White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Will U.S. Barons ‘Magna Carta’ Trump?

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Sitting behind President Trump at his inauguration were men who might well be called the barons of America: the big-tech billionaires who control vast wealth and public awe. They are so high in Trump’s esteem that he seated them in front of his Cabinet.

When King John of England was crowned in 1199, barons also attended him. They were the barons of England,  although most were of French descent — the result of the conquest of England in 1066 by William, Duke of Normandy, who defeated King Harold II of England in the Battle of Hastings.

The difference between John’s coronation and those of his father, Henry II, and brother, Richard I, was that he didn’t make the customary promises to uphold the rights and the norms of conduct that had become a kind of unofficial constitution. John neither embraced those norms then nor abided by them later.

King John was known to be vengeful and petty, tyrannical and greedy, but is believed to have been a relatively good administrator and a passable soldier — although many of his financial problems resulted from the loss of English lands in Normandy.

Those wars and expenditures by his father and brother on fighting the Third Crusade meant that John had a money problem. He solved the problem with high taxes and scutage — payments that were made in lieu of military service, often by wealthy individuals.

John also had a “deep state” problem. 

The King’s administration had become extremely efficient, bureaucratic, and especially good at taxation and coercion, which browned off the nobles. They were getting pushed around.

When the barons had had enough, they told the King to behave, or they would install one of the pretenders to the throne. They met in long negotiations at Runnymede, a meadow along the Thames, 22.5 miles upriver from what is now Central London. It is pretty well unchanged today, save for a monument erected by the American Bar Association in 1957.

The barons forced on John a document demanding his good behavior, and impressing upon him that even the King was not above the law.

The document that was signed on June 15, 1215 was the Magna Carta (Great Charter), limiting the king’s authority and laying down basic rules for lawful governance.

In all there are 63 sections in the document, which have affected Western culture and politics for almost 800 years. The Magna Carta is part of English and American common law, and was a foundational document for the U.S. Constitution.

It stated that the king was subject to the laws of the time, that the church could be free of the king’s administration and his interference, and that the rights of the barons and commoners were respected. Particularly, it said that no one should be imprisoned without due process.

Today’s barons in America are undoubtedly the big-tech entrepreneurs who have not only captured great wealth but also have an air of infallibility.

While John has been hard-handled by history, the Magna Carta has done superbly. John was saddled with the epithet “Bad King John” and no other English monarch has been named John.

When an American president is showing some of the excesses of John, isn’t it time for the great commercial and technological chiefs, who have so far sworn fealty to Trump, to sit him down beside another great river, the Potomac, and tell him a few truths, just as happened at Runnymede?

Since Trump’s inauguration, U.S. national and international status has deteriorated. Chaos has reigned — the government has nearly ceased to function, a pervasive fear for the future has settled in a lot of Americans, there is embarrassment and anger over the trashing of laws, circumvention of the Constitution, tearing up of treaties, aggression towards our neighbors, and a general governance by whim and ego. 

America’s barons need to tell the president: You aren’t a king. Leave the free press free. Abide by the decisions of the courts. Stay within the law. Respect free speech wherever it is practiced. Above all, respect the Constitution, the greatest document of government probity written since the Magna Carta.

The Trump Way Comes to The Washington Post

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As Juliet might have said, “O America, America, wherefore art thou America?”

What has become of us when the president, Donald Trump, who opposes big government, wants the government to have its hand in everything, from the operation of The Kennedy Center to the regulatory commissions, to gender identification, to traffic control in New York City, to the composition of the White House press pool?

Under the pretext of cutting three shibboleths (waste,  fraud and abuse), Trump is moving to bring everything he can under his control, to infuse every apparatus of the country with the Trump brand, which emerges as a strange amalgam of personal like and dislike, enthusiasm and antipathy.

He likes the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — he who orders assassinations outside of Russia and causes his opponents to fall out of windows — so much so that he is about to throw Ukraine under the bus. Short shrift for people who have fought the Russian invader with blood and bone.

He has a strange antipathy to our allies, starting with our blameless neighbor Canada, our supply cabinet of everything from electricity to tomatoes.

He shows a marked indifference to the poor, whether they are homeless in America or dying of starvation in Africa.

He and his agent, Elon Musk the Knife, have obliterated the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended our soft-power leadership in the world and handed diplomatic opportunities to China; while at home, housing starts are far behind demand, the price of eggs is out of sight, and necessary and productive jobs in government are being axed with a kind of malicious pleasure.

The mindlessness of Musk’s marauders has cut the efficiency he is supposed to be cultivating. It is reasonable to believe that government worker productivity is at an all-time low.

If there is a word this administration enjoys it is “firing.” The Trump-Musk duopoly relishes that word. It goes back to the reality television show “The Apprentice,” when its star, Trump, loved to tell a contestant, “You’re fired!”  Now a catchphrase from a canceled TV program is central to the national government.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary assemblage of misfits and socially challenged individuals in Trump’s Cabinet — and, it must be said, who were confirmed by the Republicans in the Senate — are doing their bit to disassemble their departments, fixing things that aren’t broken, breaking things because they hated their authors or because revenge is a policy. Look to the departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security — really all the departments — and you’ll find these hearties at work.

There is a quality of cruelty that is alien to the American ethos, that is un-American, running though all of this. When everything that isn’t broken is fixed, we may lose:

—Our standing in the world as the beacon of decency.

—Our role as a guarantor of peace.

—The trust of our allies.

—Our place as the exemplary of constitutional government and the rule of law.

—Our leadership in all aspects of science, from space exploration to medicine to climate.

Nowhere is the animus of Trump and its lust to control more evident than its hatred of the free press. The free flow of news, fact, and opinion, already damaged by the economic realities of the news business and its outdated models, is an anathema to Trump. A free press is a free country. There is no alternative.

This week, the White House and the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, moved to destroy the norm of decades in the press room, where the press corps collectively through its elected body, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has assigned seats. The association also decides who will be a part of the small rotating group of journalists and photographers — the pool — who accompany the president. It has been effective and is time-honored.

Now Leavitt, a Trump triumphalist, will choose the pool and favor the inclusion of podcasters and talk-show hosts who are reliably enthusiastic about the president.

At The Washington Post — the local newspaper of government — editorial pages are to be defenestrated. The Post, which has had for decades the best editorial columnists in the nation, is to be silenced. Its owner, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, has told the editorial staff that going forward they will write only about personal liberties and free markets.

It is the end of an era of great journalism, the dimming of a bright light, the encroachment of darkness in the nation’s capital.

A newspaper can’t be perfect, and The Washington Post certainly is far from that. But it is a great newspaper, and its proprietor has been manipulated by the controlling fingers of the Trump machine: A machine that values only loyalty and brooks no criticism. A machine that is unmoved by the nation’s and world’s tears. A Romeo who doesn’t hear Juliet.

A Chainsaw Is the Woefully Wrong Tool for Government Reform

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At the recent “Future of the Blue Economy” conference in Newport, Rhode Island, entrepreneurs and their investors were talking about breakthroughs, but the term they used — replacing “Sputnik moment” — was “SpaceX moment.”

That was a salute to the extraordinary precision engineering that enables the booster stage of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket to reposition itself on the launch pad after firing. It is inspiring to watch, but there must have been untold preparation, thought and planning to bring about that seemingly miraculous engineering feat.

All hail Elon Musk, boss of SpaceX!

Sadly, none of that precision preparation, thinking and planning has gone into Musk’s latest venture, the Department of Government Efficiency.

It has raged across the government, leaving a trail of havoc, shattered careers, broken departments, endangered missions: techno-barbarians running wild inside the government.

In the history of social engineering, nothing as vast and self-defeating has been attempted since Chairman Mao’s  Cultural Revolution set China back decades.

Prepare for a similar dividend from the President Trump-Musk efficiency team. If they had approached launching a rocket the same way they have sought to make the government more efficient under the mantra “waste, fraud and abuse,” they would have piled a jerry-built rocket atop a pile of explosives and lit a match. Result: a catastrophic failure.

There are things here which are beyond explanation. Trump has run businesses. He knows if you fire half the front desk staff in a hotel, things aren’t going to go smoothly. If you berate the staff and accuse them of waste, fraud and abuse, essentially stealing, morale will plunge. 

In the Soviet Union there was an adage: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. An awful lot of government workers who haven’t lost their jobs but are disconsolate will be pretending to work for the rest of the Trump administration. Efficiency? Hardly. Many will efficiently do nothing.

Everything about the unleashing of the DOGE suggests that it had little preparation and little planning. Particularly, Musk and his crew knew nothing about the departments they were savaging. Hence, the embarrassment with the nuclear workers at the Department of Energy. Or the folly of shutting the window through which most of the world saw America’s goodness, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

We have as a society a tendency to believe that those who are good at one thing must be good at everything, something which might be called “success syndrome.”

This was on display during the energy crisis which erupted in the fall of 1973 with the Arab oil embargo and lasted through the Iranian revolution of 1979 and beyond, toppling governments and driving inflation. Many thought that proven inventors, like Edwin Link, the creator of the first flight simulator for pilot training, and Edwin Land, creator of the Polaroid camera, were expected to be able to invent us out of the oil shortage. They didn’t.

Good, patient science, regulatory reform and entrepreneurial courage did that.

Another myth is that if only you put a tough businessperson in the White House, someone who will apply their foot to the rear end of the bureaucracy, wondrous things will happen.

We have a businessperson and a brilliant inventor at the controls in Washington, and so far, the kicking of the bureaucracy with the aid of high-tech tools has produced chaos in the government workplace and devastating consequences globally.

Taken together the evidence that you can’t run a government as a private company and great inventors —even one so remarkable that he has made the greatest fortune ever — can’t reinvent government without some coherent planning.

Musk was given a chainsaw as a symbol at the CPAC meeting in Washington. They are useful but dangerous tools, as any emergency-room physician who has had to sew up an over-exuberant operator can tell you. Trump and Elon Musk appear to be attempting what should be delicate surgery with one.

A restraining of the bureaucracy may be overdue, but the bloodbath is going to weaken the patients, rendering them unfit for duty at a critical time.

A chainsaw moment is not a SpaceX moment.

The High Price of Crying Fraud!

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Seminal is a strong word. It means that when an event is seminal, nothing will ever be the same again.

Elon Musk and his marauding young minions will leave the United States damaged in ways that won’t be easily put right, toppling the country from the position it has held so long as the world’s pillar of decency, generosity and law. As President Ronald Reagan said, “a shining city on a hill.”

Every day, the small but deadly Musk force, authorized and encouraged by President Trump, is tarnishing that image.

Once you have established yourself as a capricious and unreliable partner, you won’t be trusted again; trust lost defies repair. It doesn’t come back with an apology, a course correction or a change of administration. It is gone, sometimes for centuries. Distrust is enduring.

Treaties torn up today are treaties that won’t be written tomorrow. Disavowing America’s commitments is a Trump hallmark. Tearing up these commitments is more than an indication of instability; it is a burden on the future and a doubt about the sincerity of our handshake.

We have left the World Health Organization amid a new wave of incipient pandemics and abandoned the Paris Agreement without reason. We are about to damage in grotesque ways our good relations with Canada and Mexico, our family in North America.

Trump has drummed up an inexplicable animus to our good neighbors and best trading partners. With tariffs, he is planning to violate our trading agreement with them. President Trump signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law — with praise for his handiwork — in his first term.

For me, the immediate excess of the administration has been the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. I have seen the agency at work in Pakistan, Bolivia, and, especially, in Central Africa. My wife, Linda Gasparello, has seen its work in Egypt and the Middle East, helping to save and enhance lives and stabilize those countries.

First, USAID was lied about and then it was shuttered. In that shuttering, America withdrew its helping hand to the world, its most potent and effective marquee for its values of caring, helping, educating and uplifting.

Musk’s blind and ignorant closing of USAID has blacked out our billboard to the world of what America is about. Women, especially, will suffer.

The immediate effect of shutting down USAID is that thousands of people who would have eaten today won’t. People who would have received their HIV treatment won’t. Children who would have learned to read and write won’t.  Uneducated populations are putty in the hands of extremists, from Marxists to jihadists. In damaging the recipients of USAID assistance, we are damaging America and its global interests.

“Fraud,” says Trump. “Fraud,” says Musk. “Fraud,” say their supporters. If there is so much fraud, where is the evidence, and where are the prosecutions? Why are there no arrests?

In fact, for a relatively small agency, USAID has been examined, audited and inspected by the machinery of government and by Congress more than any other agency.

Steven Hendrix, who retired last year as the USAID coordinator for foreign assistance in the State Department, said on the television program “White House Chronicle,” which I host with Adam Clayton Powell III, that when he was working with USAID in Iraq, “We instituted a very rigorous performance evaluation and monitoring of all of these investments. We were also very responsive to the State inspector general and other authorities. I’ve got to tell you, in Iraq I had simultaneous audits from all of them.”

The toughest of these, he said, was the USAID’s own inspector general.

The fraud may be that the Trump-Musk duopoly is defrauding America of its potent soft power.

Requiem for America’s Helping Hand in the World

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I have seen the U.S. Agency for International Development in action — in Bolivia, Botswana, Pakistan and in Eastern Europe — and I can say that it is sometimes ragged and sometimes wasteful, but overall it is a great value for the money.

It is the face of America in 100 countries and its work is independent of the State Department, which has been one of its strengths.

The purpose of State is to represent American policy abroad and all that it entails. The purpose of USAID is to extend a helping hand.

It is the agency which shows the world through its actions our goodness, our decency, our humanity. USAID makes a difference, whether it is fighting AIDS, Ebola and malaria in Africa or helping electrify the Americas.

I have chanced upon — and that is the word — USAID at work in my travels. In Bolivia, I saw a village enjoying the luxury of electricity for the first time. In Pakistan, I saw trucks of American grain going into an Afghan refugee camp — the only source of food for the inhabitants.

I have heard from my family about the work in Southern Africa, about the treatment of AIDS, malaria and other diseases, where it is most needed. My father suffered from malaria, and I have a special feeling for its ravages.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, has a special feeling for Egypt, where she has lived. She has noted the impact of USAID in Egypt, where it has helped build schools and train teachers, helped create jobs in agriculture and tourism, helped provide access to clean water, helped reduce child and maternal mortality, and helped eliminate polio.

USAID has probably convinced more people that the United States is the good guy in the world than most diplomatic efforts or even the reporting of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.

If the work of USAID ceases, as Elon Musk has engineered, or is subsumed into State, people will die and Russia and China will fill the vacuum. They won’t fill it with the same human touch, but they will be there and we will be gone — and our good works and influence with the departure.

I grew up in Zimbabwe and even before President John F. Kennedy created USAID, there was general hostility to the idea of foreign “do-gooders.” In those days, the do-gooders were volunteers and the churches. The white community worried about ideas of democracy and equality that would upset the balance of privilege in colonial society.

Later, in the countries I know best (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and South Africa), that fear and resentment was transferred to the international aid community. The dethroned white ruling class spread the word that foreign aid was corrupt, wasteful, and ineffective. American conservatives signed on.

Did Musk — who is irrational and pathological in his hatred of USAID and wants it abolished, and has  gone a long way to achieving that aim — absorb these prejudices when he was growing up in South Africa?

Musk and President Donald Trump have presented no evidence, sought no information nor commissioned a study on USAID’s efficacy. Based just on hearsay and a paranoia that the world is out to cheat America, take its money and otherwise kick sand in its face, they are dismantling one of our pillars of statecraft.

It is an abiding myth among MAGA conservatives that foreign aid is a sinkhole, corrupt and indefensible. I have seen otherwise. But you can’t see if you don’t look.

Remember the Marshall Plan, the expensive but so worthwhile rebuilding of devastated Europe after World War II? It is cherished here and in Europe as an act of American magnanimity and statecraft that was unique in its scope and its preparedness to use American wealth for the good of others.

The plan paid off as one of the smartest investments we could have made as a country. It is an extreme example of the effectiveness of soft power.

It convinced Europe of the fundamental goodness of the American project and enabled more than 70 years of openness and sharing, convincing generations that America had certain values of human concern that would always prevail even when there were disputes.

In trashing USAID — and what mindless trashing it has taken! — the United States has opened the door to Russia and China to take on the good-guy mantle and to manipulate global opinion in their favor; and to make an always dangerous world into a more hostile one for the United States.

Without food and medicine, staples of the USAID efforts, the poorest and most wretched will suffer unspeakably. In Africa, where Musk and I grew up, people will die.

There is a ghastly irony that they will do so at the hand of the richest man in the world, acting for the richest nation in the world.

How Not to Manage the Bureaucracy

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The trouble with governing from myth rather than fact is that you break that which isn’t broken and end up with the very opposite of what you set out to achieve.

The personnel decisions of the Trump administration are driven by the myth — repeated throughout the campaign and earlier in conservative circles — that the bureaucracy is an extra branch of government, powerful, left-leaning and determined to impede change.

Presidents, including political opposites Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, have run against Washington, and then grew the government. It is easy to say that the employees of the government are the problem; that fits with the myth.

The government workforce has no lobby, and its unions are limited in their power by law. They are subject to castigation by myth and have to take it in silence.

The myths about the bureaucracy are just that, myths. But they stifle good government. If you are told long enough that you are the problem, you might be tempted to act that out.

The government may well need trimming. It does appear to be overstaffed, but it is something that needs a scalpel, not a saw.

The Trump administration’s invitation to federal employees to accept a buyout or face uncertainty will be counterproductive.

Anyone who is familiar with the idea of reducing the workforce with buyouts knows what happens: The best and ablest leave because they can prosper elsewhere; the dross remains. 

It won’t so much reduce the federal payroll by tens of thousands of workers as it will scour out its talent. Brains out, time servers in.

I am told by people in the government, work has already come to a standstill as demoralized workers debate their options. The government just got less efficient, its productivity went down.

This assault followed another de facto attack on the most productive in government: the one-size-fits-all return-to-office order. By and large, it might be better if more employees worked in their offices, but not all.

Again, there is a talent factor.

Devoted scientists and engineers — and the government employs tens of thousands of them in places like the national laboratories, NASA, NIH, USDA, NSA and throughout the civilian-military.

In the age of computers and artificial intelligence, these knowledge workers are the aristocrats. Many are more productive at home and have built their lives in recent years working there two or more days a week.

The return-to-office order is disruptive and counterproductive. The workplace has changed, and we have changed. We have technologies we didn’t have even five years ago.

The challenge has to be to find new ways of managing remote work, not banishing it.

The trouble with the administration’s return-to-office order is that one size doesn’t fit all. There are seldom simple solutions to complex problems unless a solution is embraced that is more radical than useful. You can cure tooth decay by pulling out all the teeth and fitting false ones, but that is hardly a solution.

Any officer knows that the troops he has are the troops who will save his life or otherwise. They are a general issue, but they are the fighters he or she has at their back. So, too, with the federal workforce.

A Cabinet secretary once told me during an interview that his staff was the “lame, the blind and the halt.” When I got back to the office before writing a line, his office called to implore me not to use the quote.

Criticizing staff is a poor way to get the best out of them: It is leadership in reverse.

Day in and day out, a country is run by its civil service; it is the outfit that delivers or falls down. It isn’t a deep state, a malevolent, secret organization, cherishing power, out to humiliate its political masters. It is also not a monolithic whole, organized and equipped with motives of its own.

It is a large, sometimes efficient — and often less so — organization of individuals: the silent backbone of any country.

The Struggle To Save the Printed Word and the Challenge at The Washington Post

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The printed word is to be treasured.

Two decades ago, I would have written newspapers are to be treasured. But the morning newspaper of old — manufactured in a factory in the middle of the night, shoved onto a truck and trusted to a child for delivery — is largely over. It follows the demise of its predecessor, the afternoon newspaper. These fell to competition from television in the 1960s and 1970s.

The word nowadays is largely carried digitally, even though it might have the imprimatur of a print publication. All the really big names in print now have more virtual readers than traditional ones. These readers may never have the tactile enjoyment, the feel of “the paper” they read, but they read. Increasingly, I am one of those. 

I plow through The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I dip into The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. 

I also read — and this is an interesting development — a number of magazines which are de facto dailies. These include The Economist, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

The Economist is the only publication to which I have a digital and a paper subscription.

Much as I have loved newspapers down through the years, I am resigned to the fact there will be fewer going forward, and a generation of young people will find them more a curiosity than anything else.

But the importance of the written word hasn’t diminished. I make the point about the written word — and I distinguish it purposely from the broadcast word — because it has staying power.

I have spent my entire career working on newspapers and making television programs. It is words that are written on paper or online that last, that are referenced down through time.

Overnight television has an impact, but it fades quickly; the advertising industry has scads of data on this. The printed word — using that term to embrace words on paper and online — has staying power.

People often remind me of something I wrote decades ago. Few remember something I said on television years ago. Or months ago. But people remember your face.

My regard for the printed word brings me to The Washington Post, where the news staff is aligned against the owner, Jeff Bezos.

There are two issues here.

The staff feels that Bezos has sold them out to President Donald Trump and the forces of MAGA.

Bezos bought the paper without any interest in being a newspaperman, in enjoying the pleasures and pain of news ownership. He didn’t understand that you don’t own a newspaper like you own a yacht. 

A newspaper is a live, active, rambunctious and roiling thing. You have to enjoy the fray to own one. Hearst did, Pulitzer did, Murdoch did. You don’t retail words the way Amazon sells pizza crusts.

Not only must the newspaper proprietor deal with the news and its inherent controversies, but he or she also must deal with journalists, a breed apart, disinclined to any discipline besides deadlines. By nature and practice, they are opponents of authority.

The Post has been mostly untouched by Bezos, except for his decision to spike an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The staff took it hard. 

Bezos was undeterred and took what had become the billionaire’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to become, to staff fears, Trump’s liegeman, or at least to reassure Trump. Then Bezos got a seat at the inaugural.

Readers of The Post also took it hard and unsubscribed en masse. Thirty percent of those were among the critical digital subscriber ranks, indicating how political its readership is and just how difficult it is for the paper to please all the constituencies it must serve.

I was an assistant editor at The Post in the glory days of editor Ben Bradlee and the ownership of the pressure-resistant Graham family, under matriarch Katherine Graham. When I was at the paper, I was president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. The Guild negotiated what turned out to be the largest wage increase for journalists in any Guild contract. As I remember, it was 67 percent over three years.

Even so, the membership complained. The Post editors and writers are good at complaining with a high sense of self-regard. Len Downie, who was to rise to the executive editorship of the paper, declared, “King has sold us out.” 

It was a contract that benefitted both the management of The Post and journalism in general.

It was a loud reminder of how poorly journalists are compensated and how this affects the flow of talent into the trade. 

The driving force behind the contract from the union side was its professional head, the remarkably gifted Brian Flores and the equally gifted Guild chairman at The Post, John Reistrup.

Under Bezos, The Post first looked as though it would become a great force in the digital world, while the printed paper survived unspectacularly. Bezos clearly saw the digital potential.

But things unraveled and The Post started losing money. It lost $100 million last year.

It is still a good and maybe a great paper. But it needs to get its sense of mission back. That sense of mission can’t be at war with its owner.

The Post clearly would benefit from a new owner, but who has pockets deep enough and skin thick enough? It is a question Bezos and the querulous staff both need to ask themselves as the fate of the paper is uncertain.

Fact-Checking Has Always Been an Elemental Part of Journalism

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A whole new area of endeavor is opening up for the entrepreneurial. Name it after the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. He allegedly hunted for an honest man and was possibly the founder of Cynicism.

Verification will become a vital business as the flood of misinformation engulfs us. What can be trusted? What source is reliable? What image is actual? Is the voice or image authentic, or has it been created with artificial intelligence?

Rather than fact-checking becoming outdated, as at Facebook, it will be essential. The source of news will be as important as the news. Publications with a reputation for accuracy, or their equivalent in this digital free-for-all information age, will be revered.

As — whether we like it or not — we all get our current information through journalism, journalism becomes more critical, not less so.

Elon Musk, who owns X, has declared that we are all journalists now. No, we are not.

You don’t have to spend four years in a university to become a journalist, but some reverence for the craft and some on-the-job training is necessary. Skill with the language, a knowledge of history, curiosity, and a desire to find out what is going on and tell people are all needed.

So is the hardest part of the qualification to define: news judgment. This is knowing what news is and seeing it immediately. You also need to be serious about facts and fact-checking.

Fact-checking, which Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, has equated to being incompatible with free speech, is at the heart of journalism. The individual journalist is haunted by a permanent fear (“the inner core of panic,” as my late first wife, Doreen, who was a superb journalist, described it) of, “Did I get it right? Is it Steven or Stephen or did the speaker say millions or a billions?”

Any news story has many facts and judgments, most executed under pressure and in real-time. If it is essential, it needs to be gotten out.

After World War II, and mainly because of excellent reporting from London during the Blitz, the BBC developed a reputation worldwide as trustworthy in getting it right. In much of the world, that reputation still stands. But in Britain, the BBC is reviled for being left-leaning and woke-thinking.

The once great news service, United Press International, had a reputation among editors for being unreliable. I never found anyone who could prove that it was less dependable than its competitors, the Associated Press, Reuters and the English version of Agence France-Presse, but the myth was oft-repeated and stuck.

Similarly, The New York Times is regarded worldwide as exemplifying the gold standard for reliability. However, in the United States, many regard it as left-leaning and, therefore, less believable.

That doesn’t mean there are no mistakes, indeed egregious errors; we all make them and suffer the shame that goes with it. The agony of getting facts wrong is real and profound and known to every journalist.

Factual inaccuracy is a self-inflicted wound on a publication. If one fact is wrong, the veracity of the entire outlet is called into question in the reader’s mind.

Ownership is not as important as the integrity of the individual operation. The Wall Street Journal is regarded as being accurate, but the New York Post is thought of as having dubious accuracy, and Fox News is seen as incontrovertibly political, yet all three have the same ownership.

In the news business, fact-checking has to be part of the process. It can’t be glommed on after the event.

Journalism and its army of reporters can only help with facts in some measure.

When it comes to the industrial-scale disinformation pouring out of governments and political parties everywhere — and especially now out of Russia and China — technology needs to be mobilized to fight the technology-generated lies: fake images, sounds and news situations.

The best hope is that technology will be able to fight its own evil; to be able to tag the fake or at least to identify the real with watermarks — where the information came from and how it was created.

The world needs a fact-checking ethic, something that has existed quietly in journalism for a long time but which is threatened to be overwhelmed in the asymmetry where journalism is a small part of the dishonesty spewing out of social media, such as Facebook, X and Truth Social, and from Russia and other mischief-bent regimes.

Meanwhile Diogenes’ cynicism may be the first line of defense, along with the journalism of old. Verify before you trust.

Trump ‘Puts a Bit of Stick About’ and Frightens Our Friends

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President-elect Donald Trump is “putting a bit of stick about.”

That is a British expression which means as it sounds to stir up trouble. In sports, like rugby, it means to play more aggressively. In politics, it can mean to stir up  trouble for trouble’s sake.

Aficionados of UK television will remember when, in the BBC version of “House of Cards,” the prime minister turns to an aide and says with evil relish, “Put a bit of stick about.”

Trump is causing distress, even shock, in the capitals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, possibly the most effective alliance the world has ever known. NATO has been a force for peace since the end of World War II.

Concomitantly, it can be surmised, Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Largo thrilled the capitals of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It would appear to them that NATO is coming apart and what used to be called the free world is eating its own.

Trump told Denmark that he might invade Greenland, Panama likewise, and Canada that he would use economic measures to compel it to become the 51st state.

Trump’s final bit of stick, if you will, was to suggest renaming the Gulf of Mexico, presumably to infuriate Mexicans for no better reason than so many of them have migrated illegally to the United States. Pique, just pique, Mr. President-elect.

Allies and defenders of Trump have rushed to his side, largely depending on their lack of a grip on geopolitical reality or because they believe that he must be right because he is their man, their leader, their sage and America’s savior.

Just how are U.S. interests being served by roiling our two large, friendly neighbors with whom we have lived amicably since the end of the hostilities in the War of 1812 for Canada, and the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 for Mexico?

Trump was enthusiastic about that friendship when he tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement and replaced it proudly with a similar agreement, the United States, Canada, Mexico Agreement, in July 2020, during his first administration.

One can imagine a foolish campaign to seize Greenland, which would tear NATO asunder and give Russia an incentive to invade the Baltic states and, with Europe off balance, to finally win Ukraine.

One could see some future American president eyeing the wreckage and saying, as Richard III wails pathetically in Shakespeare’s play, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” “Europe for Greenland.”

One can imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping taking any U.S. hostile move against a neighbor in North America as an invitation to take Taiwan.

One could go on, imagining Iran launching a full land war against Israel, and Israel responding with nuclear weapons. Or Central and South America, uniting in hostility to the United States, helping their drug gangs to surge fentanyl into the United States via drones and tunnels.

The Panama Canal is a vital waterway, and Americans did build it after the French failed. Since the full transfer of the canal in 1999, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, which guaranteed its neutrality, mostly things have worked well. Yes, China has invested in Panama and the canal, but that is no secret. That was going on, as were other Chinese investments worldwide, during the first Trump administration.

The Chinese do operate two terminals on the canal, but they need the revenue from world shipping, just like any other business along the canal.

The canal remains in our backyard, under surveillance. Interfering with its operations would be an act of war by any country.

If Panama is overcharging U.S. shipping, negotiate.

Leave Canada alone. It is our great asset to the north, our kith and kin in democracy and capitalism. Canadians are not a subjugated people, longing to have two senators and about 60 representatives on the Potomac.

Putting a bit of stick about can be some fun. But take it too far and it becomes vandalism.

My Frightening, Splendid Christmas in the ER

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Most people have horror stories about emergency rooms. Whether in Boston, Washington or Los Angeles, the stories are appalling.

Gurneys, sometimes with critically ill patients, lined up and left unattended along walls. Hurting people waiting for hours because of a shortage of staff, beds and a prevailing shortage of resources. Systems that are stressed and seem to be near breaking point.

I have a story about my recent ER visit, which was pure joy and likely saved my life.

The story begins just before Christmas with my travels on crowded Amtrak trains and more overcrowded airplanes.

I was wearing a mask during these trips and I had gotten flu and COVID shots, but I caught the flu. I received prompt and proper treatment, but I wasn’t licking it.

The Saturday before Christmas, early in the morning, I had a fever hallucination: I sat bolt upright in bed and told my wonderful wife, Linda Gasparello, that I was preparing my maiden speech to the British House of Commons.

As I hadn’t set foot in the UK parliament for years, and then only in the press gallery, this insane bravado led her to call an ambulance at 2 a.m. — over my protests that I was getting better and taking a Tylenol would take care of everything. “Just you see,” I said.

What Linda saw was a very sick man, clearly delirious and in need of urgent medical help.

Kindly men from the West Warwick (Rhode Island) Fire Department’s ambulance service quietly entered our apartment and wafted me into the ambulance, where they checked my vital signs, did an electrocardiogram and other work. I was in good, strong, comforting and knowledgeable hands.

When they were done, they drove me a few miles to Kent Hospital, part of Care New England, which has the second-busiest ER in the state. Not auspicious? Read on.

I wasn’t parked along a wall or interrogated about my insurance but rushed straight to waiting nurses and the emergency medical technicians until I was hooked up to an IV, and a doctor had seen me. Soon afterward, I was seen by two doctors.

Emergency rooms are, by all accounts, hellholes. I expected the worst, but I got two days of excellent care and pleasant attention. I have stayed at some of the best hotels in the world, including the Carlyle in New York, the Ritz in Paris, the Hassler in Rome and Brown’s in London, and I had the same feeling of well-being at the Kent Hospital ER — people who cared and told me they were just a bell-ring away.

When my vitals were stable in a few days, I was invited to participate in a unique and remarkable system called “Kent Hospital at Home.”

Under this system (some form of which is operational at nearly 400 hospitals in 39 states), select patients can go home without being discharged, and the home becomes a hospital room. You are hooked up to a monitor, which sends data about your vitals to ER nurses. You can read these on an iPad, with contact information for the nurses and doctors assigned to you. You also get an emergency alarm on a wristband.

Everything the patient might have needed in the hospital is transported to the home. This might include an IV, oxygen and other necessary equipment that might be used in the ER.

Best of all, you get visits twice daily from a nurse and once a day from a doctor, either in person or virtual. I was in the system for just two days before discharge and saw the doctor in my home once and on Zoom once. I was given his cell phone number with instructions to call whenever needed.

The hospital-at-home concept was pioneered by the Mayo Clinic, among other medical facilities, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has a waiver from Medicare, which means that you are billed as an in-hospital patient, not an outpatient.

Kent Hospital emphasized that when it moved me from the hospital to my home — in their vehicle — it was a “transfer,” not in any way a discharge.

Research suggests that hospital-at-home care saves the provider between 19 percent and 30 percent on keeping the same patient in the hospital.

I am grateful to all who played a role in my recovery, from the ambulance crew to the emergency nurses, doctors, radiologists and porters.

Also, I am grateful for an insight into how medicine should work and how it will be enhanced in the future through technology that makes hospital-at-home care possible and viable.

For the record, I had Influenza A and sepsis pneumonia. I had magnificent treatment, and I thank all who handed me a Christmas present beyond value. And I even saw a doctor making a house call. I wasn’t hallucinating.