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May 01, 2017
The Trump spectacle continues to dazzle

President Trump's rally in Pennsylvania was a return to what he does best: creating an entertaining spectacle that distracts from the promises he has failed to fulfill, writes Michael D'Antonio
Having failed, at least so far, to deliver on his promises on healthcare, a border wall and tax cuts, President Donald Trump ended his first 100 days in office the way they began, with a deeply negative, divisive speech that served as a booster shot for his followers' rage. Included in the tirade, which he delivered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were attacks on the press, immigrants and progressives.

Once again, he flailed Democrats who "don't mind the illegals pouring in, the drugs pouring in. They don't mind." He also referred to the members of the media as "very dishonest people" and "enemies of the people," before returning to his diatribe against immigration and the need for a border wall. All of this was offered in a rambling style worthy of a reality TV star -- not the President of the United States. 


Michael D'Antonio
Of course it was style and not substance that Trump traveled to deliver, and it was style that many came to hear. The Saturday spectacle in this swing state was politics practiced as a dark art, designed to entertain the crowd while distracting from the cruel fact that Trump hasn't been able to fulfill his campaign pledges.

As so often occurs with Trump, reality took a back seat as he celebrated his 100 day mark. Although empty seats could be seen from the podium where he stood, he announced that attendance "broke the all-time record." He praised the mythological substance called "clean coal" and falsely claimed that The New York Times had apologized for its coverage of the 2016 election. 

The decidedly unpresidential tone of Trump's address was consistent with his motivation for going to Pennsylvania in the first place. The appearance coincided with the annual White House correspondent's dinner, which has been a tradition in Washington since the 1930s. The event, essentially a roast of the sitting President and others in the power elite, marks the one night of the year when the powerful agree to accept ridicule and even admit to their own flaws, all in the name of charity and amity. 

Trump, whose idea of humor is to mock others, is the first President to skip the dinner since Ronald Reagan was recovering from the bullet wounds he suffered in an assassination attempt. For him, there would be no good-natured acceptance of jibes from comedians and politicians. Instead he chose to alienate the majority of Americans who disapprove of his presidency thus far and rally his supporters with an ill-tempered tirade.

Like a sulking child who hosts a competing party when the other kids gather to celebrate, Trump intended to upstage the WHCD, and to some extent he did. His rally got plenty of TV airtime and was live-streamed online.

It reminded his supporters that he can be relied upon to stir their resentment. The event also served the President's ego, bringing an energy and enthusiasm to his face that has been missing ever since that night when he seemed stunned to see that he had gained the White House while losing the popular vote.

Always a man with a chip on his shoulder, Trump has often seemed quite miserable in the office of the President, and it's easy to imagine him alone in the White House (with his wife Melania living in New York) dialing up old friends to chat as darkness falls on Washington.

Except for being amused by the fact that he can press a button at his desk and suddenly receive a fresh glass of Coke, Trump has appeared quite grumpy as he struggles to get anything significant accomplished. His legislative failures on health care have been matched by multiple defeats in the courts in his effort to ban visitors from several majority-Muslim countries from our shores. Investigations into his team's connection to Russia continue, and members of his staff make more headlines for their feuds than for their policy agendas.

The work product of the Trump administration betrays the malaise gripping the man at the top, who only seems like himself when he's on stage performing as an angry provocateur. He is, at his core, the personification of the politics of division. This quality was fully established when he declared his run for the presidency and has been his modus operandi ever since. In his most authentic moments as President, most recently in Harrisburg, he has made himself into a riveting but also terrifying spectacle that is the shame of the Republican Party and the nation.

On the morning after the Harrisburg speech, the Trump administration announced that the White House would welcome a visit from the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who has admitted to killing suspected drug dealers without first granting them trials. In his embrace of Duterte, who is a global pariah, a leader who loves to talk like a strong man honors a President who kills like one. It is a demonstration of character just as clear, and even more disturbing, than what he gave us in Pennsylvania.

If Trump has proven anything as President, it is that he unable or unwilling to do the job to which he was elected. This weekend alone, he has shown us he is not interested in uniting the country, inspiring action and fashioning a bright American future. Instead, he is content to take Theodore Roosevelt's description of the office of the presidency as a "bully pulpit" quite literally.

[info title="Note" icon="info-circle"]Michael D'Antonio is the author of the book "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success" (St. Martin's Press). The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
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April 24, 2017
Hate speech is free speech, Gov. Dean: Glenn Reynolds
Howard Dean
I tell my constitutional law students that there are a couple of statements that indicate that a speaker is a constitutional illiterate who can safely be ignored. One is the claim that the Constitution views black people as ⅗ the worth of white people (actually, it was all about power in Congress, with slaveowners wanting black people to count 100% toward apportionment so that slaveowners would get more seats in Congress, and abolitionists wanting them not counted at all so that slaveowners would get fewer seats in Congress; the ⅗ compromise was just that, a compromise).

The other hallmark of constitutional illiteracy is the claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech.” And by making that claim last week, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, revealed himself to be a constitutional illiterate. Then, predictably, he doubled down on his ignorance.

In First Amendment law, the term “hate speech” is meaningless. All speech is equally protected whether it’s hateful or cheerful. It doesn’t matter if it’s racist, sexist or in poor taste, unless speech falls into a few very narrow categories — like “true threats,” which have to address a specific individual, or “incitement,” which must constitute an immediate and intentional encouragement to imminent lawless action — it’s protected.

The term “hate speech” was invented by people who don’t like that freedom, and who want to give the — completely false — impression that there’s a kind of speech that the First Amendment doesn’t protect because it’s hateful. What they mean by “hateful,” it seems, is really just that it’s speech they don’t agree with. Some even try to argue that since hearing disagreeable ideas is unpleasant, expressing those ideas is somehow an act of “violence.”

There are two problems with that argument. The first is that it’s idiotic: That’s never been the law, nor could it be if we give any value to free expression, because there’s no idea that somebody doesn’t disagree with. The second is that the argument is usually made by people who spend a lot of time expressing disagreeable ideas themselves, without, apparently, the least thought that if their own rules about disagreeable speech held sway, they’d probably be locked up first. (As Twitter wag IowaHawk has offered: “I'll let you ban hate speech when you let me define it. Deal?”)

The response to Dean was merciless: First Amendment law expert Eugene Volokh responded, "No, Gov. Dean, there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.” If there were, neither the Westboro Baptist Church — whose hateful speech the Supreme Court recently held protected — nor the many people referring to Trump supporters as Nazis and “deplorables” would enjoy free speech.

As Volokh writes, if people want “hate speech” to be unprotected, they’re calling for a change to the First Amendment, and it’s a big one. They should not only admit that, “they should explain just what viewpoints the government would be allowed to suppress, what viewpoints would remain protected and how judges, juries and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two. And claiming that hate speech is already 'not protected by the First Amendment,' as if one is just restating settled law, does not suffice.”

Dean then doubled down with the constitutional illiterate’s usual fallback, that you could ban “hate speech” as “fighting words” under the 1942 case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, which allows a ban on “fighting words.” (Journalist Dan Gillmor commented: “Disappointing, to say the least, to see Dean digging the hole deeper on his flatly incorrect original statement.”)

But “fighting words” aren’t hate speech. Fighting words are direct, person-to-person invitations to a brawl. Expressing political or social views that people don’t like isn’t the same thing, even if people might react violently to those views.

And that’s good. If, by reacting violently to views they didn’t like, people could get the government to censor those views as “hate speech” or “fighting words,” then people would have a strong incentive to react violently to views they don’t like. Giving the angry and violent the ability to shut down other people’s speech (the term we use for this in constitutional law, Gov. Dean, is “heckler’s veto”) is a bad thing, which would leave us with a society marked by a lot more violence, a lot more censorship, and a lot less speech.

Is that really what you want? Because that’s what we’d get, if we followed the advice of constitutional illiterates.
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April 15, 2017
Why You Should Read Books You Hate
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Here’s a reading challenge: Pick up a book you’re pretty sure you won’t like — the style is wrong, the taste not your own, the author bio unappealing. You might even take it one step further. Pick up a book you think you will hate, of a genre you’ve dismissed since high school, written by an author you’re inclined to avoid. Now read it to the last bitter page.


Sound like hell? You’re off to a good start.

This is not about reading a book you know is bad, a pleasure in its own right, like an exceptionally dashing villain. It’s about finding a book that affronts you, and staring it down to the last word.

At a time when people are siloed into narrow sources of information according to their particular tinted worldview — those they follow on Twitter, the evening shoutfest they choose, AM talk radio or NPR — it’s no surprise most of us also read books we’re inclined to favor. Reading is a pleasure and a time-consuming one. Why bother reading something you dislike?

But reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value, whether it’s a style, a story line or an argument. Because books are long-form, they require more of the writer and the reader than a talk show or Facebook link. You can finish watching a movie in two hours and forget about it; not so a novel. Sticking it out for 300 pages means immersing yourself in another person’s world and discovering how it feels. That’s part of what makes books you despise so hard to dismiss. Rather than toss the book aside, turn to the next page and wrestle with its ideas. What about them makes you so uncomfortable?

My taste for hate reading began with “The Fountainhead,” which I opened in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a college class on 20th-century architecture. I knew nothing of Ayn Rand or of objectivism. I thought it was a book about building things. I even showed it off to a French friend, an architect and a die-hard socialist, thinking he’d be impressed.

“How could you bring that into our house?” he asked in disgust. “But it’s about architecture,” I replied weakly. Or was it? Within pages, I found myself suffering at the hands of its tyrannical egomaniac of a protagonist, Howard Roark, forever plunging a fist into soil and holding forth. The lead female character, Dominique, who naturally took second place to the godlike Roark, kept striding across rooms in long, column-like gowns.

Still, I persisted. A hundred pages later, I was more of a French socialist than I’d ever been before or since. I finished every wretched page of “The Fountainhead” in alternating states of fury and despair, and when it was finally over, I tried to leave the vague echo of Dominique, stomping around in her evening gowns, behind. What stuck was the abiding knowledge that I was not, nor would I ever be, a libertarian.

In earlier, blithe days, I’d simply allowed the contents of books to gather agreeably in my head as I read and then file out when I was done. Either I enjoyed a book or I didn’t. It was only by burrowing through books that I hated, books that provoked feelings of outrage and indignation, that I truly learned how to read. Defensiveness makes you a better reader, a closer, more skeptical reader: a critic. Arguing with the author in your head forces you to gather opposing evidence. You may find yourself turning to other texts with determination, stowing away facts, fighting against the book at hand. You may find yourself developing a point of view.

As debaters know, sometimes you figure out your position only in opposition. All it takes is for me to read a book by Howard Zinn or Paul Johnson, each gleefully hate-worthy in its own polarizing way, to locate my own interpretation of history. This is what’s so invigorating about hate-reading. To actively grapple with your assumptions and defend your conclusions gives you a sense of purpose. You come to know where you stand, even if that means standing apart.

I’ve hated my way through many books, thinking, I will read you no matter how hard you make it. But as I go on, I often find that loathing is mixed with other emotions — fear, perverse attraction, even complicated strains of sympathy. This is, in part, what makes negative book reviews so compelling.

One of the most scathing reviews I’ve ever written was for this newspaper as a freelancer. The book I’d been assigned was a parenting book. I wanted to like the book. I agreed with much of the book. But the authors were too credulous of certain research, and in ways that served their thesis. As I put it in the review, the authors’ “penchant for describing psychological studies and research projects as if they were chemistry experiments, with phrases like ‘the test of scientific analysis’ and ‘the science of peer relations,’ conjure up the image of Thomas Dolby repeatedly exhorting ‘Science!’ ”

It came across as manipulative, and I felt betrayed both personally (I had written a parenting book and bristled at seeing the genre compromised) and on behalf of readers who might not have the background to parse the data. New parents are a susceptible lot — I know because I used to be one.

It can be interesting, and instructive, when a book provokes animosity. It may tell you more about a subject or about yourself, as a reader, than you think you know. It might even, on occasion, challenge you to change your mind.

Of course, many hateful books simply clarify and confirm. I can tell you straight out what I loathed about the novel “Flashman,” by George MacDonald Fraser, though I read it nearly 15 years ago. “Flashman” is a cult novel, which didn’t bode well for me when I picked it up at the suggestion of a new boyfriend. For whatever reason, when it comes to cult fiction, I am never part of the cult. Beloved in the same way Wodehouse is beloved but by fewer people, “Flashman,” published in 1969, is the first in a series whose subsequent titles each felt like a slap in the face (e.g., “Flashman and the Redskins,” “Flashman’s Lady”). The cover of “Flashman, Volume I” featured a swaggering bloke in uniform with a bare-breasted maiden of “exotic” background, in, of course, the background. Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover.

But I went in anyway. There, I met the title character, Harry Paget Flashman, who romps across the British Empire, landing variously in Scotland, India and Afghanistan. Accompanying him are minor figures from British history — Lord Auckland, governor-general of India; Thomas Arnold, headmaster at the Rugby School; and the like. But the main action concerns Flashman, a light dragoon and a womanizing drunkard who skips from duel to romp to “forceful seduction.” Most of the time, he frequents prostitutes, but he also enjoys raping an Afghan dancing girl. I have nothing against a good antihero, but I didn’t even enjoy hating this guy. I just wanted to get away from him. Also, it turned out, I wanted to get away from the boyfriend who’d recommended him. This was a perfectly useful takeaway.

Yet hate reading can actually bring readers together. Sure, it’s nice when people like the books you like. But an even more stimulating excitement comes from finding someone else who hates the same book as much as you do (welcome, fellow “Pickwick Papers” loathers). This is why book critics love commiserating. Some of the most spirited discussions I’ve had with other readers have been over just how despicable or disheartening we’ve found something we’ve read.

So go ahead, bond over what you hate. Or hate it all on your own, knowing that someone, somewhere wants to throw that same miserable book against the wall. Just please finish reading it before you do.

By : Pamela Paul
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April 10, 2017

President Trump arriving at the White House on Sunday.
 
Does anyone still remember the Carrier deal? Back in December President-elect Donald Trump announced, triumphantly, that he had reached a deal with the air-conditioner manufacturer to keep 1,100 jobs in America rather than moving them to Mexico. And the media spent days celebrating the achievement.

Actually, the number of jobs involved was more like 700, but who’s counting? Around 75,000 U.S. workers are laid off or fired every working day, so a few hundred here or there hardly matter for the overall picture.

Whatever Mr. Trump did or didn’t achieve with Carrier, the real question was whether he would take steps to make a lasting difference.

So far, he hasn’t; there isn’t even the vague outline of a real Trumpist jobs policy. And corporations and investors seem to have decided that the Carrier deal was all show, no substance, that for all his protectionist rhetoric Mr. Trump is a paper tiger in practice. After pausing briefly, the ongoing move of manufacturing to Mexico has resumed, while the Mexican peso, whose value is a barometer of expected U.S. trade policy, has recovered almost all its post-November losses.

In other words, showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility. Which brings us to last week’s missile strike on Syria.

The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.

But outside its effect on the news cycle, how much did the strike actually accomplish? A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war.

In fact, if last week’s action was the end of the story, the eventual effect may well be to strengthen the Assad regime — Look, they stood up to a superpower! — and weaken American credibility. To achieve any lasting result, Mr. Trump would have to get involved on a sustained basis in Syria. 

Doing what, you ask? Well, that’s the big question — and the lack of good answers to that question is the reason President Barack Obama decided not to start something nobody knew how to finish.

So what have we learned from the Syria attack and its aftermath?

No, we haven’t learned that Mr. Trump is an effective leader. Ordering the U.S. military to fire off some missiles is easy. Doing so in a way that actually serves American interests is the hard part, and we’ve seen no indication whatsoever that Mr. Trump and his advisers have figured that part out.

Actually, what we know of the decision-making process is anything but reassuring. Just days before the strike, the Trump administration seemed to be signaling lack of interest in Syrian regime change.

What changed? The images of poison-gas victims were horrible, but Syria has been an incredible horror story for years. Is Mr. Trump making life-and-death national security decisions based on TV coverage?

One thing is certain: The media reaction to the Syria strike showed that many pundits and news organizations have learned nothing from past failures.

Mr. Trump may like to claim that the media are biased against him, but the truth is that they’ve bent over backward in his favor. They want to seem balanced, even when there is no balance; they have been desperate for excuses to ignore the dubious circumstances of his election and his erratic behavior in office, and start treating him as a normal president.

You may recall how, a month and a half ago, pundits eagerly declared that Mr. Trump “became the president of the United States today” because he managed to read a speech off a teleprompter without going off script. Then he started tweeting again.

One might have expected that experience to serve as a lesson. But no: The U.S. fired off some missiles, and once again Mr. Trump “became president.” Aside from everything else, think about the incentives this creates. The Trump administration now knows that it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failures by bombing someone.

So here’s a hint: Real leadership means devising and carrying out sustained policies that make the world a better place. Publicity stunts may generate a few days of favorable media coverage, but they end up making America weaker, not stronger, because they show the world that we have a government that can’t follow through.

And has anyone seen a sign, any sign, that Mr. Trump is ready to provide real leadership in that sense? I haven’t. 
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April 08, 2017 , , ,
Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and Volodymyr Yelchenko, left, representative of Ukraine, at a Security Council meeting on April 7.
It has been a head-spinning week watching the Trump administration stumble into its first international crisis only to emerge with a transformed policy on the use of force in the Middle East, announced on Thursday with the unleashing of 59 sea-launched cruise missiles against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
While the limited missile strike was a commendable and overdue response to the use of chemical weapons and to countless other war crimes perpetrated by the regime in Damascus, the public performance of President Trump and his team throughout this tragic episode hardly inspires confidence. On the contrary, the administration demonstrated a dangerous degree of incoherence and inconsistency.
Consider the chronology. The debacle began with a remark by the new United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, in New York at the end of March. Despite a brutal six-year civil war in which Mr. Assad’s forces have been responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 civilians, and despite near universal opposition to his rule by leaders of the civilized world, Ms. Haley thought it was the right time to send a signal to Mr. Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, that the new American president’s priority “is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed this new view, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, described as a simple recognition of “political reality.” Intentionally or not, American policy with respect to the world’s worst military and humanitarian crisis had been changed dramatically.
The unsurprising consequence of this shift was a newfound confidence within the Assad regime that it need not worry about paying a heavy price if its forces committed new acts of barbarity aimed at demoralizing the nation’s remaining rebels. And sure enough, the Syrian Air Force soon began dropping nerve gas on civilian neighborhoods in an insurgent-held town in Idlib province.
Stunned by this atrocity, Mr. Trump and his team then reversed course. For months they have suggested that “America First” meant that the country should not become mired in the region’s civil wars and violent upheavals. But this week, Mr. Trump suddenly decided that the Assad regime’s latest outrage required a military response.
This was yet another dramatic turnabout. After having criticized President Barack Obama for over-involving the United States in Syria’s problems, President Trump, by using military force against the regime, has now gone further than Mr. Obama was willing to go.
Syria represents the most consequential public reversal by the administration to date, but it is certainly not the only one. Even before his inauguration, Mr. Trump raised doubts about the longstanding “one China” policy, only to endorse it weeks later. As a candidate and as president, Mr. Trump has made contradictory statements about NATO, even as his foreign policy team has busily reassured European leaders that the United States values its alliances with them. There had been talk of scrapping the Iran nuclear accord, but now there is talk of maintaining it, at least for now. Where the administration stands on any number of major issues can depend on the day of the week.
The administration’s inability or refusal to articulate — or even formulate — an overarching foreign policy beyond Mr. Trump’s nationalistic slogan “America First” and his plans to spend billions rebuilding the military are the major sources of the problem. But there are bureaucratic problems as well. The departure of Michael T. Flynn as Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser just weeks after the inauguration no doubt slowed the formulation of a coherent set of policies. Delays in filling senior leadership positions in the State Department and Pentagon surely haven’t helped.
The apparent disconnect between Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and the White House has also added to the disarray. Ms. Haley has articulated politically popular positions that conflict with the White House, taking a harder line on Russia and emphasizing the importance of human rights even as the White House has downplayed the issue. Whatever her motivations, the messages have been mixed. And that can only give heart to dictators who view inconsistency as weakness.
Most troubling is the way Mr. Trump has allowed, or perhaps encouraged, the creation of confusing lines of authority and alternative centers of power within the White House. Despite his recent removal from the National Security Council, Stephen Bannon, Mr. Trump’s top political adviser, remains an influential figure who is viewed warily by senior intelligence and national security officials. And Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has emerged as the president’s foreign policy troubleshooter, playing a prominent role in the administration’s talks with China, visiting Iraq on a fact-finding trip and taking over the Middle East peace portfolio. These are jobs traditionally given to seasoned diplomats, something Mr. Kushner is not.
Regardless of which of these factors is most to blame for the incoherence of administration foreign policy, it is imperative that the president address the problem as soon as possible. Unlike in domestic policy, where nuances often matter less, small changes can have big consequences in foreign affairs. The White House needs not only to clarify its policies, but also to establish and enforce better controls over the public explanation of those policies, before more damage is done to the country’s reputation and alliances.
Fixing this problem is a straightforward matter of political power, will and discipline. The stock of the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, is almost certainly sky high in the White House right now, given the bipartisan plaudits Mr. Trump has received for the missile attack, arguably the administration’s first unadulterated policy success. In normal circumstances, the national security adviser should be able to enforce the articulation of a consistent and coherent national security policy. But in this administration, General McMaster has his work cut out for him.
So does Mr. Trump. During the campaign and his first months in office, he has put down America’s moral leadership in the world while talking up dictators and strongmen, from Asia to the Middle East to Europe. Might his reprisal against the Assad regime for waging chemical warfare be a sign of a new respect for democracy? The world can only hope so.
James P. Rubin served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Clinton administration.

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