"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
It took Donald Trump to make me associate Franklin Roosevelt with Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
It was Roosevelt, of course, who, in his first inaugural address, said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That remarkable speech, delivered before Congress on March 4, 1933, is worth revisiting, and not least for the dignity of its rhetoric. The speech outlined the strategy with which Roosevelt would combat the Great Depression; its hope was to inspire, to bring people together and above all, to reassure the nation that we would “revive and prosper.”
The primary obstacle to this restoration was not economics but fear: “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” A key strategy for conquering that fear, he went on, is speaking with candor: “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.”
If, 85 years later, you wanted to imagine the presidency of Mr. Trump in a nutshell, simply take all of the generousness and wisdom in Roosevelt’s first inaugural address and do the opposite.
The only thing Mr. Trump has is fear itself.
He wants us to be afraid, for it is fear that divides us, that sets us one against the other. If there is anything frank and bold about this presidency, it is Mr. Trump’s ability to invent falsehoods out of fairy dust and marzipan, solely to make us afraid — of immigrants, of transgender people, of one another.
It doesn’t matter to him that most of the things he urges us to be afraid of pose no danger. What matters is that his paranoid inventions suck up our attention and make us focus, week after week, upon him.
Those of us in the media devote endless hours to refuting the latest barrage of hooey emanating from the White House. But even in this, we’re still amplifying his noise and nurturing, even in the process of refutation, the fear on which the man thrives.
All of which makes covering this White House very difficult indeed. When Jim Acosta’s press credentials were suspended recently, the British journalist Jane Merrick suggested a mass boycott of the briefings. But as Masha Gessen in The New Yorker observed, this action “would mean walking away from politics altogether, which, for journalists, would be an abdication of responsibility.”
So we can’t ignore him, and we can’t report on him without engaging in his game. In so many ways we’re trapped — which is, one suspects, exactly what this president wants.
There’s a well-worn trope in horror fiction about the Monster Who Feeds on Fear. These are creatures or forces who thrive on negative emotions and whose power over you is in direct proportion to the terror they can generate: Vincent Price’s “The Tingler”;the Scarecrow character in the Batman franchise; Marvel Comics’ Mister Fear; the Dark Side in “Star Wars.”
The most fully imagined of these monsters, in my opinion, is Stephen King’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the novel “IT,” who prefers above all to devour children, because their fears are the easiest to manipulate. It’s a process he compares to “salting the meat.”
If this were a horror movie, our heroes would understand that the only way to defeat the monster is by refusing to be afraid of it, to shrink it through indifference.
This being reality, though, that path is really not available to us — either as journalists or as citizens. Try as we might, we cannot ignore the president of the United States.
But we still have options.
One of them is legal action. PEN America — the advocacy group promoting free expression worldwide (and on whose board I serve) — filed suit this fall in federal court to stop President Trump from using the machinery of government to retaliate or threaten reprisals against journalists and media outlets for coverage he dislikes. There is other legal action pending against Mr. Trump and his administration as well, including whatever emerges from the Mueller investigation.
These actions will give this president ample reason to feel some of the fear he has inflicted on others.
The other strategy is the one thing that Mr. Trump appears to fear most, for it is the one thing that all his riches and power have apparently never brought him. And that thing is a sense of humor.
In J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” stories, one of the most terrible creatures our young heroes can face is the boggart — a creature that feeds on fear. A boggart takes the form of whatever it is you fear the most. Harry sees a wraithlike creature called a Dementor; Ron Weasley sees a giant spider; Neville Longbottom sees the cruel and mysterious Professor Snape.
These apparitions are not dispelled through violence, or cruelty, or by building a giant wall. In the genius of Ms. Rowling’s imagination, they are vanquished with a charm called “Riddikulus,” which turns the boggart into an object of derision. In the wake of this charm, Ron’s spider winds up on roller skates; Neville’s Snape finds itself in his grandmother’s pajamas.
It’s no coincidence that this president is famous for having no sense of humor. It is comedy, above all, that peels the masks off liars and reveals the truth — the virtue that Roosevelt deemed most necessary to convert retreat into advance.
Want to conquer fear? Tell better jokes — and not the easy kind, salted with cruelty and malice, but the more complex, generous and fundamentally American variety, as pioneered by Mark Twain, or Richard Pryor, or Lily Tomlin.
Let the rule of law, the power of truth and the subversion of humor vanquish this boggart for good. In so doing we shall assert our firm belief: The only thing we have to fear is Trump himself.
An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the writer of a New Yorker article on White House press briefings. She is Masha Gessen, not Masha Green.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: A Monster Who Feeds On Fear. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper ******************
A small man with a small mind and the heart of a coward. The thing he hates the most is when the rest of us stand up to, expose, and challenge his lies, false narratives, and constant bullying of the most vulnerable among us.
Nearly 300 pages into Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, a West Wing aide named Zach Fuentes cautions fellow staffers. With depressingly familiar words, Fuentes informs his colleagues, “He’s not a detail guy. Never put more than one page in front of him. Even if he’ll glance at it, he’s not going to read the whole thing. Make sure you underline or put in bold the main points … you’ll have 30 seconds to talk to him. If you haven’t grabbed his attention, he won’t focus.” Some subjects, such as the military, do engage him, but the overwhelming picture is worrying and dire. Still, one could finish this passage and feel at least slightly relieved that people like Fuentes are aware of the reigning deficiencies in the White House, and doing their best to mitigate them.
Fuentes is merely an assistant to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, but Kelly and James Mattis, the secretary of defense, are presented throughout Woodward’s book as being cognizant of the president’s extreme limitations and authoritarian instincts, and rather boldly willing to push back against their boss. This is why it’s probably worth mentioning that Fuentes wasn’t talking about Donald Trump; no, he was talking about John Kelly. And Woodward’s book—which arrived at around the same time as the already infamous, still-currently anonymous New York Times op-edabout the men and women in the executive branch supposedly working to protect America from Donald Trump—is as much a portrait of the craven, ineffective, and counterproductive group of “adults” surrounding Trump as it is a more predictable look into the president’s shortcomings. It’s not entirely clear how aware Woodward is of what he has revealed about the people he’s quoting at length. (Sources tend to come off well in his books.) But intentionally or not, Fear will make plain to the last optimist that, just as Republicans in Congress are unlikely to save us, neither are the relative grown-ups in the Trump administration.
Is Woodward the last optimist? He quite obviously believes that Trump is unfit to be president, but a reader can’t quite shake the sense that he somehow thinks maybe, just maybe, things could be different with the right coaching or incentives. Fear is a book full of stories about Trump being contained; his instincts being thwarted; his worst qualities being slightly minimized by people who claim to be afraid of what would happen if they weren’t there. “It’s not what we did for the country,” former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn says early on. “It’s what we saved him from doing.” Quotes like this aim to settle the ethical debate—which has been going on from the start of the Trump presidency—over whether anyone should be working for a bigoted and corrupt president with no respect for democracy, even if they are planning to, in that most tiresome phrase, contain his worst impulses. But that conversation has obscured the more pressing question of what those supposedly well-intentioned individuals can actually accomplish from the inside. Even allowing for the self-serving nature of the accounts that Woodward offers here, the answer appears to be: not much.
Indeed, the near-misses Woodward writes about feel particularly insubstantial, in part because very few of these aides and appointees seem to really grasp the nature of the man they are serving (no matter how much they talk about his stupidity and recklessness), and in part because Trump himself is so clueless and aimless that he rarely seems to follow through on his worst ideas anyway. (The terrible things he has followed through on, such as various immigration policies, are not really discussed at length, and on these matters a good chunk of his staff appear to agree with him.) Moreover, many of these aides are tasked with—or see their roles as—not preventing policy decisions, but instead as putting the nicest, non-Trumpy face on Trumpism; the ethics of this deserves its own debate.
Fear will make plain to the last optimist that, just as Republicans in Congress are unlikely to save us, neither are the relative grown-ups in the Trump administration.
Perhaps the biggest non-hinge moment in the book occurs in July 2017, six months after Trump has taken office and two years since he emerged as a presidential candidate by offering his thoughts on Mexican rapists. “Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy, and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.” The two men decide to meet to “develop an action plan,” which consists of getting the president in the Tank, “the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” because it might “focus him.” But when they do, and succeed in telling him about the value of allies and diplomacy, Trump ignores them and proceeds to rant and rave on a variety of subjects. The meeting wraps up after accomplishing precisely nothing. (This is the event that caused Rex Tillerson to call Trump a “fucking moron.”)
What remains astonishing about the meeting is not that Trump is an idiot. It’s that Mattis and Cohn seemed to have hopes for their plan, believing they could use the sit-down to really turn a corner. The book is so full of scenes like this because the people around Trump seem to have less feel for the president than a politically astute person who spends 20 minutes a day reading the newspaper. It’s not that hard to grasp that Trump’s authoritarian leanings condition him to distrust democratic allies; nor is it a secret that he has utter contempt for America’s intelligence agencies. An earlier passage in the book has Mattis telling a NATO-skeptical Trump that, “If you didn’t have NATO, you’d have to invent it” and “there’s no way Russia could win a war if they took on NATO,” which left me wondering if Mattis could have chosen an argument that would be less likely to appeal to the president, and why anyone who has paid even glancing attention to Trump’s behavior toward Russia would think it would be effective.
Woodward conveys all this in his typically matter-of-fact style, with dialogue heavy-scenes, and with his sources sounding reasonable and frustrated. He rarely tips his hand or offers critiques of those who talked to him, but his narrative does allow for them to come across as ill-equipped. Take former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who Woodward presents as a thoughtful enough guy simply unwilling or unable to contain his pedantic lecturing style, even though it is clearly irking the president. This leads McMaster to get involved in stupid, inevitably doomed spats stemming from Trump’s childishness, including one over precisely where the president and the Indian prime minister will dine that is too dreary to recount. Of course, McMaster doesn’t last long, in large part because of this type of nonsense; meanwhile, he can’t get along with Mattis or Tillerson, two other guys who apparently pride(d) themselves on being the last line of defense. And yet, they do everything they possibly can to undermine McMaster, and make his job more difficult. “McMaster considered Mattis and Tillerson ‘the team of two’ and found himself outside their orbit, which was exactly the way they wanted it,” Woodward writes. Now the national security adviser is John Bolton. Good job, everyone.
The story in the book about Mattis that has gotten the most attention concerns his decision to quietly counter Trump on Syria after the president reportedly screamed “let’s fucking kill him” over the phone about Bashar al-Assad. According to Woodward, Mattis hung up and stated to an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” A victory for common sense, you might say. A couple pages later, we read that “Trump had stepped back from his initial desire to kill Assad.” But did he step back or just forget? Immediately afterward, Trump asks McMaster for some Syria hypotheticals, which McMaster can’t answer because he is being ignored by Mattis and Tillerson. Thankfully, Woodward concludes, “Trump soon forgot his questions.” It’s certainly possible that Mattis or Tillerson or McMaster stopped Trump from doing something truly terrible or illegal over the past nearly 20 months, but if so we are not told what it was. Despite all the self-aggrandizing quotes from the so-called moderating influences in the White House, the upshot of Woodward’s own reporting is that if we end up riding out this term free of a foreign policy catastrophe, it is more likely to be the result of Trump’s incuriosity and short attention span than a bold act of bravery by one of the grown-ups.
The possible exception is Cohn’s already famous decision to steal a paper from Trump’s desk that would have removed the United States from a trade deal with South Korea, and thus possibly impacted national security by undermining the Washington-Seoul alliance. This at least counts as a staff member taking strong action, although, as Woodward acknowledges, it’s “an administrative coup d’etat,” and neither Woodward nor Cohn (quoted as saying, “got to protect the country”) convincingly show that the stakes were high enough to warrant such a step. Tellingly, and predictably, Trump keeps bringing the pact up but can’t seem to remember that he was just about to pull out of the deal, which makes you wonder if he was really on the verge of doing so.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair.
Nevertheless, there is a strong argument to be made that someone like Mattis should stay in his job, and the person who wants to see him resign in protest is braver than I am. But the case to keep working in the Trump administration is much weaker if your job isn’t a matter of life and death, and some of the examples in the book meant to highlight the good deeds of the people around Trump are extremely thin. After Trump’s disgraceful response to Charlottesville, staff secretary Rob Porter apparently cajoled the president into giving a less grotesque speech about what occurred. Porter, who appears to be Woodward’s biggest source and therefore comes across relatively well—his resignation after allegations of domestic abuse is afforded less than a page—“felt it was a moment of victory, of actually doing some good for the country. He had served the president well. This made the endless hours of nonstop work worth it.” Naturally, within a day, Trump had backtracked and surprised precisely no one by making clear that he doesn’t actually have a problem with Nazis, leaving Porter feeling that “Charlottesville was the breaking point” and wondering “if trying to repair [racial divisions] after Charlottesville was almost a lost cause.”
Unless Woodward is winking at readers with that “lost cause” reference, he doesn’t betray any acknowledgement of how absurd Porter’s musings seem, coming as they did years or months after birtherism, blatant bigotry, and a ban on certain Muslims from being allowed to enter the country. Nor does it ever seem to occur to Porter—or Gary Cohn, whose supposedly tortured post-Charlottesville dilemma is afforded considerable space—that Trump is a racist; that he will continue putting into effect racist policies; and that focusing, as the people around Trump do, on ensuring that the words of his speeches are inoffensive is really just a way of helping Trump politically so he can carry out his policies with less opposition.
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Read the rest of Chotiner’s article at the above link.
It’s painfully clear that the white (almost all) men surrounding Trump don’t have much real problem with his overt bigotry, racism, immorality, misogyny, and lawlessness except when revealing it gets in the way of their policies.
After all, it’s important to the country that we have more tax breaks for the rich, less health care for the general populace, dirtier air, polluted rivers and lakes, fewer National monuments, more black lung, reduced worker protections, fewer voters of color, almost no refugees, only white immigrants, more abused children, a generation of young people who are barred from reaching their full potential, dumber schools, religious bigotry and hate speech, homophobia, a subservient, non-professional Civil Service and Foreign Service composed of political hacks, more racial and religious resentment, less free press, etc.
These dudes don’t really want to change the toxic agenda that is destroying our democracy. No, they just want to make sure that Trump’s stunning incompetence and unsuitability for office is mitigated enough that they can carry out their nasty anti-democratic policies without his interference. That’s what passes for “courage” and “true patriotism” in today’s GOP.
The only way to save our republic is to throw every Republican out of office and force the party to either ditch its White Nationalist base or split into two parties — a legitimate conservative opposition party and a far right White Nationalist party.
Trump is the end product of a GOP that just doesn’t believe in 21st Century America as a diverse, multi-racial, multi-cultural nation of immigrants and the strength and power that gives all of us. We need regime change. This November is the time to start that process at the ballot box! Don’t wait until it’s too late!
“The damage to the next generation may be compounded by other, less obvious assaults on their biology and psychology. Research by Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York has demonstrated that the consequences of Holocaust survivors’ extreme trauma can be passed down to their children and grandchildren, making them exquisitely sensitive to the ordinary stresses of relatively safe lives. Yehuda and other researchers believe that these are “epigenetic” effects, modifications in the ways genes express themselves, which transmit vulnerabilities to stress from one generation to the next. Though the mechanisms are not completely understood, animal studies as well as those on human adults who were abused as children demonstrate similar changes.
“There is no short-term fix for this kind of damage,” Lori Kaplan commented sadly, thinking about the young people and their families who are anxiously calling her and her colleagues, reporting physical and emotional distress, looking for answers. “We’ve been dealing with the trauma of the immigrant experience for so long,” the flight from violence, the loneliness, the poverty, the struggle to survive in a strange land and the longing for home. “Obama was deporting people, sure, and there was anxiety, but he also gave us hope. And now the roof’s been blown off.”
