Israel and Iran: The Extraordinary History of Mutual Support

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            In the spring of 1982, just over three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, I was invited by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to his sheep ranch in the Negev Desert to hear his surprising arguments about Iran. As we sat in his spacious house, he made a strong case that Washington should work to repair relations with Tehran—in the strategic interests of both the United States and Israel.

            This was not a complete break from decades of Israeli policy toward Iran, which had traded oil for weapons. Yet at that moment, Sharon was voicing a bold and counterintuitive position for his country, which was the target of anti-Zionist hatred from the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And the timing was off, for it came when American emotions remained high, little more than a year after the release of American diplomatic personnel who had been held for 444 days after the US Embassy was overrun.

Sharon wanted his controversial idea in The New York Times, but only “on background,” not with his name attached. This is a trade-off journalists accept to give the public significant information that would not be available otherwise. So, in a broad piece about American, Israeli, and Soviet stakes in Iran, I called him “a well-placed Israeli official,” a disguise unnecessary now, a dozen years after his death.

A former general infamous for ruthlessness toward Arabs, Sharon was more opportunist than ideologue. His lens was military, not religious. He saw Iran—Muslim but not Arab—as a counterweight against the well-armed Arab countries. At the time, only Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel. Iraq, Syria, and—to a lesser extent, Jordan—remained in the Arab order of battle.

Sharon worried about Moscow’s gains. He began his pitch by assessing Iran as the region’s most critical Muslim country, which deserved cultivation by Washington. “In spite of all Iran has done to the United States,” he insisted, “the United States cannot afford to permit Iran to be totally and unreservedly anti-American and leave the field open to Soviet penetration.”

Furthermore, he noted that about 40,000 Jews lived in Iran. “Under a regime like this one, you can consider them as hostages,” he said, making Israel responsive to Iranian requests for military equipment and spare parts for weapons.

In fact, Israel continued to provide military supplies to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (250 tires for F-4 fighter jets in 1980, for example, ammunition and parts for tanks); it suspended the sales under US pressure until the hostages were released in 1981, then resumed shipments for awhile. “No matter how intense their zeal against Zionism,” Sharon told me, “we don't have to fuel this fire.”

It’s safe to say that Sharon would not have advocated support once Iran embarked on its  nuclear weapons program, which could ignite a nuclear arms race in a region where Israel alone has a nuclear arsenal. It’s reasonable to think that he would endorse today’s war against Iran. But the countries’ prior history, documented by declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry memos and reports, offers an instructive picture of a largely secret alignment that Israel might want to renew if a moderate government came to power there, as unlikely as that seems today.

Analyzing the official papers in 2019, an Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, described an extensive, mutually beneficial relationship from 1953 to 1979, during the dictatorial rule by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. He had come to power after British intelligence, aided by the CIA, helped overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized British oil holdings. (The scheme is well-documented in an investigative film, Coup 53.)

Under the Shah, Iran delivered oil to the Israeli port of Eilat, according to the files, from which it passed by pipeline to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean. In addition, “private and state-owned Israeli companies, ranging from textiles, agriculture, electrical appliances, water, fertilizers, construction, aviation, shipping, gas, tires and even dentures, had been operating extensively in Iran,” Mack wrote. “In some years, Iran was one of the main destinations for Israeli exports.”

The papers that Mack analyzed show close Israeli relations with the Shah’s feared security police, the SAVAK, which imprisoned and tortured political opponents. According to one Foreign Ministry memo, the Iranian prime minister asked in 1967 for Israel to train his chief bodyguard. Whether or not it was done is not spelled out. But Iranian police went to Israel for training by the company Motorola in using communications equipment. And documents show Israeli officials as keenly interested in the SAVAK’s ability to contain pro-communist or other opposition to the Shah.

Intelligence and military cooperation were extensive. Iran paid Israel to renovate Iranian air force and civilian aircraft. Purchases of Israeli tanker airplanes and other weaponry were reported. “Between 1968 and 1972,” according to Mack’s summary of the declassified documents, “IMI Systems [a major weapons manufacturer then owned by the Israeli government] sold $20.9 million worth of equipment to Iran; Israel Aerospace Industries sold $1.3 million; Soltam sold $16.9 million in mortars; Motorola sold $12 million; Tadiran sold $11.3 million and set up a radio equipment factory in Iran; and Israel’s Defense Ministry sold $700,000 worth of equipment.”

High-level contacts were maintained. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion visited Iran in 1961. Prime Minister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin met the head of Iran’s security services on Dec. 8, 1974. For years, Israel and Iran had offices and representatives in each other’s countries, sometimes clandestinely, and Israeli military attaches were in frequent contact with Iranian officers.

A 1967 memo from Israel’s ambassador in Tehran, Zvi Dorel, put it this way: “We have established a close, friendly, and practical partnership between the IDF and the security services and their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programs and missions of national importance, with continuous mutual visits by the heads of the armed forces and their senior officials. … The Iranian army views the IDF and the security services as allies and those involved in making contact and professional issues.”

An Israeli Finance Ministry official reported in 1973: “The spectrum of activity is broad, ranging from the supply of military products and electronics manufactured by factories in Israel, to the export of systems for creating and assembling them on the spot, training, surveys, construction, assembling and maintenance of facilities on the ground through contractors.”

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Israel saw its interest in a weakened Iraq, so provided military support to Iran. In 1981, Sharon publicly berated the US for allegedly providing Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, with artillery and ammunition. “The fact that they are supplying these dangerous weapons to the Arab world, sophisticated weapons, puts us in a very difficult situation,” Sharon complained.

To the extent that Israel’s extensive, past relations in Iran have been translated into ongoing spy networks, they might have complemented the sophisticated digital surveillance that has evidently given Israel precise inside intelligence, which has facilitated identifying and targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and other key figures.

Although nationalist hatred and religious zealotry in the Middle East can look immutable, the rise and fall of the Israel-Iran collaboration exemplifies fluidity. Sharon’s plea in 1982 was a yearning to recover somewhat from the virtual collapse of the relationship after the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Significantly, as early as 1976, Israel’s ambassador in Tehran, Uri Lubrani, began to predict the Shah’s demise. “The feeling of many in Iran today is that the status of the Shah has begun to be quickly undermined,” he cabled to the Foreign Ministry, “a process that cannot be reversed and will eventually lead to his defeat and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran. It is very difficult to give a time estimate and my personal assessment, which is not based on any objective data, is that this will take place more or less in the next five years.” It took three.

Israeli officials hoped for a military government that would maintain the relationship, but Lubrani was far from sanguine. “It is reasonable to assume that the monarchy will end and that, at least in the first stage, the military officers will take its place,” he wrote. “The big question is who will lead them and what direction he will take. . . . The implications of a new situation for Israel-Iran relations should the Shah’s rule be undermined are grave, and the current regime of the Shah will be seen as the most positive one for Israel in Iran. Any change in this government will, to the best of our assessment, be to the detriment of our relations with this country.”

About a year before the end, on Sept. 28, 1978, Lubrani met with the Shah and reported, “He is not the man we were familiar with, he was distant and sometimes stares. . . He is full of terror and uncertain of the future. The most worrisome aspect is the sense that he seems to have made peace with his fate, without having found any strong desire to take matters into his own hands and change it.”

After that, Iran muscled up its military, funded and armed proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen—and posed the greatest threat to Israel, while some Arab countries, also threatened by Iran, moved toward accommodation with the Jewish state.

Those proxies and Iran’s own military have been severely damaged in repeated attacks. Despite a pro-Western restiveness among some of Iran’s 90 million people, demonstrated by the pre-war anti-government protests that were put down with slaughter, experts on the country doubt that this Israeli-American war will completely overturn the radical regime that has ruled since the Shah.

        The moment has a way of seeming permanent. Nevertheless, the Middle East is like a kaleidoscope whose future patterns of alliances and allegiances only fools and prophets would dare predict. The only certainty is that the kaleidoscope is being given another shake.

Phase Four: The Police State

 

By David K. Shipler 

            America’s march toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimed not merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americans and violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and the evident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.

The agents, masked and camouflaged in combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, Donald Trump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassured them: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law with impunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism: the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law and the liberties of the citizens.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarized policing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (First Amendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment); the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourth and Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). All that is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.

How far it will go is an open question. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests have sparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicans who have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looks clear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above local control.

This is in the playbook of every dictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarian aspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’s civil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normal structure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, political prosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selective taxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.

An element of secrecy usually accompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Such is the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges or nametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of the American nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees in Minneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streets of Gaza.

Three Questions for an ICE Agent

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the unlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent after he has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrenched a husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody, or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask: 

1.      Do you realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life? (A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to the Soviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now the people in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear in their eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured, how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)

2.      When your children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’s democracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age after World War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during the Nazi era; searing conversations often followed.)

3.      What did your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)

Mobilizing the Conscience of America

 

By David K. Shipler 

            My earliest political memory is watching television film of Southern segregationists screaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s, and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs, and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s. 

            She had been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. But as she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignation at the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my first lesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and to generate reform.

The scenes eventually mobilized the conscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.

This year’s holiday marking the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes of masked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadly enough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and his collaborators.

 We saw a moral uprising after a long history of police killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrations across the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. And since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportation have rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially in Minneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videos show, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.

In a current CBS poll, 61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56 percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesters were either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32 percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” As one might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in opposite directions, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “less safe.”

The numbers appear to show a gathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moral mobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels with today are far from precise.

Civil rights demonstrators were trained in the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marched peacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, or sat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, called this the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern power structure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant, revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across the country.

Anti-ICE protesters have no such coherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most are peaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken and doctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not exist sixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had not been captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.

Before the internet and cable news, television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which generally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated news coverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’s perceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust in news organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion, it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmation bias, it’s called.

Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioningly conveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domestic enemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largely from the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rights demonstrators as “outsider agitators.”

The dynamic today has been inverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state and local governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the First Amendment.

In 1957, for example, after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressed Faubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Court had ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But when Faubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalized the guard and sent 101^st Airborne troops to restore order and protect the students.

Today, it is the federal government that is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments in Minnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that is suppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state that wants to hold the agent accountable.

The inversion of righteousness is telling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage is triggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violations of ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other features of a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitary force unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to the law or to the norms of decency.

Seared in my memory is the photograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamed at a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself in this mirror.

My grandmother did not become a flaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected her views on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the 1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worried for us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness and uplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.

The New America: Fortress on a Hill

 

By David K. Shipler 

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

--John Winthrop, 1630 

            The stirring phrase “city upon a hill” was coined not as a description of the United States but as an aspiration, a challenge, applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop in a sermon probably delivered at sea, before arriving in New England. Since then, as quoted by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it has morphed into a mirage of self-adulation—not a hope but a supposed achievement.

             “I've spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan declared in his farewell address: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. . . . And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

            You want to weep when you read these words today. Even putting aside Reagan’s own failures to keep that beacon bright (he opposed the monumental civil rights acts, for example, and slandered the poor on welfare), the metaphor imagined the best of a complicated America. It was accepted globally, though not unanimously, as modeling democratic freedom and economic opportunity. Millions from around the world have struggled to climb up to this shining city on a hill.

Now it is becoming a fortress. In merely one year, President Trump and his minions have recast the model. It is no longer a robust democracy but a semi-dictatorship fueled by a cult of personality supported by a critical mass of Americans. No longer is the rule of law its bedrock. No longer can the public’s discontent be reliably translated into political change. No longer does free speech flourish under a government that regards dissent as punishable. No longer do its officials or many of its private institutions embrace that essential American idea: the din of many ideas. No longer is it entirely safe for “the people peaceably to assemble . . . for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment provides. Whatever harmony the country enjoyed among “people of all kinds” has dissolved into discord under a government driven by the ideology of white supremacy.    

America's March Toward Autocracy: Phase Three

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Having demolished much of the best scientific research supported by the federal government, ignored congressional acts that created and funded agencies, harassed the private sector into accepting racial discrimination, bullied media corporations into self-censorship, erased historical truths, distorted government fact-gathering, sent masked agents to grab immigrants, deployed hapless national guard onto peaceful streets, and severely damaged the rule of law and the constitutional separation of powers, Donald Trump and his collaborators now turn their draconian radicalism against the country’s system of free elections.

            This is Phase Three in the demise of democracy. Whether the Trumpists succeed remains an open question, but they are laying the groundwork for what experts who have studied dictatorships term “competitive authoritarianism.” It means that elections are held but are manipulated so the opposition party has little or no chance of coming to power, as in Hungary and Turkey.

            The elements of the effort are these:

Political prosecutions of opposition (Democratic) figures. Trump is mobilizing a complicit Justice Department to take revenge on critics by inflating minor or imagined infractions into criminal charges. The efforts against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James have been blocked so far by a federal district court judge and two grand juries of citizens honest enough to refuse to indict James, who won a major business fraud case against Trump. But the James case might be revived, and other prosecutions are in the offing.

            In what The New York Times calls “a nebulous and far-reaching” federal investigation, former officials involved in bringing criminal cases against Trump are being subpoenaed, with a grand jury empaneled in southern Florida to consider conspiracy charges. Prosecutors of the January 6 rioters are also in jeopardy. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California, who led the first impeachment prosecution of Trump, is under investigation. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, is being investigated by the Pentagon for his part in a video by six Democratic lawmakers reminding military personnel that they can and must refuse illegal orders. He could theoretically be recalled to active duty and court-martialed under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President,” and other officials.

Looking for a War

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            The man who craves a Nobel Peace Prize is looking for ways to play with his soldiers. He declares great swaths of the American citizenry the enemy from within and sends befuddled National Guard troops into cities governed by his political opposition. He threatens to go "guns-a-blazing" into Nigeria to stop murders of Christians. He labels occupants of small boats “terrorists” when he imagines, with no proof, that they they might be transporting drugs. He launches a military buildup led by the largest US aircraft carrier to waters near Venezuela in preparation for a possible military assault to overturn the government of the socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.

            This is Donald Trump the peacemaker who did manage to get a shaky end to Israel’s war in Gaza, but who blustered ineffectually about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine and renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. And this is Donald Trump the strongman who undermines his military’s combat expertise by letting his defective “War Secretary,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior ranks of the most competent officers, a likely step toward politicizing the armed forces with right-wing, white Christian nationalists.

            If this array of odd behavior appears contradictory and hypocritical, let’s look again. It contains significant consistencies of personality and method.

            President Trump thrives on conflict and confrontation, as if his brain chemistry needed the fix. He enhances his power by tough-guy unpredictability, trying for fear, flattery, and capitulation in both warmaking and peacemaking scenarios. This sometimes succeeds, but not always.

If no conflict or crisis exists, he creates or imagines one, then reimagines it as disappearing because of his bold acts. He’s already practices this sleight of hand by thanking himself for restoring order in US cities where no disorder prevailed, and by curtailing drug smuggling via routes where it barely existed. Sadly, his pattern of imagining and reimagining is not just a frivolous magician’s act. It hurts and kills people.

Israel Unleashed

 

By David K. Shipler 

In nearly two years since the Gaza war began, the world has learned what Israel does when it feels its very existence is threatened. It invades, bombs, maims, starves, blockades, sickens, dislocates, and traumatizes an entire population of innocents whose most radical leaders and their followers have committed intimate atrocities against innocents inside Israel: Sacrifice innocents for innocents. It attacks throughout the Middle East, in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. It defies international condemnation. It dismisses evidence of its victims’ suffering as antisemitic propaganda.

            What it has not done, obviously, is use its nuclear weapons, which Moshe Dayan revealed to me in 1981 could be quickly assembled. As Defense Minister, he reportedly urged consideration of their use when Israel was attacked by Arab countries in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Whether the possibility came up this year, as Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, is not yet known publicly.

            The lesson couldn’t be clearer: Born as a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust, Israel inherits a legacy of anxiety and persecution, and therefore treasures its military strength. It feels risk beyond what hard-headed security experts might assess. Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger once said about the Jewish state, even paranoids can have real enemies.

And so, when its own intelligence and military hierarchy grew so complacent that Hamas terrorists could easily flow in from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023 to slaughter, rape, and kidnap, a traumatized Israel sensed doom and replied with terrorism of its own, which an international commission of the UN Human Rights Council has now defined as genocide.

America's March to Autocracy Enters Phase Two

                                                            By David K. Shipler 

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

1)    Getting Americans used to seeing camouflage on the streets by ostentatiously posting national guard troops in the nation’s capital and allowing police to “do whatever the hell they want,” in Trump’s words, with threats of the same in other cities. This is a step toward the militarized state that Trumpists favor.

2)    Hiring right-wing ideologues to fill key mid-level vacancies created by the mass firings from federal agencies. The purge was not so much to save money—little was saved—as to open opportunities for zealots to weaponize government and stifle expertise and debate. Recruitment by the Heritage Foundation has been going on for years. New hires will remake federal law enforcement into a tool of Trump by expanding ICE with politically-vetted agents, possibly from the ranks of white nationalists. The FBI will no longer require a college degree and extensive training for its agents, who will also be subjected to ideological screening.

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

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

Phase One, initiated immediately after his inauguration January 20, overcame the checks and balances among the three branches of government that the Framers of the Constitution had so ingeniously created to avoid the scenario that is now unfolding 238 years later.

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

            The Trumpists have normalized breaches of legal and ethical standards to the point of danger—the danger that the outrages will no longer seem outrageous. The threshold at which shock and opposition are triggered has been raised higher and higher.

Some citizens complain and mobilize to fight back, of course, but not as a broad movement. Americans have grown accustomed to masked ICE agents hauling off peaceful international students and essential foreign workers, locking them up without recourse. Americans are no longer surprised by the purges of websites and archives of historical facts, the removal of books on race and gender from military libraries, the subjection of data to political filtering, the screening of government workers for ideological conformity.

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

Most leading institutions in the United States are also afraid and have been complacent and compliant. Congress is supine, controlled by the Republican Party that Trump hijacked and twisted away from traditional conservatism. District federal judges have tried to restrain the administration, sometimes overreaching, but Trump appointees in appeals courts and the Supreme Court have reversed many of those restraints, unleashing Trump with extraordinary powers to usurp the role of the legislature.

If a leftist president is eventually elected, those powers can be invoked to swing the country wildly in another direction, creating a pendulum of instability akin to the worst authoritarian states in the non-industrialized world.

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

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

The victims are not uniting. Even Harvard, which mounted a strong court case in the face of Trump’s arbitrary cutoff of funding for valuable research, is on the cusp of a deal that would reward the president’s dictatorial impulses. Some big law firms caved when their largest corporate clients were poised to abandon them, while others are fighting, and pro bono attorneys have organized to help targeted individuals and institutions. Big media conglomerates, which had strong cases against ridiculous libel suits filed by Trump, capitulated and bought him off with huge sums, while other respected news organizations persist in reporting truthfully.

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

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

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

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

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.