinary Russians without special passes could get to the Red Square parade through the series of checkpoints. Non-credentialed people saw it only on TV.

In person, it was spectacular. With Russians’ flair for pageantry, Moscow could surely win a theater critic’s award over Washington, even Trump’s Washington. While the ageing Politburo was lined up on the rust-red Lenin Mausoleum (equipped with heaters, we assumed), thousands of troops in uniform great coats and fur hats goose-stepped in precise unanimity across the vast plaza, with not a step out of tempo or a leg off angle.

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

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

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

Washington’s parade seemed less scary because it contained no missiles, just a few unarmed mobile launchers. (The Army doesn’t have ICBMs, which are controlled by the Air Force and Navy.) It felt carefree and almost benign as drivers and gunmen waved and smiled from the turrets of their tanks and other deadly vehicles. One nearby father kept trying to whip up enthusiastic awe in his small son,—“Buddy, look at that! That’s the 101^st! See that? Special Forces!”—but we won’t know for about a decade if it worked on the young man. From my grassroots post, this parade did not live up to its ominous billing as Trump’s militarized swagger toward authoritarianism.

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

The evolution included humans’ capacity to develop imaginative tools of death, and the crowds along Constitution were captivated by the long succession of olive-drab armored vehicles, including the behemoth of all—the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank—which is too big to be very useful in much modern warfare. It’s not clear whether it damaged the capital’s streets as predicted, but I saw no harm being caused on venerated Constitution Avenue. The reason, as a young fellow who’d spent eight years in the 82^nd Airborne explained to me, was that the tanks were heading straight, and treads tear things up mostly when they turn. Steel plates had been installed at corners.

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

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

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

White Supremacy in the White House

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Two prominent themes of racial and ethnic antagonism have found their way into official government policies under the Trump administration. One is the longstanding belief that nonwhites are mentally inferior to whites, a stereotype dating from slavery. The other, generated more recently, is the notion that whites are the real victims, suffering discrimination under the banner of racial preferences.

            President Trump has displayed both assumptions in personal remarks and symbolic acts, and his aides have incorporated them into federal funding and programming. Not since the years of legal segregation, before the civil rights movement, has government been so dominated by the ideology of white supremacy. Not in the decades of work toward a more open society have its leaders repudiated the progress so venomously.

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

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

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

American Fear

 

By David K. Shipler 

There is nothing sadder than fear.

                                     --Isabel Allende 

     A new divide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist the authoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread your way between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keep your head down to present less of a target?

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

In modern America, the native-born have not been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned by masked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not been dictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Government officials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for political loyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyond government into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats to private organizations that do not comply.

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

What opposition has developed has been fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy that has already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is now governed largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt global markets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workers jobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissenting voices.

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

The charmed life of the United States has ended.

Inheriting the War

 

By David K. Shipler 

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

She was speaking recently in Washington, DC, alongside the photographer Peter Steinhauer, who was captivated in childhood by pictures of Vietnam taken by his father, a US Navy oral surgeon stationed in Danang during the war. As an adult, the son traveled there, then lived there, and has made part of his profession the celebration in images of the country’s landscapes and architecture. Marc Knapper, the current US ambassador to Vietnam, is the son of a Vietnam War veteran.

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

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

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

The Ideology of Ignorance

 

By David K. Shipler 

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

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

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

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

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

            A recent illustration got less attention than it deserved. When Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote about being inadvertently invited into a Signal chat on attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen, Trump was not told by anybody in White House or Cabinet. He learned it from a reporter’s question in a press pool. He seemed genuinely surprised and said he didn’t know anything about it.

The ensuing uproar legitimately focused on the security lapse, but Trump’s ignorance was telling. He is the architect of a structure of deceit. Unlike his first term, when more mainstream officials were willing to set him straight, he and the Heritage Foundation have populated agencies with ideologues who command loyalty to Trump personally and “his agenda” above the country or the Constitution. That loyalty includes subordination of the truth. The most recent case: the Justice Department lawyer just suspended for saying honestly in court that an error had been made in deporting a Maryland man legally in the US under an immigration judge’s protective order.

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

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

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

In other words, Trump might suffer from a grave disability. It would be sad enough for him, but his autocratic style transmits this disability throughout his staff and the ideological subordinates who now populate government agencies. So, the disabled president is disabling the country and much of the world.

What’s more, Trump’s cognitive impairment, if that’s what it is, has been codified into an ideology of ignorance, now implemented by battalions of aspiring totalitarians. When Trump officials dismiss reality as inconvenient, watch out. Immigrants are first, now being deported under legal-sounding lies. The same method of fabricated charges can be used to jail citizens. Political opponents can be labeled enemies and charged as supporters of terrorism, audited by the IRS, threatened by pardoned Proud Boys, fired by fearful employers.

The totalitarian mindset understands that information is power. Even in the US, which is still pluralistic, government collects and keeps huge stores of data, which are designed to inform sensible policy. Under Trump, information is now being subjected to suppression and manipulation. Offices that test and survey are being abolished, and statistical sets are being taken offline.

Trump has set out to destroy the open forums of honest inquiry, the very institutions that have been jewels in the crown of American brilliance: universities, museums, libraries, private foundations, institutions honored with Nobel Prize-winning research. Vice President JD Vance has called universities the “enemy.” Free universities are always a threat to autocracies.

Those running the federal government are like counter-revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow the country’s decades of progress in almost every area of achievement. They are working to facilitate the creation of alternate “realities” to serve a broader takeover of American thinking in economics, medicine, social science, history, and other fields.

Whether or not this counter-revolution will succeed is an open question. But it is making headway as Trump’s illness becomes America’s illness.

Why People Distrust Government

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            This is a story about high-handed Maine state officials proposing to jeopardize island residents’ emergency access to mainland hospitals. It is a local outrage, small in comparison to the sweeping outrages that are uprooting global security and undermining American democracy. But its significance is immense, because it’s a case study in how anti-government sentiment can be generated among good citizens who depend on key services. Nationwide, that disaffection has been a key element in the country’s dramatic political shifts.

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

That system might be scrapped for three of the islands in two or three years, if the state has its way. The commissioner of transportation, Bruce Van Note, and the director of the ferry service, William Geary, say they’re considering docking the ferries overnight on the mainland. They are in the Democratic administration of Governor Janet Mills, whose press secretary, Ben Goodman, did not answer my emailed request for an explanation of her position.

Under the proposal, there would be no transportation by ambulance between the last ferry run of the day and the first the next morning. I’m biased, because I spend four to five months a year on Swan’s Island: I’ll try to arrange my stroke or heart attack in the daytime.

Moscow on the Potomac

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            Back in the bad old days of Soviet Communism, a dissident in Moscow was summoned for interrogation by the KGB, the secret police. As the agent ticked off a list of charges, the dissident rebutted each by citing one guarantee after another in the Soviet Constitution, which protected free speech, privacy, and other rights. “Please,” the KGB agent interrupted. “We’re having a serious conversation.”

            I have treasured that story since I heard it decades ago. It dramatized the difference between the Soviet and American systems, between a constitution of fictional rights and one of actual rights. When an American political scientist, Robert Kelley, taught for a semester at Moscow State University, he used to tell his students that if the United States had a state religion, it would be constitutional democracy.

            No more.

            President Trump and his zealous aides do not blatantly mock the Constitution in words, but they do so in actions. They are ignoring some of its central principles, particularly the separation of powers, defying both the legislative and judicial branches. And while I’m always diffident about drawing parallels since no analogy is perfect, I am feeling an uneasy sense of familiarity as Washington spirals down into a darker and darker place. Trump and his allies—plus Americans who are capitulating in their businesses, politics, and universities—would have fit comfortably in Moscow, where they would have survived and prospered.

            The essence of the American idea is the din of ideas, exactly what Soviet leaders found distasteful, and what American leaders are now trying to muffle. There was a way of thinking in the Soviet Union, which continues today in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that eschewed pluralism and imposed conformity. Only a single truth was tolerated. Disagreements and debates were considered antithetical to the historical progress that Communist theory envisioned. Political irreverence might be heard quietly around the kitchen table, but elsewhere it was punished.

Gaza: Facts on the Ground

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the late 1970s, Israel’s former general Ariel Sharon used to call Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “facts on the ground.” As agriculture minister then, he provided the roads, wells, and power lines that made settlements possible. They would anchor the Israeli presence, he argued, making it hard to dislodge.

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

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

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

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

Save the Neutral Panama Canal

 

By David K. Shipler 

            PANAMA CITY, PANAMA—If President Trump takes over the Panama Canal, a wish he keeps pushing, he will be able to disrupt a significant chunk of global trade at his whim, rewarding and punishing countries he happens to like or dislike, as he has done with various measures in his first few weeks in office. The canal’s neutrality, enshrined in a US-Panama treaty, would be in jeopardy, and this shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would be compromised.

            On a trip through half the canal’s length last Sunday, and in subsequent research in two museums, I learned how easy it would be to weaponize the vital waterway. While most cargo through the canal is part of US trade, Trump could force long waiting times on certain other vessels, impose different fees for different countries, or even bar passage to ships transporting goods to or from disfavored nations.

That is, he could add the canal as a tool in the global and domestic protection racket that he has already devised with on-and-off tariffs, interrupted military aid, funding cuts to schools and universities, sanctions against lawyers who oppose him, and the like. Nothing in his behavior, even toward his own citizens, suggests that he would respect the Panama Canal’s universal accessibility, which served 170 countries last year.

Although Trump has railed against what he calls the high transit fees charged by Panama, it’s a good bet that his long-term desire is less about money than political leverage. His method of political leverage, based on bullying, would risk a popular backlash in Latin America, especially in Panama, and undermine US standing in the region.

Furthermore, the canal has water problems that only Panama can address from outside the strip that Trump wants to own.

Putin's Gamble

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

When Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine three years ago, he made several bets that might have seemed like sure things to him then. One, that Ukraine would quickly fold. Two, that the United States had no staying power. Three, that Europe was too fractured to mount effective resistance.

            Ukraine has fought valiantly, however. The US under President Biden mustered huge supplies of weaponry and diplomatic support. Europe united to provide even more aid than the US. And instead of crumbling, NATO added two new members, Sweden and Finland.

Nevertheless, Putin’s gamble finally began paying off last week, thanks to his admirer Donald Trump, who is so obviously volatile that next week might be different. Putin once labeled him unpredictable. By contrast, the Russian leader has the patience of a chess master—albeit an emotional player, as I wrote in the Washington Monthly two months before the invasion.

His long game relies on a wish and a belief: his wishful, messianic ambition to expand and restore a Russian empire, and his passionate belief that Western democracies are vulnerable to moral decay, internal disorder, and external subversion.

He is acting in both these dimensions simultaneously, and now has a willing (or unwitting) partner in President Trump.

Russia has tried to accelerate the decline of democracies by exacerbating domestic divisions with online disinformation during elections, which probably helped elect Trump in 2016. Moscow is promoting pro-Russian parties in Germany and other NATO states, a Russian interference campaign that has been joined by Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have championed rightwing European parties with neo-Nazi sympathies.

Trump Defunds the Police

 

By David K. Shipler 

            There are several ways to curb law enforcement. One is to cut off funding literally, as a minority of Black Lives Matter protesters urged. Another is to redirect some money from uniformed officers to social workers and mental health counselors, which is what many demonstrators meant by “defund the police.” Still another is to release convicted violent assailants of police officers. Or to ignore specific laws; declare no intention to enforce them; and to investigate, fire, and intimidate prosecutors and policing authorities who combat certain crimes.

            President Trump is doing all of those things except, of course, moving money to mental health services. He and his consigliere, Elon Musk, have frozen spending broadly enough to impede law enforcement. Trump has fired most of the inspectors-general who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse. He has frozen hiring at the IRS and discussed laying off 9,000 employees to undercut tax enforcement. He has pardoned men found guilty of violently attacking police officers on January 6. He has removed veteran specialists from counter-terrorism work in the Justice Department, robbing the country of expertise in a critical area of national security.

            He has announced that the law prohibiting Americans from bribing foreign officials to get contracts abroad will no longer be enforced. He has defied the congressional statute, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court, that bans Chinese-owned TikTok and has promised no prosecutions of companies that continue to distribute the prohibited platform.

            He has stymied three agencies that enforce laws protecting workers and customers of banks and credit card companies by shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and illegally firing the Democratic-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board and two of three Democrats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Trump: Promises Made, Promises Broken

 

By David K. Shipler 

                One of President Trump’s campaign slogans most popular with his supporters was the mantra, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” But the most important promises that presidents are obligated to keep are those made by their country. And in merely three weeks, Trump has broken multiple solemn promises made by the United States, many longstanding and life-saving.

                His message is clear: Don’t trust America.

If you work for our soldiers in war and are promised safe passage to the US, don’t believe it. If you’re promised continuing treatment with HIV medication, don’t believe it. If the world’s leading democracy promises to keep supporting your pro-democracy efforts in your not-so-democratic country, don’t believe it. If you’ve obtained a hard-won promise to fund effective work combating sex-trafficking, civil conflict, ethnic strife, or radicalization that leads to terrorism, don’t believe it. If you have a subcontract or a lease or an employment commitment from a non-profit organization funded by the US, don’t trust it. Don’t think that promised funds for hospitals, ports, roads, or other development projects already underway will actually be paid—unless the money is coming from China.   

                Don’t trust any international agreement with the United States, not on nuclear weapons, climate change, or trade. Don’t believe in any alliance with Washington. Don’t think that common security interests or economic interdependency protects you from a blizzard of broken promises.

If you’re in the US, don’t believe the promise of a written contract based on federal funding; it can be scuttled at midnight. If you’re a federal employee, don’t believe in the promises of the law, civil service protection, due process, or even plain ethics; you can be kicked out of your office in an instant. Don’t believe that your long expertise will protect you; in fact, it is likely to hurt you, since the Trump movement resents, vilifies, and distrusts “experts.”

Do not, under any circumstances, text or email anything sensitive, particularly with such terms as “gender” or “diversity.” Use the phone if you have to communicate. Don’t trust your coworker, who might be an informant.

Trump's Coup d'Etat

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Anyone who has seen the overthrow of a country’s government, either peacefully or by force, must be watching the United States with an uneasy sense of familiarity. In less than two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump and his zealous staff have committed offenses typically associated with a sudden takeover of an unstable autocracy.

Is this what most voters who elected Trump wished for? While stopping short of arresting political opponents (so far), the new regime has threatened criminal investigations of disfavored officials, begun ideological purges in government agencies, ordered federal workers to inform on colleagues, yanked security details from former officials who criticized Trump, risked the health of millions by halting worldwide humanitarian programs, erased essential medical information from government websites, pressed colleges to report on foreign students’ supposed antisemitism, undone rules against racial and gender discrimination, dictated that schools nationwide indoctrinate children with a “patriotic” curriculum, and more.

 The widespread destruction of norms and institutions, aimed at creating immense vacuums to be filled with a new belief system, has never before been seen in the United States. It reflects an aspiration that might be called totalism—not totalitarianism, which connotes complete subservience of the population to the will of the state. But rather, an effort to infuse both government and civil society, as totally as feasible, with a comprehensive ideology. Part of that is borne of a distaste for government itself, except when used to expand raw presidential power.

This cannot be accomplished within the confines of the Constitution’s separation of powers and the republic’s decentralization of authority to the states. Therefore, Trump has been ignoring the legislative branch—the laws passed by Congress—and in one case so far (not shutting down TikTok), ignoring both the legislative and judicial branches. He also seems poised to bully recalcitrant states by withholding federal aid.

Trump Leads America Through the Looking Glass

 

By David K. Shipler 

     Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “One can’t believe impossible things.”

 “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

                The United States is capitulating to one-man rule so rapidly that only Lewis Carroll could describe the absurd fantasies that Americans have accepted.

                Consider this: The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, flatterer and purchaser of President Donald Trump, gives two straight-arm, Nazi-type salutes at a Trump Inauguration Day rally, and the Anti-Defamation League, which touts itself as “the leading anti-hate organization in the world,” dismisses it as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Judge for yourself. Watch these two videos, one of Musk, one of Hitler: Compare.

And consider this: The number of illegal entries from Mexico drops to a four-year low, and Trump declares a state of emergency at the southern border. The country’s oil and gas production reaches an all-time high, and Trump declares an energy emergency. The violent crime rate drops steeply, lowest among non-citizens, and Trump pictures a crime wave driven by immigrants. The society spends decades combating discrimination against minorities and women of merit, and Trump calls for a meritocracy by demolishing the programs that are achieving it. What’s more, big companies rush to follow his lead back into bigotry.

To appear to be a solver, Trump needs problems to tackle. And since his remade Republican Party is still averse to attacking the real problems of its own working-class supporters, who have financial trouble in everyday life, Trump needs fake problems. Then he can conjure up fake solutions to the fake problems, crow about his progress, and—evidently—fool most of the people most of the time. And that’s a most distressing feature of this new American era, which might be called Make America Gullible Again.

It is not remarkable that a charlatan could come along in American politics. The world is full of con artists. They once traveled from town to town selling magical potions to make your hair grow or infuse perpetual youth. Now they’re online weaseling millions of dollars from lonely people lured into the mirages of love affairs and financial windfalls. And also online, Trump will benefit from his billionaire friends who run social media companies. In trepidation or collaboration, they have abandoned fact-checking and opened their platforms to Trumpist alternative realities.

Defending Minorities Against the Defense Secretary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The one true thing that Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary this week was that the military is a better place for minorities than perhaps any other American institution. What he fails to recognize is how much work it has taken to get there, and how much it will take to stay there. That point was not even made by Democratic senators as they berated him about his history of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and lack of management experience. It was a missed opportunity for serious discussion.

Hegseth railed, mostly unchallenged, against programs promoting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and pictured “wokeness” as antithetical to the lethality essential in a fighting force. Yet actual experience shows the opposite: racial, religious, and gender tolerance has to be taught, sadly, and if it isn’t, fissures can open to the military’s detriment.

In 1971, after the decay of military cohesion as racial tensions and violence spiked among troops during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon established the Defense Race Relations Institute, now named the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). There, military trainers operate on a pragmatic philosophy about the interaction between bias and readiness. They summed it up for me years ago, when I visited DEOMI several times while researching A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: You can think anything you want; that’s your business. But what you do becomes our business if you undermine your unit’s cohesion and fighting effectiveness.    

Like most conservatives, Hegseth apparently believes that the natural landscape is a level playing field, and that doing nothing will guarantee a meritocracy devoid of privilege for one group or another. (Or, perhaps more likely, he and other conservatives make this self-serving argument to preserve white males’ longstanding advantages.)

Not only is Hegseth’s position oblivious to the nation’s history, it’s also blind to the future. Halting diversity efforts allows institutions to snap back into old patterns of bias and discrimination. The military “does not do the equal opportunity and fair treatment business because it’s the nice thing to do,” I was told back then by DEOMI’s director of training, army Colonel Eli A. Homza Jr., who was white. “We do it because we have learned that if we don’t do it, we will not have cohesive and battle-ready units.”

The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.

Putin Advises Trump on Oligarchs

 

By David K. Shipler 

                “Donnie, do you know the difference between you and me?” Vladimir Putin asked Donald J. Trump in a brief phone call yesterday. “It’s a riddle.”

                “Don’t call me Donnie,” Trump said. “Or I’ll call you Vladdie.”

                “Hey, don’t get so upset, comrade,” said Putin. “I’m just trying to make you think you’re my friend.”

                “And don’t call me comrade till Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed. She’ll be thrilled, but she’s got to get past some leftover ‘experts’ in the party who don’t admire you.”

                “Don’t admire me?” Putin replied. “That’s impossible. Everybody I know admires me.”

                “Me too,” said Trump. “Oh, shit, I said, ‘Me too.’ I take it back. I’ve banned that expression. Nobody who works for me can say ‘me too.’ But they all love me, Vlad, they really do. I’m loved from the minute I get up—well, after I leave Melania behind in the bedroom—until the minute I go to bed. Well, if I go to bed before her.”

                “Come on, Donnie, guess the riddle.”

                “Stop with the Donnie.”

                “OK, MISTER PRESIDENT, what’s the difference between you and me?”

                “You don’t have my hair,” said Trump.

                “Slava Bogu!” Putin replied. “That means glory of God. You’d say thank God. But you don’t believe in God, do you, Donnie?”

                “Absolutely not. Don’t tell the evangelicals. What’s he ever done for me? I’ve done it all myself. He’s a hoax, like climate change.”

                “Climate change isn’t a hoax, Donnie. Now come on, the riddle.”

                “I give up,” said Trump.

                “You give up easily, comrade. Kamala was right, you know. You’re weak. You wouldn’t last two minutes in the Kremlin. The knees on your million-dollar suits would wear out from groveling. But in the White House? I’m going to love it when you’re there.”

                “OK, so that’s the difference? You’re a strongman and I’m a weakman?”

                “You’re getting close,” said Putin. “The difference is that my oligarchs do what I tell them or I take their billions and throw them in jail or out a hotel window. But you—you do what your oligarchs tell you. They run you. You worship them and fear them. You’re afraid that their contributions to your slush funds will dry up and they’ll say mean things on X and won’t keep Republicans in line. You’re afraid of that little twerp Elon Musk. Here in Moscow, I create Elon Musks and obliterate them when they get uppity. That’s the difference, Donnie Boy.”

                The recording of the call goes silent for a few seconds. It seems to be ended until a faint sigh is heard, then the voice of Trump: “I gotta hang up and go play golf with Elon, but I hate it. He always wins, even when I cheat. See you next year in Kyiv.” 

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

                 

From Democracy to Kakistocracy

 

By David K. Shipler 

Kakistocracy, n: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state 

[Note: Bowing to the influence of The Shipler Report, Gaetz withdrew only hours after this was posted.]

            When President Richard Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court in 1970, his lack of intellectual heft was defended by Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, who famously declared: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”

            The Senate rejected Carswell, with 13 Republicans joining Democrats in voting no.

            Ah, for the good old days. This time around, it is not just mediocrity that is ascending to power but wild incompetence seasoned with wackiness. From Donald Trump on down, the federal government is about to be converted into a cesspool of financial and moral corruption, and into a juggernaut of fact-free autocratic decrees, political arrests, and military roundups. At least that’s Trump’s goal, which his key nominees are poised to pursue.

If Hruska were still with us, he would have to update his argument by noting that the country’s sexual assailants also deserve “a little representation.” Since most voters just elected a court-proven sexual assailant president, he would surely find sympathy in the supine Senate. And remember, Republicans in years past confirmed Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite credible accusations, respectively, of sexual harassment and assault. Today, Trump seems partial to men who do that kind of thing, since the accused (but not proven) assailants he’s picked for his Cabinet include Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services.

The Democratic Party's New Playbook

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Shipler Report has obtained an early draft of the National Democratic Committee’s manual for the next presidential candidate. It is the result of the post-election self-flagellation that only Democrats can perform with such alacrity. Here it is: 

                “Dear Candidate (insert name),

                Donald J. Trump has become a model of how to win elections in the new America. Following his successful campaign in 2024, we strongly recommend adopting his top ten techniques, as follows: 

1.      Begin to lie as soon as your lips start moving.

2.      Use only superlatives, as in, “We will have the best hurricanes ever,” and, “We have the worst open sewers in history. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

3.      Read Mein Kampf – great tips

4.      Terrify the citizenry and badmouth the country as swarming with swarthy, pet-eating ex-convicts and insane, blood-poisoning invaders.

5.      Use these four words often, no matter what the problem, imagined or real: “I will fix it.”

6.      Ramble for hours incoherently in front of large audiences by “weaving” unrelated digressions into a tangled web that makes you seem cognitively impaired.

7.      Sell Bibles that include an extra New Testament book with your name, and a preface reading, “The Gospel According to _________.” Price it exorbitantly so people know it’s valuable.

8.      Sell bright blue MAGA hats, but don’t tell anyone that the initials stand for “Make America Gullible Again.”

9.      Pretend to perform a sex act with a microphone.

10.  Lose millions in lawsuits for sexual assault, and keep bragging about grabbing women’s pussies. Most men love that, and millions of women do, too.”

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Uneducating America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the United States of America.

                On the tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to occur during an administration.

                If we ever understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas and Hezbollah.

                If we ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Elections seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions, and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The First Chill of Self-Censorship

                                                         By David K. Shipler

                The decisions by the rich men who own the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to kill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders of how an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but the system’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operate automatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding risk and informing on those who deviate or dissent.

                That is how the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writers knew instinctively what content was permitted in their newspapers and broadcasts; they were Communist Party members themselves, so official censorship was internalized, embedded in their professional judgments. There wasn’t much the censors needed to delete.

                In schools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard against political irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were often exacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening today in Russia, which has been dragged backward by Vladimir Putin. In other words, the authoritarian structure presses people horizontally as well as vertically, not only from the top down but also from within the lowly communities where individuals live their lives.

                Oh, please, some of you will say. The US is not Russia. We have a passionate tradition of free debate, suspicion of government, and fervent individualism. “It Can’t Happen Here,” you might insist, the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a fascist who rises to power in America—and who holds a huge rally in Madison Square Garden, by the way, its adoring crowd described with prescience by Lewis decades before Donald Trump’s ugly rally there this week.

Trump is trying to seed the ground for that dynamic of self-policing. He has illuminated the most significant divide in America, which is between those who see it coming and those who do not. You can call it the divide between the left and the right, or between Democrats and Republicans, or between Blacks and whites, or women and men, or college and high-school graduates. Those lines exist. But more fundamentally, it is a divide between those who understand how pluralistic democracy can be undermined along an insidious path toward autocracy, and those who do not. Apparently, Americans don’t study this. Our schools have failed miserably.

The Absolutism of Trump Republicans

                                                        By David K. Shipler  

            Democracy thrives on shades of gray. Few public issues actually divide themselves starkly into black and white. And even when disagreements are unyielding, a government “of the people” needs to embrace a variety of views, accommodate differences, and include a supple give-and-take. That’s the ideal, essential to a pluralistic political system in an open society.

Yet that is not the ideal of the Trump Republican Party. Instead, in a corruption of yesterday’s refined conservativism that preached smaller government, it plans to transform government into a powerful monolith imposing ideological absolutism on many areas of American life—private as well as public.

This can be seen most vividly in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Donald Trump has disavowed, although the most extreme provisions were written by his administration’s former officials who are likely to serve with him again if he’s elected.

The agenda is invasive. Women would be required to give their reasons for having legal abortions, and doctors would have to report the information to their states, which would lose funds if they failed to collect and relay the answers to the federal government. The data wouldn’t have the women’s names, supposedly, but the very demand would trespass into personal zones of intimacy.

States where abortion is legal would have trouble making it accessible, because any clinic that provided abortions would be denied Medicaid funds for anything, including providing other health services, thereby putting most of them out of business. While federal law prohibits payment for abortions by Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans, clinics can be reimbursed for other health care. This would be a back-door way of virtually banning abortion nationwide.

The Year of Moral Loss

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deep paradox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moral certitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground of righteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with the intimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then with the remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left is whatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not that wars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conducted within Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle has been nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries. Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as a standard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted and tormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jets against Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewish settlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages. And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now, as Tom Friedman has said, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it. And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens, watch out.”

              Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic; both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical and hateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinian leaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israeli leaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflate all Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bomb whole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, those at the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Their military tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods of warfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivation and massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, exploding pagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamas has embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools and hospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have fought through those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killing and wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medical facilities.

Trump Channels America's Deepest Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

              If you spread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacks and other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’ll see how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, these instruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both their intended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetrators themselves.

              The latest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to this country in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety and opportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. That Trump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’s officials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” and second, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.

              The concocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks as primitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed the rationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wing electorate.

Trump has proved dangerously skillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locates and gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broad support by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes of disease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. It doesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrants than native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecution and danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter that the two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.

He doesn’t have to say explicitly that the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough. Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks in particular, has deep roots in American culture.

The stereotypes fall into five basic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across the country, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around these themes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.

Targeting America

 

By David K. Shipler 

              The bullet just grazed Donald Trump, but it struck the heart of America.

At a moment of critical care for a suffering democracy, the assassination attempt last night in Pennsylvania further weakens the stamina of an ailing culture of pluralistic politics. It adds toxins to the chemistry of the country. It has already provoked blame rather than introspection. Instead of strengthening Americans’ bonds of common citizenship, as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy did sixty years ago, this near miss will only deepen the divisions. It will be taken to justify the rage, hatred, and passion for revenge that Trump himself has fostered.

Moreover, it is hard to see how that apostle of autocracy fails to get elected in November. This bolsters the image of macho victimhood he has promoted, an ironic way of channeling the alienation and sense of helplessness felt by millions of white working-class voters who adore him. He was a cult figure before and now, in near martyrdom, he perfects the performance. Before allowing Secret Service agents to move him to safety, he needs to play his part, so he tells them, “Wait,” is helped to his feet, his bloody ear now visible as he raises his fist and apparently shouts, “Fight!”  And fight they will, in one way or another.

This Sunday morning, there have undoubtedly been preachers crediting God, as Trump did in a post, for making the bullets narrowly miss. Some of his followers believe he has been divinely assigned to lead the nation, and this will be taken to prove their case. And there have surely been preachers admonishing their congregations to seek reconciliation, to gaze inward, to love the other, to examine themselves for the wrongs that they and the broader society must right.

The sermons on taking responsibility and seeking healing and listening to the other side will not make the front pages, sadly. They will not generate a lot of followers on social media or even find their way into most politicians’ stump speeches on the campaign trail. Senator J. D. Vance, a possible vice-presidential candidate, instantly blamed President Biden’s harsh rhetoric against Trump for a shooting whose motives were still unknown. Vance didn’t mention Trump’s years of violent rhetoric, of course, or his vitriol loosening the restraints of civil order, culminating in the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by his violent supporters.

That’s the nature of American political leadership today. Some of the worst people rise to some of the highest levels.

What Trump and his Republican acolytes—including those on the Supreme Court—fail to realize is that whatever they unleash in governmental power or private aggression can be used by the left as well as the right. In other words, the authors themselves can someday be the targets. In her dissent from the Court’s recent grant of broad presidential immunity against criminal prosecution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a president could now “order the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and avoid prosecution. Her hypothesis, signed by the three liberal justices, drew no distinction between a Republican or a Democratic president.

At this writing, the public knows little about the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by the Secret Service. He was white and apparently not an immigrant, so Trumpists won’t be able to blame all people of color and all immigrants, as many (Trump included) are wont to do for the ills of the country. He was not a member of Seal Team 6, evidently, so Biden’s off the hook for using his newfound powers from the Supreme Court. Crooks was reportedly a registered Republican who gave a small contribution a Democratic cause, so take your choice about his reasons for wanting to take Trump out.

Unless his online posts, friends, and family offer insights, a vacuum of information on his disturbed thinking will allow room for fantastic conspiracy theories. Those will further deteriorate the health of the society, and a society’s health depends on how self-corrective it is, especially in a moment of crisis.

It doesn’t look good for the United States. In this heated atmosphere, political violence begets more political violence. It would not be amazing for some of Trump’s militant supporters to take up arms against any target they deem worthy of their attention. Trump has called for unity but not peace. He might be incapable of preaching nonviolence to those who love him and value his raised fist. We’ll see.

What does appear reliably predictable is that a weak-looking, impaired Joe Biden cannot win over Trump. If Biden remains the candidate, Trump will be inaugurated next January. And at that moment, the world’s three most powerful countries will be led by criminals. Granted, only one will have been convicted. But Xi Jinping of China for his persecution of the Uighurs and Vladimir Putin of Russia for his war of atrocities in Ukraine certainly deserve prosecution. If you think of Trump’s crimes as minor, just wait.

The bullet that Trump heard whizzing past his ear? We all heard it as it found its mark.