White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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.

Trump, Who Thinks He Bought the Nation, Now Eyes the World

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When Donald Trump began his first term as president in 2017, I wrote that he came to office not as a politician who had won an election, but rather as a businessman who had won a takeover battle and was ready to hire, fire, sell-off, and generally to reshape the property he had bought.

On Christmas Day, Trump – with a series of posts on social media — revealed himself as a businessman who believes not that he has won the nation in a takeover battle,  but rather that he has won the whole world and that he is ready to hire, fire and sell-off.

Also, like a canny takeover artist, he didn’t reveal his hand during the takeover struggle. During the election, there was no hint that Canada should become the U.S. 51st state, that Panama was overcharging U.S. shipping nor that ownership of Greenland was essential over and above the key role it already plays with a vital U.S. base, happily provided for by treaty with Denmark.

Like a businessman, Trump offered to buy Greenland during his first presidential term. His offer was soundly and summarily rejected. Now he is back and the answer hasn’t changed.

Canada, Trump believes, takes unfair advantage of the United States in trade, although the regime of the flourishing cross-border trading is the selfsame one: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, signed in July 2020 by Trump himself as a vast improvement over its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement, although in substance and spirit it is very similar.

When it comes to Panama, Trump has a double accusation. Beyond the belief that Panama is ripping us off, this kind of national business paranoia is part of the Trump manual of expectations in foreign policy: All foreign governments are scalawags bent on cheating America.

It is part of a kind of permanent, low-grade C-Suite paranoia that is present in many companies: Who is stealing an advantage, who is going to concede to the unions, who is angling for more shelf space, etc. You might call it corporate situational awareness paranoia.

Statesmanship is learned; good instincts help, but it isn’t intuitive for most leaders. It is learned through studying history, meeting, talking, traveling, and moving in foreign policy circles. It is learned best on the job, if the job is in the House or the Senate.

Trump has learned not in that world, but in the world of New York real estate with its own jungle law — deals are done, undone, litigated, and political influence is brought to bear. Ultimately, there is victory for one side.

Trump correctly — and it could be said belatedly because he took no action during his first administration — has cast a penetrating light on China in the Americas. China, as Trump has said, doesn’t operate the Panama Canal. Panama does. A subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings manages two ports at the canal’s entrances, with Chinese firms providing more than $1 billion for the construction of a new bridge over the canal.

Panama’s revenues are up as a result of congestion charging, but fewer ships are transiting the canal due to drought. The vast Lake Gatun, which feeds the canal and keeps the lock system viable, is only partially full. The less water available, the fewer transits are possible. These dipped from 38 large ships to just 22 but rains have improved the situation and transits have risen.

Seizing canals is a fraught business, witness the disaster of France and Britain trying to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. Major damage to the Panama Canal would cost the United States for decades. It is a masterpiece of big, intricate engineering. I took a cruise through it for the purpose of understanding it better.

The British word “gobsmacked” is easily understood: smacked in the mouth. That is what happened to the commentariat — those who comment on national affairs. Trump’s Christmas Day declarations on Truth Social, his social media network, went almost unmentioned. The reporting was there, the networks and newspapers  turned up the volume, but the commentators were silent,

That, in its way, is as notable as Trump’s implication that he has bought the world and plans to take possession. The enormity of the thing has been quieting. We, the opinion writers, have been struck dumb, you might say. That is news in itself.

The Crisis in Journalism — More Reporting Needed

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There is a lot of dither about the future of journalism. Make no mistake, it is the essential commodity.

If you know what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine or Syria, it is because brave journalists told you. Not the government, not some academic institution, not artificial intelligence, and not hearsay from your friends or from a political party.

The crisis in journalism isn’t that it failed analytically in the last election, or that we — an irregular army of individualists — failed, but that journalism has run out of money and its political enemies have found that the courts (and the fear of libel prosecution) can terrorize the companies that own the media.

In 2016, the gossipy site Gawker was sued by the pro wrestler and political figure Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was financed by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Now come two suits, filed by President-elect Donald Trump: One that he won against ABC News, and one to be filed against the Des Moines Register. It is reported that conservative interests plan a series of these legal interventions against the media.

This will have a frightening effect on news coverage. When there is fear of prosecution, there is less likely to be investigative news coverage.

So far, the most troublesome of the prosecutions has been the one against ABC News. The network caved in early. It agreed to pay $15 million plus legal fees into a fund for what will be the first Trump presidential library.

Could it be that ABC is owned by Disney, and Disney wants good relations with the incoming administration?

However, a much bigger problem faces the media than the fear of prosecution. It is that the old media, led by local and regional newspapers, is dying. Although there are thousands of podcasts, they don’t take up the slack.

You could listen to an awful lot of podcasts and not know what is going on. State houses and local courts aren’t being covered. The sanitizing effect of press surveillance has been withdrawn and, frankly, God help the poor defendants in a local court where there is a disproportionate desire to plead cases, to avoid honest trials even when there is conspicuous doubt.

I never tire of repeating what Dan Raviv, former CBS News correspondent, said to me once, “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so. However, there is a problem: Journalism needs to be concentrated in a newspaper or a broadcast outlet where there is enough revenue to do the job. Otherwise, you get what I think of as the upside-down pyramid of more and more commentary, based on less and less reporting.

We are awash in commentary, some of it very good and some of it trash. It is all based on news gathered by those news organizations that can afford to employ a phalanx of reporters.

Regional newspapers used to have Washington bureaus and foreign bureaus. At one time, the Baltimore Sun had 12 overseas bureaus. Now it has none.

This is the story nationwide. Fewer people actually cover the news, digging, checking and telling us what they have found.

Throughout the history of journalism, technology has been disruptive, sometimes advantageously and sometimes less so. Modern printing presses developed at the end of the 19th century were important boosters, as was the invention of the Linotype machine in 1884.

On the negative side, television killed off evening papers, and podcasts are taking a toll on radio. Now, the internet and tech companies have siphoned off most of the revenue that supported newspapers, radio and television.

As one can’t have a free and fair society without vibrant journalism, we clearly need a new paradigm which is internet-based news organizations that are large enough and rich enough to do the job in the time-honored way with reporters asking questions, whether it is at the courthouse, the White House or on the battlefield.

There is a clear choice: News and informed analysis, or rumor and conspiracy.

‘Missing Link’ Offers Unique Boost to Renewable Energy Generation

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In a well-ordered laboratory in Owings Mills, a suburb of Baltimore, an engineer has been perfecting a device that might be called the missing link in renewable energy.

Now, it is ready to begin its transformative role in electric generation, bringing electricity to the remotest places in America and adding it to the grid.

It is an invention that could cut the cost of new wind turbines, make solar more desirable, and turn tens of thousands — yes, thousands — of U.S. streams and non-powered dams into power generators without huge civil engineering outlays.

The company is DDMotion, and its creative force is Key Han, president and chief scientist. Han has spent more than a decade perfecting his patented invention, which converts variable inputs into a constant output.

In a stream, this consists of taking the variables in the water flow and turning them into a constant, reliable shaft output that can generate constant frequency ready to be fed to the grid. Likewise with wind and solar.

Han told me the environmental effect on a stream or river would be negligible, essentially undetected, but a reliable amount of grid-grade electricity could be obtained at all times in all kinds of weather.

He has dreams of a world where every bit of flowing water could be a resource for many power plants, and the same technologies would be essential in harnessing the energy of ocean currents.

A further advantage to Han’s constant-speed device is that it has a rotating shaft, which is a source of what in the more arcane reaches of the electrical world is known as rotational inertia. Arcane, but essential.

This is the slowing down of something that was once moving briskly, like stopping a car. In power generation, this can be a few seconds, but it is necessary to enable an electrical system to keep its output constant — 60 cycles per second in America, 50 cycles per second in Europe and parts of Asia. If that varies, the whole system fails. Blackout. Then, the system must be re-calibrated, and that can take days or several weeks for the entire grid.

Electricity needs rotational inertia. This isn’t a problem with fossil-fueled plants: There is always rotational inertia in their rotating parts.

Wind power loses its inertia, which is there initially as the wind turns a shaft, but is lost as the power generated is groomed for the grid. It passes through a gearbox, then to an inverter, which converts the power from direct current to grid-compatible alternating current.

Han says using his technology, the gearbox and the inverter can be eliminated and inertia provided. Also, most of the remaining hardware could be on the ground rather than up in the air on the tower, making for less installation cost and easier maintenance.

Loss of inertia is becoming a problem for grids in Europe, where wind and solar are approaching half of the generating load. Germany, particularly, must create ancillary services.

Han told me, “DDMotion-developed speed converters can harness all renewable energy with benefits. For example, wind turbines can produce rotating inertia, therefore ancillary services are not required to keep the grid frequency stable, and river turbines without dams can generate baseload, therefore storage systems, such as batteries and pump storage are not required.”

DDMotion has been supported primarily by Alfred Berkeley, chairman of Princeton Capital Management and a legend in the financial community. He served as president of Nasdaq and later as its vice chairman.

Han, who holds patents relating to his work on infinitely variable motion controls, began his career at General Electric before founding DDMotion in 1990. A native of South Korea, Han attended college in Montana to fulfill his dream of becoming a professional cowboy. His resume includes roping and branding calves one summer.

If DDMotion succeeds as Han and his supporters hope, their missing link will vastly enhance the value of renewable energy and bring down its cost to the system and consumers.