White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Europe Knows Russia and Is Deeply Afraid

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Europe is naked and afraid.

That was the message at a recent meeting of the U.K. Section of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ), at which I was an invited speaker.

It preceded a stark warning just over a week later from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, also speaking in London, who said the danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia won’t recede even if there is peace in Ukraine.

Rutte said defense spending must increase across Europe and recommended that it should reach 5 percent of GDP. Singling out Britain, he said if the Brits don’t do so, they should learn to speak Russian. He said Russia could overwhelm NATO by 2030.

The British journalists’ session reflected fear of Russia and astonishment at the United States. There was fear that Russia would invade the weaker states and that NATO had been neutered. Fear that the world’s most effective defense alliance, NATO, is no longer operational.

There was astonishment that America had abandoned its longstanding policies of support for Europe and preparedness to keep Russia in check. And there was disillusionment that President Trump would turn away from Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.

The tone in Europe toward the United States isn’t one simply of anger or sorrow, but anger tinged with sorrow. Europeans see themselves as vulnerable in a way that  hasn’t been true since the end of World War II.

They also are shattered by the change in America under Trump; his hostility to Europe, his tariffs and his preparedness to side with Russia. “How can this happen to America?” the British AEJ members asked me.

In many conversations, I found disbelief that America could do this to Europe, and that Trump should lean so far toward Putin. In Europe, where Putin has been an existential threat and where he invaded Ukraine, there is general amazement that Trump seems to crave the approbation of the Russian president.

Speaking to the journalist’s meeting via video from Romania, Edward Lucas, a former senior editor of The Economist, and now a columnist for The Times of London and a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy, said, “Donald Trump has turned the transatlantic relationship on its head. He wants to be friends with Vladimir Putin. We are in a bad mess.”

He said he saw no realistic possibility of a ceasefire in Ukraine in the near future, and he said Trump had made it clear that he was prepared to walk away from trying to bring peace “if it proved too hard.”

Lucas suggested that if European nations continue to back Ukraine after a Russian-dictated peace offer endorsed by America, Trump will punish them. He might do this by withdrawing U.S. assets from Europe, pulling back large numbers of troops from the 80,000 stationed there, and refusing to replace the American supreme commander of Europe.

“Then we will see how defenseless Europe is,” he said.

In Washington, it seems there is little understanding of the true weakness of Europe. No understanding that money alone won’t buy security for Europe.

Europe doesn’t have stand-off capacity, heavy airlift capacity, ultra-sophisticated electronic intelligence or anything approaching a defense infrastructure.

Trump has equated defense simply with money. But in Europe (although 27 of its nations are part of the European Union), there is no cohesive structure in place that could replace the role played by the United States.

Within the EU there are disagreements and there is the spoiler in the case of Hungary. Its pro-Russia ruler, Victor Orban, would like to try to block any concerted European action against Russia. The new right-wing Polish president’s hopes for good relations with Orban are a worry for most EU members.

I have long believed that there are three mutually exclusive views of Europe in the United States.

The first, favored by Trump and his MAGA allies, is that Europe is ripping off America in defense and through non-tariff trade barriers and is awash in expensive socialist systems embracing health, transportation and state nannying.

The second, favored by vacationers, is that Europe is a sort of Disney World for adults, as portrayed on PBS by Rick Steves’ travelogues: Watch the quaint people making wine or drinking beer.

The third is that Europe has been encouraged by successive administrations to accept the U.S. defense umbrella, as that favored America and its concerns, first about Soviet expansion and more recently about expansion under Putin.

Now Europe is alone in defense terms, naked and very afraid — afraid of Trump’s pivot to Putin.

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

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Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

Hello, World! America Doesn’t Have Your Back Anymore

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America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in Western Europe to the struggling masses worldwide, America has always been there to help. Its mission has been to serve and, in its serving, to promote the American brand — freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — and to keep America a revered and special place.

America was there to arbitrate an end to civil war, to rush in with aid after a natural disaster, to provide food during a famine and medical assistance during an infectious disease outbreak. America was there with an open heart and open hand.

If you want to look at this in a transactional way, which is the currency of today, we gave but we got back. The ledger is balanced. For example, we sent forth America’s food surplus to where it was needed, from Pakistan to Ethiopia, and we opened markets to our farmers.

The world’s needs established a symbiotic relationship in which we gained reverence and prestige, and our values were exported and sometimes adopted.

President Trump has characterized us as victims of a venal world that has pillaged our goodwill, stolen our manufacturing and exploited our market. The fact is that when Trump took office in January, the United States had the best-performing economy in the world, and its citizens enjoyed the products of the world at reasonable prices. Inflation was a problem, but it was beginning to come down — and it wasn’t as persistent as it had been in Britain, for example.

Trump has painted a picture of a world where our manufacturing was somehow shanghaied and carried in the depth of night to Asia.

In fact, American businesses, big and small, sought out Asian manufacturing to avail themselves of cheap but talented labor, low regulation, and a union-free environment.

Businesses will always go where the ecosystem favors them. The business ecosystem offshore was as irresistible to us as it was to a tranche of European manufacturing.

The move to Asia hollowed out the old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and New England, but unemployment has remained low. Some industries, including farming, food processing and manufacturing, suffer labor shortages.

We need manufacturing that supports national security. That includes chips, heavy electrical equipment and other essential infrastructure goods. It doesn’t include a lot of consumer goods, from clothing to toys.

Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican and a semanticist, said you couldn’t come up with the correct answer if your input was wrong, “no matter how hard you think.” Trump’s thinking about the world seems to be input-challenged.

The world isn’t changing only in how Trump has ordained but in other fundamental ones. Manufacturing in just five years will be very different. Artificial intelligence will be on the factory floor, in the planning and sales offices, and it will boost productivity. However, it won’t add jobs and probably will subtract them.

Trump would like to build a Fortress America with all that will involve, including higher prices and uncompetitive factories. While not undermining our position as the benefactor to the world, a better approach might be to build up North America and welcome Canada and Mexico into an even closer relationship.  Canada shares much of our culture, is rich in raw materials, and has been an exemplary neighbor. Mexico is a treasure trove of talent and labor.

Rather than threatening Canada and belittling Mexico, a possible future lies in a collaborative relationship with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Canada is looking for markets to the East and the West. Mexico, which is building a coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Panama Canal, is staking much on its new trade deal with the European Union.

Trump has sundered old relationships and old views of what is America’s place in the world order. No longer does the world have America at its back.

This is a time of choice: The Ugly American or the Great Neighbor.

Political Fear Stalks Law, Education, Journalism, Migration

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Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.

Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.

The state under Donald Trump has a special interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.

Fear of the state has entered the political process.

Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list,” which was mostly journalists. His political paranoia was always there, and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal.

Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.

Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters, it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mainly achieved with information given or withheld.

The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies or those who disagree with it. It includes the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated,” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.

If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work, and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.

One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.

The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.

Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation, and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.

The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.

If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.

Shamefully, Columbia caved to try to salvage $400 million in research funds. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education, the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.

One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool — critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.

Traveling with the president is essential. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.

Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves. ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. Corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.

Accommodate what they have, and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes. The truth is obvious; the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.

Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty, and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.

Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.

VOA Pure Because it Wasn’t Beholden, Despite Its U.S. Funding

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It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended. 

The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.

There was only one channel and no television in  Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.

To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel “The Man of Property.”

I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.

Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed country, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest. 

But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.

Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.

What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda. 

Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda. 

Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.

Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.

The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons. 

The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.

I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.

At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)

For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, “White House Chronicle,” was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.

I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.

Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are —  at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.

We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.

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.

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.