Instructions From the White House to the Cabinet

 

By David K. Shipler

 

            The Shipler Report has obtained an internal memo from Susie Wiles, President Trump’s chief of staff, announcing a significant exception to a standing order. The reversal pertains to statements on religion.

Previously, and in multiple reminders, Wiles had warned staff and Cabinet secretaries against upstaging the president. Now, she wants them to do just that. She is known as the most candid of Trump’s inner circle, hence her direct language.

On January 21, 2025, the day after Trump’s second inauguration, she wrote: “You must not publicize yourself, take credit for successful actions, or hint that major policy initiatives originated anywhere other than the President’s fertile imagination—otherwise known as his mind. You may not make public statements more outlandish than the President’s, or that provoke either more applause or more outrage than whatever the President has ignited. He is the Force, and no one of you must ever portray yourself as more inspiring, more energizing, or more appalling than him.”

            Then, in early March of this year, Wiles issued this terse message to the Cabinet: “Kristi Noem didn’t get the memo.” Days later, Noem was fired as Secretary of Homeland Security after spending $220 million on TV ads that featured herself, decked out in a cowboy hat, riding a horse in rugged terrain like a marshal come to bring order to a turbulent land.

            Last week, after Trump trash-talked Pope Leo XIV (“WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,”) Wiles sent this urgent memo:

 

MEMORANDUM TO CABINET MEMBERS

            April 13, 2026

 

TO: CABINET SECRETARIES

FROM: SUSIE WILES, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF

SUBJECT: RELIGIOUS EXCEPTION TO MEMORANDA OF JAN. 21, 2025, MARCH 30, 2025, JULY 4, 2025, AND MARCH 3, 2026

 

            The White House, noting the President’s recent condemnation of the Holy Father, hereby reverses its previous order that staff and Cabinet Secretaries refrain from statements more excessive or inflammatory than the President’s. On the matter of religion, and on that topic only, Secretaries are instructed to fashion remarks that are actually more extreme, more outrageous, and more arrogant than the President’s. We acknowledge that this could present a challenge. But it is vital in maintaining the President’s (self-) image as a stable genius. Everything is relative, as we know. The Vice President, who cannot be commanded, much to the President’s dismay, is nevertheless encouraged to speak in this vein as well.

I.                    For example, it is recommended that the Vice President lecture the Holy Father on theology, notwithstanding Mr. Vance’s conversion to Catholicism just seven years ago and his lack of formal theological education. Most voters will not know this, and they will not know that Pope Leo was educated at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and studied Canon Law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. [Vance, following the advice, then said, “I think it is very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about theology.”]

II.                 Secretary of War (and Expeditions) Pete Hegseth is instructed to continue his fashioning of the Iran conflict as a holy war. His analogizing the pilot rescue on Easter to Christ rising is just the kind of statement that is valued as a way to cast the President, by comparison, in a more reasonable light—grounded, shall we say. Praying at the Secretary’s Pentagon press conferences, citing God’s blessing on our troops, and declaring His lack of mercy on the enemy are off-the-wall statements endorsed by the White House. It would also be helpful to call the Iranian Muslims “enemy infidels who are destined for hell”—again, to help the President to be seen as moderate. Or to quote a fake Bible verse from a movie. [Hegseth took the advice. He quoted a mostly made-up passage from the film Pulp Fiction as if it were from Ezekiel. And he likened himself, his troops, and the administration to a healing force, with “Trump-hating” reporters as Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect, who were “only looking for the negative” when they witnessed Jesus heal the sick. “Our press are just like these Pharisees,” Hegseth declared.]

III.              President Trump’s posting of an image of himself like Jesus, healing the sick, will be difficult to top, but it might inspire some of you to come up with another outrageous AI concoction. The purpose, again, is to make the President seem rational and cogent by comparison. A warning, however: Do not portray yourselves as God. Remember, the President does not like being relegated to inferior status, and you would undoubtedly depart soon thereafter to the Cabinet afterlife, wherever that might be.

        Good luck negotiating these treacherous waters. Please contact the office of the Chief of Staff with any questions. 

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for the quotes from Trump, Vance, and Hegseth), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.         

                

Is Israel to Blame for the Iran War?

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given President Trump plenty of bad advice about Iran. But the rising belief that Israel is to blame for Trump’s war of choice deflects responsibility from the White House, where it obviously belongs. Trump failed to weigh Israel’s interests against those of his own country. He reportedly ignored his advisers’ doubts about Israel’s assessments and predictions.

            As the war damages the global economy and security, Israel is being teed up as a scapegoat. A most aggressive effort has come from Tucker Carlson, once a Trump cheerleader, whose recent rant against the war includes a malevolent portrait of a president at the mercy of Israel.

“The Israeli government has a storied history of blackmailing US presidents,” he writes absurdly in his Morning Note. “America’s ‘special ally’ is willing to play very dirty to achieve its goals. Dark-money campaign contributions, extortion, physical threats and even assassination. In their anti-Christian worldview, the ends always justify the means. They have no issue destroying lives.” (Carlson doesn’t mention “Jews,” but those with an antisemitic bent will surely read it that way.)

Americans’ longstanding support for Israel has weakened severely. Unfavorable opinions were driven up by Israel’s widespread bombing and brutal blockade of Gaza Palestinians following the October 7, 2023 atrocities by Hamas, and have risen further since the coordinated Israeli and American war on Iran was launched February 28. A Pew Research Center poll taken in March 23-29 found that 60 percent of American adults hold a negative view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year and 33 per cent in 2022. This could get worse if the conflict is not resolved beneficially to American interests. It’s not truly over, of course, and the eventual outcome will render judgment.

Netanyahu lobbied hard for this war, particularly on February 11, when he gained a rare invitation to a highly-classified meeting in the White House Situation Room. His pitch to Trump came in a period of terrible coincidence, a perfect storm of anxiety and extremism. Gripped by a heightened sense of vulnerability, Israel is led by the most radical, right-wing government in its history. The result is an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim strategy driven by religious absolutism and ethnic bigotry.

After the October 7 attack, a wave of existential fear swept through Israel. Hamas fighters, many on motorcycles, had managed to breach Israel’s high-tech defenses around Gaza, shredding confidence in the intelligence and military establishments. Iran then attacked mainly through its proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, forcing Israelis to leave their homes near the border. Others, evacuated from near Gaza in the south, added to an unprecedented population of internal refugees. Israel felt nearly encircled by Iran’s determination to annihilate the Jewish state.

It’s doubtful that Israel’s existence was truly at risk; it still had the Middle East’s most formidable military. But a muffled drumbeat of fear has always run through Israeli society, a legacy of the Holocaust reinforced by the perpetual conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. For most of its history, Israel’s counterpoint to fear has been aggressive defiance, which the Netanyahu government has translated into military onslaughts.

Israel demolished most of Iran’s air defenses and decimated both Hamas and Hezbollah. Last June, the US and Israel coordinated air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The streets filled with huge numbers of Iranian citizens, hostile to the Islamic Revolution and suffering economically; many were gunned down, but Iran’s government looked weakened. The time for action seemed as ripe as it had ever been.

According to remarkable reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in The New York Times, Netanyahu and the head of Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, argued that regime change would be triggered by a joint US-Israeli attack. The Israelis even played a video—imagery, not words, seem the major input to Trump’s brain—showing individuals who could take leadership.

Trump Meets the Unconquerable World

 

By David K. Shipler 

            One of the most enlightening summations of Donald Trump came from his longtime associate and now chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He has an “alcoholic’s personality,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair, which means he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” She should know. Although Trump claims not to drink alcohol, Wiles grew up with an alcoholic father, the football player and sportscaster Pat Summerall.

            Trump’s fantasy of omnipotence helps explain why he swaggers across parts of the globe and tramples his own country’s democratic norms. But his illusion of boundless power is now running into the reality of Iran. So is Israel’s imagined ability to manipulate the politics of its enemies, a practice it has pursued for decades with absolutely zero success.

Trump has been riding an intoxicating high of adventurism since he found little resistance from earlier targets, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean, capturing President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela in January, and now cutting off Cuba’s oil supplies. He said of Cuba, “I can do anything I want with it.” On Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf states, Trump declared, “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

 An educable president who took advice from experts would have anticipated the ruthless resilience of Iran’s odious regime. That is not the president Americans elected. Instead, he has rid government of specialists who know Iran. He has made the White House into an echo chamber of zealots and sycophants. He has let his incompetent “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior officer corps of many seasoned professionals essential to complex combat.

Furthermore, Trump carries the flaw of every dictator. He thinks policy is personified in a single figure, as in his own administration: hence his misplaced belief that decapitating a government will bring it down, as in the seizure of Maduro and the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

Taking a still picture of a war in progress can be misleading, for the final judgment usually rests on its outcome. So far, the Israel-American onslaught from the air has killed much of the leadership, including potentially moderate figures, and obliterated much of Iran’s military.

The regime remains, however, fighting for its life using asymmetrical warfare against massive Israeli and American air power: mostly drones and rockets aimed at the pressure points of the global oil economy. The US is burning through its arsenal of expensive defensive missiles, which it’s using to down the relative cheap Iranian drones. That limits Ukraine’s ability to get them to hold off Russia, which poses a much graver threat than Iran.

Nor is there any sign yet of the power vacuum that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu anticipated could somehow be filled by an unarmed and unorganized opposition. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump told Iranians on February 28, the day he began the war. “Stay sheltered, don’t leave your home….When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take.”

Perhaps Trump had been persuaded by Netanyahu, the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders who have tried and failed to realign Arab and Muslim politics.

            In the early 1980s, to dilute the Palestine Liberation Organization’s influence in the occupied West Bank, Israel appointed Menachem Milson, a professor of Arabic literature at Hebrew University, as architect of a set of rural “village leagues” composed of moderate, compliant Palestinians. They were seen by the PLO as Israeli collaborators, Jordan threatened to prosecute them for treason, moderate Palestinian mayors denounced their complicity, one member was shot and wounded when his son was killed, and others resigned. Milson impressed Arabs as arrogant and ignorant of their culture, I was told at the time, breaking promises and wielding crude political patronage to no avail.

            Similarly in that period, Israel’s army in occupied Gaza was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, a precursor of Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed to me in 1981 by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor for Gaza, who explained that he was instructed to build the Brotherhood as a counterpoint to the PLO and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

            The Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the Byzantium of Gaza’s politics.

A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction. Their favored leader, Bashir Gemayel, a Maronite Christian who had led fighters on Israel’s behalf, was assassinated by a pro-Syrian operative shortly after being elected president.

More recently, Netanyahu governments bolstered Hamas to divide Palestinians and cripple their movement for statehood. Years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Israel allowed Qatar to send suitcases full of cash for Hamas through checkpoints into Gaza.

Devoted to Israel’s ultimate destruction, Hamas seemed useful to Netanyahu, because it undermined the Palestinian Authority, which descended from the PLO, favored a two-state solution, and governed parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords. The self-destructive result of this bumbling attempt at manipulation came on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters caught Israeli intelligence and armed forces off-guard, breached the defenses around Gaza, slaughtered some 1,200 people, took 251 hostages, and triggered Israel’s massive bombing of the territory. In its brutal vengeance during that war, Israel forfeited its moral authority.

Under Trump, the United States is also forfeiting its moral authority. That is an unmeasurable commodity. It cannot be quantified in numbers of missiles, dollars per barrel, or the balance of trade. But its depletion, with allies and adversaries alike, leaves America handicapped in the real world, which even Trump’s megalomania cannot tame.   

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.”

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.