The Washington Post National Weekly. Sunday, March 1, 2020

SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2020

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

The castaway

Politics Few rules for online campaign ads 7

After being scorned

by Trump, Jeff Sessions wants to reclaim his old Senate seat. But will Alabama have him back? PAGE PAGE 12 8

Nation Drug crisis shifts west 9

5 Myths Cyberwar 23

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Politics perspective

Turning to the experts he maligned

Photos by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

Trump has to set aside his penchant for chaos to reassure a nation fearing pandemic

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND P HILIP R UCKER

W

hen President Trump sought to reassure a nation on edge over the coronavirus, he was flanked Wednesday at the White House by more than a halfdozen public health experts.

But the very officials whose expertise the president is now counting on are part of the vast bureaucracy of scientists and other public servants that Trump has

repeatedly maligned, ignored and jettisoned.

Throughout his more than three years as president, Trump has obsessed, at times conspiratorially, over what he calls the “deep state” — the thousands of career government specialists in national security, intelligence, science and other areas whose expertise he shuns in part because he suspects they are disloyal saboteurs.

And so, with the first case of coronavirus not tied to foreign travel being announced in Cali-

fornia on Wednesday, Trump finds himself grappling with a crisis for which his record suggests he is particularly ill suited to respond.

At a moment that demands sobriety and honesty, Trump is a leader prone to hyperbole and falsehoods. As the financial markets and the public crave order and clarity, Trump has a penchant for creating chaos and confusion.

And at a time when expertise is paramount, Trump has hollowed out the government agencies re-

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Pence and members of Trump’s coronavirus task force, holds a news conference on the spreading disease on Wednesday.

sponsible for the tasks at hand.

“People should speak without hyperbole and try to be cool, calm and collected and pay attention to the experts,” said Andrew Card, a former White House chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration who helped manage the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. “Try not to be driven by emotion, and don’t say things that are not true. This is when you stick to the facts and don’t invite fear or impulsive behavior.”

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Politics perspective Trump’s charge is to calm, rather than con, a frightened nation.

But now in his fourth year in office, he lacks credibility with broad swaths of the country — the sort of safety net that many of his predecessors could fall back on in moments of crisis.

Stephen Morrison, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he directs the center’s global health work, said that while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has done “a fine job” in regularly updating the public with guidance, “the trick and the missing part is the communications at a higher level to the American public, and that’s from the president and the president’s designated surrogates.”

Trump has already contradicted his top health officials. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Tuesday that it was not a question of “if ” coronavirus spreads in the United States but “when.”

A day later, Trump offered a different assessment: “I don’t think it’s inevitable,” the president said at his news conference.

“I think that there’s a chance that it could get worse. There’s a chance it could get fairly substantially worse. But nothing’s inevitable.”

He also claimed that the virus might dissipate by April, when the weather warms — but while some viruses do falter in warmer temperatures, there is no clear evidence that this coronavirus will behave similarly.

Ron Klain, who led the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and is now an adviser to former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, said a challenge for Trump in managing this crisis is his “desire to happy-talk away every problem.”

By downplaying coronavirus concerns, Klain said, Trump may be “trying to pump the stock market, but the virus is not going to be persuaded by Trump’s tweets. He needs to communicate straightforwardly with the American people what’s happening.”

It is not the first time Trump has provided questionable information in the middle of a crisis.

Last year, as Hurricane Dorian bore down on the Eastern Sea-

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

board, Trump used a thick black Sharpie marker to doctor an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map to support his tendentious warning to the people of Alabama that the storm would probably hit their state.

Trump’s presidency has been guided by an ethos that then-candidate Trump articulated at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland: “I alone can fix it.”

Once in office, Trump shunned government experts. He shortened or tuned out some of his intelligence and national security briefings and rejected some of the conclusions of scientists. He relied on his instincts, rather than the expertise of those around him, to make decisions in virtually every realm.

“I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” Trump said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post — a statement about his feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell but one that also illustrates his overall governing philosophy.

In the scientific community, Trump has been similarly dismissive. By the spring of his first year in office, there were nearly 700 vacant positions at the CDC, because of a hiring freeze that officials said would affect programs

supporting infectious-disease control and health-emergency readiness.

Trump’s 2021 budget, submitted to Congress last month, proposes cuts to a broad array of health and scientific programs, including trimming the CDC’s funding by almost 16 percent and reducing overall funding for global health initiatives.

“You’re going to have to beat this with the ‘deep state’ — that is, the experts inside [the National Institutes of Health] and CDC and Homeland Security,” Klain said.

“But there’s a general view in this administration that they don’t trust these permanent experts who’ve served Democratic and Republican administrations both.”

For Trump, the political stakes of bungling the coronavirus response could be devastating. The president and his advisers have long relied on robust financial markets, low unemployment and high consumer confidence to smooth his path to reelection. “I’ll be running on the economy,” Trump said in 2019.

But faced with fears of a global pandemic, U.S. markets fell sharply throughout the past week — making it one of the worst weeks since the financial crisis of 2008.

Past presidents who have failed to manage national crises have often faced swift political back-

On the day of the coronavirus news conference, President Trump reportedly clashed with top staffers, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, left, and he blindsided administration officials when he deputized Vice President Pence to oversee the outbreak.

KLMNO Weekly

lash. President George W. Bush struggled to recover from his handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which left over 1,200 dead and displaced thousands more across the Gulf Coast. In the next year’s midterm elections, Bush’s Republican Party lost control of both houses of Congress.

“The Katrina comparison is very apt,” Morrison said. “This has potentially enormous consequences for the United States. It has enormous consequences that will touch many more citizens than Katrina touched, potentially.”

It remains unclear just how the coronavirus will play out — whether it will become Trump’s Katrina or, defying alarmist assumptions, prove a testament to Trump’s managerial prowess.

But already there are signs that the administration’s handling of the current crisis has assumed a distinctly Trumpian sheen. The president initially weighed in on Twitter while traveling abroad in India, offering an uncomfortable dissonance from the facts playing out on the ground in the United States and around the globe.

“Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” he wrote on the day the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 1,000 points. In another, later tweet, he misspelled the name of the virus as “caronavirus.”

Meanwhile, the president was fuming, in public and in private, over news coverage of the virus and market collapse and quickly personalized the crisis. Trump accused news organizations and Democratic congressional leaders of intentionally trying to scare people to make him look bad.

Only upon his return to Washington, as he realized that the coronavirus was dominating all news cycles, did Trump decide to try to assume more of a leadership role, scheduling a news conference that he would lead Wednesday evening.

But even that had a slapdash quality. All day, reports of infighting among Trump’s top staffers, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, leaked to the news media. And the president’s announcement that he was deputizing Vice President Pence to oversee all handling of the outbreak blindsided administration officials, including those deeply involved in the response. n

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Politics

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Still few rules for digital political ads BY

T ONY R OMM

T

he ad that interrupted some Hulu subscribers as they watched the NBC comedy “Brooklyn NineNine” last month opened with a clip of President Trump speaking.

“The ‘deep state’ is trying to inject our health system with socialist price controls,” a narrator then interjected, before a banner flashed at the bottom of the screen: “TEXT ‘SOCIALISM SUCKS’ TO 41490.”

But neither FreedomWorks, the conservative group behind the ad, nor Hulu, a televisionand-movie streaming giant, is required to reveal much more to the public about the 30-second spot or whom it targeted, leaving watchdogs and regulators fearful that federal election laws aren’t fit for the digital age — and that voters remain vulnerable to manipulation.

Four years after Russian agents exploited popular online platforms to push propaganda, sow unrest and promote the Trump candidacy, the U.S. government has made virtually no progress on bringing more transparency to paid political speech, particularly online, where major regulatory gaps exist.

Campaign finance experts say they are especially concerned about video-streaming services at a moment when more Americans are shifting their viewing habits from cable to the Web. Politicians have followed people online, and over the past year, their ads have appeared on popular platforms such as Roku, the maker of hardware and software that powers Internet-connected TVs. But nothing requires these fast-growing digital providers to disclose whom these ads targeted and who viewed them. The absence of federal transparency rules stands in stark contrast with traditional TV broadcasters, such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which for decades have been required to maintain limited public files about political ads.

On Hulu, which boasts more than 30 million subscribers, polit-

Washington Post illustration/iStock

Campaigns ramp up spending on streaming services, which lack regulations on transparency ical ads have become so prolific that its users have complained loudly — on the company’s public-facing forums. “I have Hulu for entertainment, not so I can be tortured with political ads,” wrote one user in January.

Hulu declined to comment for this story, and Roku did not respond to a request for comment.

For many ethics watchdogs, the lack of visibility into online advertising reflects a broader election-year challenge: Campaigns are spending more than ever to try to reach voters and influence their decisions, armed with powerful digital tools — yet federal regulations haven’t kept pace.

Political advertising could surpass $6 billion on television, search, social media and other digital platforms by November, according to the analytics firm eMarketer. Traditional television still captures the majority of these ad dollars, researchers said, but spending on myriad sites and services has grown exponentially

as campaigns embrace fresh ways to target their messages based on a voter’s age, location or other personal traits.

The consequences of those new digital tactics became apparent in 2016, when “trolls” tied to the Russian government relied on narrowly targeted social media ads to inflame tensions around race, religion and other political fault lines. But digital experts say the more likely threat this cycle is homegrown — campaigns and their allies that peddle half-truths and outright falsehoods in ways people can’t easily discern.

Under pressure to prevent abuse, some companies have created their own ad archives. Facebook and Google-owned YouTube maintain public repositories of the posts that campaigns and their allies pay to promote, with limited information on whom those ads targeted and how much an advertiser spent.

But a wide range of other tech companies — including Hulu and similar video services — share

“I have Hulu for entertainment, not so I can be tortured with political ads.” a Hulu user, on the service’s forum

much less about political ads, even as they reap big bucks and emerge as key battlegrounds in the presidential race.

Like much of the Web, these video portals allow political campaigns and their allies to target their messages at specific categories of viewers. A political candidate or group might create an ad buy calibrated to voters based on their geographic area, age, gender or likely socioeconomic status.

Some streaming platforms appear to try to entice well-heeled political advertisers with the promise of near-pinpoint accuracy. Sling TV, a Web-based television offering from Dish Network, participates in an ad-selling consortium that grants campaigns “precise demographic or voter attribute targeting” on streaming and traditional television.

Hulu, for its part, attracts advertisers with potential access to a “younger and more engaged audience” through “personalized and precise targeting,” though the company does not elaborate in materials it offers online.

Seeing an opportunity, Democratic presidential contenders also have ramped up their streaming offensive. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has spent at least $326,000 on political ads on Hulu between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission records. A week before voters began to caucus in Iowa, former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign announced its own Hulu ad blitz. And Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., spent more than $100,000 to advertise on Roku in November, according to FEC spending records, along with additional ad spending on Hulu.

Members of Congress, led by Democrats Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a presidential candidate, and Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), have sought to place regulations, requiring all major websites to keep a running archive of political ads and their targets. But partisan squabbling has stymied their bill, known as the Honest Ads Act, from coming to a vote. n

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Nation

ICE’s free rein on Md. license data

BY D REW H ARWELL AND E RIN C OX

U.

S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been permitted to run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland driver’s license photos without first seeking state or court approval, state officials said — access that goes far beyond what other states allow and that alarms immigration activists in a state that grants special driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

More than 275,000 such licenses have been issued statewide since 2013, when the state became the first on the East Coast to defy federal guidelines and allow undocumented immigrants to obtain a license without having to provide proof of legal status. The technology now under scrutiny could let an ICE official run a photograph of an unknown person through the system and see if any potentially undocumented immigrants are returned as a match.

“It’s a betrayal of immigrants’ trust for the [state] to turn around and let ICE run warrantless searches on their faces,” said Harrison Rudolph, a senior associate at Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “It’s a bait-andswitch. . . . ICE is using biometric information in the shadows, without government notice or public approval, to hunt down the most vulnerable people.”

A top Maryland law enforcement official told state lawmakers in November that ICE officials had logged nearly 100 sessions in the state’s driver’s license database since 2018, according to a previously unpublicized letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Each session could have included multiple searches of the Maryland Image Repository System database, which includes the photos, names, addresses and other personal information of approximately 7 million drivers statewide.

The battle to grant driver’s li-

Donna Burton

The agency can run facial-recognition searches without a warrant, alarming immigration activists censes to undocumented immigrants spanned more than a decade in Maryland and is viewed by immigrant rights advocates as a capstone victory. In 2013, Maryland lawmakers voted to create the licenses despite federal laws requiring proof of immigration status on state-issued identification cards, following arguments from advocates that the change would boost road safety by requiring driver-safety tests and insurance coverage.

But immigrant rights groups now say ICE has used that legal protection to target undocumented immigrants who consented to offering their information and sat for a photograph.

ICE has for years tapped the driver’s license databases of states such as Utah, Vermont and Washington while attempting to match a photo to a person’s identity, as The Post first reported last year.

But in those cases, ICE agents had to request that a state official run the search. Maryland records show that ICE officials across the

country can independently search without outside approval.

“They have a wide-open door to be able to search through anything in this database,” said Maryland Sen. Clarence K. Lam (DHoward), who spent years pressing the state officials to explain the extent of the program.

“They’ve not been forthcoming in their willingness to [stop it] or coming up with solutions.”

It was unclear Wednesday how this arrangement originated or when the ICE searches began in Maryland. Lam said he gleaned from meetings with agency officials that it started with a memorandum of understanding around 2012, raising the possibility that lawmakers who intended to champion the rights of undocumented immigrants created licenses for them that were readily searchable by federal immigration authorities.

The driver’s license data is recorded by the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration and is included in a broader database,

John Wagner, second from left, a deputy executive assistant commissioner for Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations, testifies before the House last month on the Department of Homeland Security’s use of facialrecognition technologies.

alongside jail mug shots, that is maintained by the state agency that runs the state’s prisons.

Kevin Combs, the chief information officer for Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services who wrote the November letter, provided no further details in the letter about who was given database access, the reasons for the searches or who was identified.

ICE spokeswoman Dani Bennett said that the agency would not discuss specific law enforcement tactics or techniques and that it obeys federal law in its investigations. ICE’s facial-recognition searches, she added, are not “routinely” used for civil immigration enforcement and are instead primarily used by special agents investigating child exploitation or cybercrime.

Walther-Rodriguez, the Baltimore-area director for CASA, said her group grew suspicious after raids and detentions in recent months and questioned how the immigrants had been found. In many of the detentions, she said, immigrants had recently acquired state driver’s licenses. One man detained three weeks ago in Rockville said he was told by the arresting officer that he was found through Maryland’s MVA system.

The group now says ICE’s open access to MVA photos and other data was a main reason for the detentions. Many immigrants, she said, pursued a driver’s license because they thought it was the right thing to do as they drove to work or dropped off children at school and now feel panicked and deceived by how their data has been used.

The Maryland General Assembly held hearings Thursday on two bills that would require ICE to get a warrant before it can scan Marylanders’ photos.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said he does not support the pending legislation. “The governor opposes any legislation that would hinder cooperation with federal law enforcement or make Maryland a sanctuary state,” Hogan spokesman Michael Ricci said in a statement. n

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The drug crisis shifts to the West J OEL A CHENBACH in San Francisco BY

D

ownstairs at the medical examiner’s office, the bodies lay side by side on stainless-steel tables and shelves, shrouded and anonymized in white bags, each person identifiable only by a protruding foot that had been toe-tagged.

Upstairs, Luke Rodda, the chief forensic toxicologist, looked over his morning docket and the terse reports from first responders.

Male, 33, “prior history of fentanyl overdose,” found at bus stop.

Male, 27, “white powder in baggie.”

Male, 51, found by construction worker, syringe next to him.

There had been at least nine apparent drug-related deaths over the previous three days in late January, Rodda said.

“This is our new norm now,” he said.

These individual tragedies are part of a national drug crisis that has shifted west. Drug overdoses are rising in many states west of the Mississippi, and dramatically so in California, even as they are falling across much of the East.

This trend has only recently become clear in government mortality data, including new numbers released in February. The increase in overdoses in the West is an ominous development that comes after a short period of progress in bringing down the overall drug-overdose death toll.

Drug deaths dropped 4 percent nationwide from 2017 to 2018, according to final mortality statistics released Jan. 30 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar heralded the new numbers as evidence that the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the overdose epidemic “are beginning to make a significant difference.”

But the provisional CDC statistics released a few weeks ago, which include estimated underreporting of deaths by medical examiners, show a slight uptick in fatal overdoses nationally over

Nick Otto for The Washington Post

National progress in reducing fatal overdoses stalls as fentanyl floods California and other states the first half of 2019.

In California, fatal drug overdoses over the previous 12 months increased 13.4 percent between July 2018 and July 2019, the last month for which the CDC has compiled provisional data — an additional 728 deaths.

In contrast, Illinois’s fatal drug deaths were down 8 percent, Pennsylvania’s down 10 percent, Michigan’s down 13 percent and Maine’s down 20 percent.

The overdoses in the West are driven largely by opioids, particularly illicit fentanyl, a synthetic drug that is roughly 50 times as powerful as heroin. Fentanyl has finally arrived in force in the western United States. Because fentanyl is so potent, and its dosage so easily miscalibrated, it is killing people who previously had managed their addictions for years.

Historically, the West Coast opioid market has been dominated by black tar heroin, a gunky substance not easily mixed with white powder fentanyl. That is

the orthodox explanation for why fentanyl first became popular in the eastern United States, where white powder heroin has historically been favored and drug dealers could more easily blend fentanyl and heroin.

Fentanyl started becoming more common here around 2015.

The medical examiner’s latest, provisional numbers tell an alarming story: Deaths in San Francisco from fentanyl and/or heroin jumped from 79 in 2017 to 134 in 2018, and then more than doubled to 290 in 2019.

People are dying from other drugs as well, with a large spike in deaths linked to the potent stimulant methamphetamine. Efforts to cut off access to meth precursors sold in pharmacies have helped shut down local meth labs like the ones made famous in the TV show “Breaking Bad.” But that opened a new market for the Mexican drug cartels, said Daniel Comeaux, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Francisco division.

Paul Harkin of the social service center GLIDE hands out fentanyl detection packets and the antioverdose medication naloxone in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco.

Fentanyl, about 50 times as powerful as heroin, started becoming more common in the city around 2015.

“You have no mom and pop labs anymore because so much is coming from the Mexican cartels,” Comeaux said in an interview in his office in the heart of the Tenderloin district.

Harm reduction advocates emphasize that the overdose crisis is driven by social factors, including economic inequality, the housing crisis that is tied to a rise in homelessness in San Francisco, systemic racism and the criminalization of drug use. They say the overdose epidemic should be treated as a matter of public health and not as a law enforcement issue.

“The war on drugs has created this problem,” said Eliza Wheeler, a leader in the harm reduction community.

Paul Harkin, director of harm reduction at GLIDE, a multi-service social center, pointed out that testing kits, including chemically treated strips similar to pregnancy tests, could help users know what’s in their drugs and help them avoid overdosing. “Unfortunately, America is very puritanical. We have to decriminalize in the way Portugal did, and we have to do drug testing so we know what’s in the drug supply,” he said.

That is a problem with fentanyl, which delivers an immediate, powerful high but can also render the user unconscious and unbreathing almost instantly.

The statistics of drug use and overdoses do little to capture the gritty reality of life on the downtown streets of San Francisco. The drug use is in plain sight in the Tenderloin and the South of Market neighborhoods. One morning on Market Street recently, a young man in a hoodie was bent over at a bus stop in front of a hotel, injecting himself with a needle. He had slit both pants legs to improve access to his legs. One leg was bleeding. He looked dazed as he stood up, and did not respond when asked his name and whether he needed assistance.

Asked again whether he was okay, he looked puzzled and said, “I feel like there’s something alive in my body and I don’t know what it is.” n

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World

Syrian children live, and die, in terror K AREEM F AHIM in Idlib, Syria BY

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he market bombing had driven Ahmed and his family from their town in southern Idlib province and onto the road, to join hundreds of thousands of other people searching for safety, the teen recalled. A Russian plane had circled overhead, and then the bombs fell, obliterating a car, its driver and other people who were passing by on motorcycles.

The attack a few weeks ago was terrible but hardly the worst he had seen. Five years ago, an airstrike had killed dozens of people in the town square.

Now, at 13, Ahmed is living in the clammy basement of a sports stadium in Idlib city, with hundreds of other displaced people who have crowded in over recent weeks. As he spoke, warplanes could be heard circling overhead again. Guards warned people to stay indoors. But Ahmed — the stoic survivor of a war and no longer a child — didn’t flinch.

“Safety comes from God,” he said.

The past few months have been especially brutal in Idlib province, with a Syrian government offensive producing a humanitarian crisis almost unparalleled during nearly a decade of war in Syria. As Syria seeks to recapture rebelheld Idlib, where children make up a majority of the population, the fighting has chased about 1 million people from their homes. Many had previously fled to the province from elsewhere in the country, and they are now trapped between the approaching battlefront and a sealed Turkish border to the north.

The offensive, waged during some of the worst winter weather in years, has offered a lesson in the endless ways young people can be made to suffer — as victims of the violence, as war refugees or because of the awful things they have witnessed. Infants have died in the cold or suffocated in their tents as their parents try to keep them warm. Children have withered away because of severe mal-

Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos

Idlib province’s largely young population suffers in the cold as a government offensive rages on nutrition as their parents desperately search for food. In bedrooms or schoolyards, they have been blasted by airstrikes or artillery shells.

Parents who spoke to reporters during a rare visit to Idlib this past week said their children have also struggled with the mental toll of the violence and have become withdrawn or alarmingly aggressive.

Everywhere in Idlib province there are children — cleaning their tent encampments, picking through trash for food and stealing a few moments to play.

Children account for more than half of the province’s 3 million people, according to the group Save the Children, making them frequent targets of what human rights activists have said are indiscriminate attacks on civilians carried out by the Syrian government and its Russian allies.

The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has justified its offensive in part by saying the campaign is aimed at defeat-

ing Islamist extremists who largely control Idlib province and nearby areas. Russia is trying to help its ally recapture all of Syria, nine years after a revolt erupted against Assad’s rule.

Assad’s forces have directly targeted children, including on Tuesday, when they attacked at least 10 schools in Idlib, according to the Syrian American Medical Society, or SAMS, which supports hospitals in the province. At least 20 civilians were killed in attacks throughout the day. Half were children, the group said.

“It feels like death is around us, everywhere,” said Ikrem, a doctor at a maternal hospital in Idlib city supported by SAMS. “There is no food. There are no houses. There is no good mental structure,” she added. She asked that her last name not be published, because she expects Assad’s forces will control Idlib province soon.

At least two newborns have frozen to death in recent weeks, she said. “Every day, there are

Shams, 11, center, holds her brother last month in a cave in Idlib province. She and her family found shelter there after fleeing the Aleppo countryside about a month ago. The moist conditions have been difficult for Shams, who has a heart defect that has left her short of breath.

large numbers of child injuries.”

Mothers arrive at the hospital after spending long periods in displacement camps, in “a very poor maternal condition,” she said. Low birth weight and preterm babies are common.

Dozens of children have been sheltering for weeks with their families in two caves in Idlib’s western countryside. When the families arrived, they had to excavate mounds of soil and rock to make the caves livable.

The caves are barely that. For weeks, there has been no heat.

The moisture has given everyone chest infections. The conditions have been especially difficult for Shams, an 11-year-old girl with a heart defect that left her short of breath, even in the best conditions.

“It hurts here, when I walk,” she said, placing her hand on her chest.

She talked about school; her favorite subjects had been Arabic and math. But there was no time for school now. There had not been for years. She had reached only the third grade.

“Their favorite subject now is bread,” said Kamal Wilfi, a father in the cave who cradled his 5-yearold son, Mohammed. The boy suffers from a blood condition, and his growth has been stunted. In his father’s arms, swaddled in a blanket, he looked no older than 2.

Walkie-talkies, carried by guards at the cave camp, crackle with the latest warning of an air attack.

Everywhere and always in Idlib, there is the thunderclap of shelling or the menacing roar of the jets.

The sounds of war also haunt the family of 2-year-old Mohamed Hassan Agha and his infant sister, Najjah Hassan Agha, who both died in an air attack on their home four weeks ago, according to Mouwaia Hassan Agha, a cousin.

The boy had been terrified of the planes, his father recalled.

When they circled, “he would run to me and try to hide.”

“In other things,” the father added, “he was courageous.” n

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Crimson Tide As Jeff Sessions runs again for the Senate, longtime supporters will have to weigh their old affections for him against their allegiance to Trump

BY D AVID

M ONTGOMERY

H

as anybody ever heard of Senator Jeff Sessions?”

Donald Trump teased a boisterous crowd of thousands in Mobile, Ala., in August 2015. The people erupted in cheers. They loved their senator — just as they were coming to love the New York real estate mogul who had been campaigning for president for only two months and was already thrashing the GOP establishment and leading the polls. Like Trump, Sessions bucked establishment Republicans, and the people of Alabama thanked him for it. Just the year before, they had reelected him to his fourth term, unopposed by any Republican or Democrat, with 97 percent of the vote.

“We have a man here who really helped me,” Trump told the crowd.

“He is the one person I sought his counsel. Because he’s been so spoton, he’s so highly respected.” Trump scanned the football stadium.

“Where’s Jeff? Get over here, Jeff.”

Trump’s face relaxed into a grin as he watched Sessions bound up to the stage.

Sessions brandished a white Make America Great Again hat. The crowd cheered. He put it on and squared his shoulders. He took off

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Jeff Sessions speaks to the crowd at an event hosted by the Marshall County Republican Club in Guntersville, Ala., in January.

the hat before stepping to the microphone. Sessions wasn’t ready to go all the way yet. Total allegiance came six months later at another rally, when Sessions put on a red MAGA hat. This time, he didn’t take it off.

As the first sitting senator to endorse Trump, Sessions supplied an early, invaluable shot of institutional credibility at a time when other GOP lawmakers were dubious or openly hostile. Sessions traveled with Trump, advised him on national security issues, helped refine Trump’s immigration message and served as an ambassador to the establishment.

After Trump’s victory, the presidentelect presented his nominee for attorney general to a jubilant crowd back in Mobile. “He’s someone I’m very proud to call a friend,” Trump told the group. “Jeff is an amazing man.”

How quickly the bromance soured, at least on Trump’s end. Following Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation mere weeks after his confirmation as attorney general, Trump launched a sustained war of furious disparagement and public humiliation. “He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself,’ ” Trump told Fox News in 2018. “I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’ ” He complained to Hill.TV: “I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.”

Photos by Elijah Nouvelage For The Washington Post

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Cover Story

Trump finally demanded Sessions’s resignation in November 2018, later calling the former attorney general his “biggest mistake.”

The hypersonic rise and pitiless fall of Trump favorites is by now a familiar arc in Washington.

Yet unlike so many others whom Trump has given up on, Sessions hasn’t given up on Trump.

He still believes. He still praises. Arguably, he has no choice, because he was an apostle of Trumpism — tough on immigration, skeptical of trade deals — before Trump himself entered politics.

Now Sessions seeks to be readmitted to the Eden of his own making. On Nov. 7, a year to the day after Trump fired him, Sessions, who had largely disappeared from the public stage, said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that he would run again for the Senate from Alabama. He also released a video declaring his unwavering fealty to Trump. Speaking earnestly to the camera, Sessions said, “When I left President Trump’s Cabinet, did I write a tell-all book? No. Did I go on CNN and attack the president? Nope. Have I said a cross word about our president? Not one time.”

And yet, it is far from clear that this will be enough to recover his place in the hearts of Alabama voters. Sessions, 73, is today a somewhat diminished figure in Alabama, where the president remains more popular than in almost any other state. In the March 3 primary, Sessions faces his toughest race in decades — against opponents including Tommy Tuberville, the well-known former football coach at Auburn University, and Bradley Byrne, the congressman from the Mobile area. The winner will take on Democrat Doug Jones, who in 2017 won a special election to finish Sessions’s term against controversial former judge Roy Moore (who is also running in this year’s Republican primary but is trailing).

Alabama Republicans now find themselves sorting out complicated feelings about Trump and Sessions: Can they pull the lever both for their hero president and for the former attorney general who let him down? The race is, at one level, a saga about a politician who has been cast out by Trump and now seeks to recuperate what he has lost. But it is also a test case of the difference between voters’ allegiance to Trump’s policies — policies that, after all, have no more faithful advocate than Jeff Sessions — and their personal devotion to Trump himself.

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arbara Clem appeared angry — and she wasn’t hiding it from Jeff Sessions. On a Tuesday evening in January, both Clem and the would-be senator were at a gathering of the Marshall County Republican Club in a packed oyster restaurant in Guntersville. A retired corporate counselor, Clem was wearing a red hat with “MAGA” spelled out in costume jewels that she had applied herself. Before his remarks to the group, Sessions was greeting people and stopped by her seat. An animated discussion ensued. At one point Sessions and Clem started wagging fingers at each other.

“I’m not going to vote for somebody who goes wobbly,” Clem told me later. “If he had talked to

the president and the president said, ‘You need to recuse yourself,’ that would’ve been fine. But he didn’t do that. He didn’t have the courage to stand up and face the president. He hid behind this, whatever, article” — she meant a Justice Department rule — “that he’s putting [out], and I just don’t like that.” I asked Clem if she always used to vote for Sessions. “Yeah, he was great!

But this just — this to me has tainted his whole service as far as I’m concerned.”

“Wobbly” was an interesting word for Clem to use — one that she probably got from Sessions himself. During his talk to the group, Sessions had told the story of Margaret Thatcher instructing George H.W. Bush not to go “wobbly” on her during the 1991 Gulf War. Sessions recalled telling voters when he first ran for Senate in 1996 that he wouldn’t go wobbly on them, and he made the same vow on this night.

Yet it is exactly perceptions of wobbliness and its opposite — resolve — that have taken center stage in this race. Talking with scores of GOP voters from Huntsville to Mobile and back — 100 percent of whom are enthusiastic supporters of Trump — I found a range of opinion as people described how they are wrestling with Sessions’s degree of loyalty to the president. The debate is roiling and anguished, even though the Justice Department rule that led to Sessions’s recusal is clear: You can’t supervise an investigation into a person or organization — in this case, the Trump campaign — if you’re connected with it. Sessions appeared to have no choice, but that detail now seems beside the point for Trump and his most ardent supporters.

Sessions took the rare step of discussing the recusal in his address to the gathering in the restaurant. “I usually don’t talk about it, but I got asked a couple times, ‘Why did you recuse yourself ?’ ” he told the group. “Let me just tell you, there are rules in the Department of Justice, there are regulations in the Department of Justice. I was a part of the campaign. I was the national defense chairman of the campaign. I had an official title in the doggone campaign. . . . And if the attorney general

Above: Barbara Clem, left, gets into a heated discussion with Jeff Sessions at a gathering of the Marshall County Republican Club in a packed oyster restaurant in Guntersville, Ala., in January.

Right: Flags supporting President Trump are seen outside a store in Laceys Spring, Ala., in January.

doesn’t follow the rules, how can he expect anybody else to follow the rules?” The last sentence earned spontaneous applause and a cry of “That’s right!”

Sessions seemed buoyed by that response when he and I sat down at a nearby table later to chat. “You know, the president was very frustrated and made his thoughts known,” he said.

“So that’s a reality, and you can’t erase that, and a lot of people believe in him. . . . I don’t usually talk about the recusal, and why, and defend myself about it. But I thought it was probably well received tonight when I did. Maybe we should do more of that. But I’m not into arguing about this. This is really about the future, about who can advance our agenda, who’s got a record of it.” As to what he has to offer that future as a senator, he said: “I think the Republican Party has the potential to lead the country for a decade or more, but we’ve got to consolidate what Trump has done, and give it legs.” He said he could help “build a more people-oriented party that can govern and fend off what I consider to be the extreme socialist left.”

I asked if he feels as though he must, in some sense, prove himself all over again to Alabama voters after his mixed experience as attorney general. “I don’t expect to get 97 percent against some good candidates,” he said, alluding to his unopposed romp in 2014. “And they’ve been at this for a year. I’m surprised, really, that we’ve moved so fast and seem to be in a good position.

But it’s a real race.”

I told him that I had met some people in the restaurant who had voted for him before but wouldn’t again. “Look, I’ve been around a long time,” Sessions said. “You play the ball where it lies. And there’s no doubt that a number of people, strong Trump supporters, you know, believe his critique of me. And I haven’t been around [to] defensively explain it.” It had been a few years since he had been able to make his customary annual visits to all 67 Alabama counties. “So that did leave a period of time that maybe the narrative that I did wrong on the recusal was a little deeper,” he explained. “But I don’t think it’s as bad as I thought.”

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essions spent the past year enjoying time with his grandchildren, traveling the country speaking to law enforcement groups, and pondering a run for Senate. “He prayed about it a lot,” Rick Dearborn, Sessions’s former chief of staff in the Senate, told me. A factor in his considerations was not wanting his public service to end on the note of being fired

by Trump. “At the end of the day, everybody in public life wants to be able to write their own chapter,” Dearborn says.

But Sessions’s recent history has had the effect of making Trump the leading issue in the GOP primary: Which candidate has been or would be the strongest advocate and ally for Trump? What role might the president play in the race? Trump told associates in the fall that if Sessions tried to return to the Senate, he would attack him. So far that is looking like a Trumpian bluff.

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“I hope that the president will stay out of this race,” Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a strong Sessions supporter and fervent admirer of Trump, told me in his office on Capitol Hill in December. When Sessions announced, Shelby quickly organized 10 other Republican senators to co-sign “an open letter to conservatives” endorsing Sessions’s candidacy. It was a subtle attempt at preempting a presidential endorsement going the other way. “That’d split the caucus up,” Shelby said.

If “the president got involved and half the Senate was on the other side, that’d be a nasty fight.” Shelby — who thinks Sessions “probably did the right thing to recuse himself” — is convinced that, despite Trump’s scorn, his former colleague’s name recognition and deep connections to conservative circles would give him the easiest path to defeating Doug Jones.

Still, Alabama Republicans have been reading the Trump tea leaves closely. They hung on the president’s words when reporters asked his position on the race the day after Sessions announced. “Well, I haven’t gotten involved,” Trump said. “I saw he said very nice things about me last night, but we’ll have to see. . . . I haven’t made a determination.” Trump couldn’t help adding: “He’s got tough competition.” Voters also parsed the significance of Trump sitting with Byrne and other elected officials in a box at the Alabama-LSU football game in November. Then, a month later, when Byrne visited the White House for an education roundtable, Trump posed with him alone for a picture in the Oval Office (and would

“I don’t usually talk about the recusal . . . and defend myself about it,” Sessions says.

“But I thought it was probably well received tonight. . . .

Maybe we should do more of that.”

later tout his education bill in the State of the Union). But the president offered no public endorsement.

There has been scant public polling in the race so far, mostly from potentially biased sources. The Sessions campaign released a poll in late January showing him at 43 percent, followed by Byrne at 22 percent and Tuberville at 21 percent. The poll said Sessions’s overall favorability in the state was 72 percent. But the influential Alabama Farmers Federation, whose grass-roots political wing, FarmPAC, endorsed Tuberville, released a poll in early December that had Sessions at 35 percent, Tuberville at 31 percent and Byrne at 12 percent. If no candidate surpasses 50 percent in the March 3 primary, the top two will compete in a runoff. Sessions has not faced a runoff since his first Senate campaign.

In the end, Trump may have second thoughts about sticking his neck out in another Senate race in Alabama, where his record is 0-for-2. In the special election primary runoff after Sessions vacated the seat to join his administration, Trump endorsed Luther Strange over Roy Moore, and Moore won. In the general, he endorsed Moore over Jones, despite allegations that Moore made unwanted sexual advances toward teenage girls as an adult decades ago — and Jones won, handing the Democrats their first Senate seat from Alabama in a generation.

For now, the candidates have been energetically filling the vacuum of Trump’s absence with a competition for who can pledge the strongest allegiance to the president.

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ouston, Ala., set among the pines and lakeshores in the northwest part of the state, is the bull’s eye of Trump Country in Alabama. It sits within Winston County, where Trump got over 89 percent of the vote in 2016, his strongest support in the state. The Houston precinct itself went even more heavily for Trump, about 95 percent, according to local officials. In recognition of that extraordinary result, Trump sent a letter of thanks to the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner, says Tim Wadsworth, who represents the area in the state legislature.

If anywhere could serve as a barometer of Sessions’s support among Trump voters, it would be Houston. Sessions made one of his first campaign stops of the new year at Chef Troy’s Talk of the Town Restaurant, next door to the fire hall where the Houston precinct votes. More than a dozen local officials and party activists ate lunch with the candidate at a long table. Sessions gave no speech but had brief private conversations with each guest.

“I just think he knows the Trump policies, and I think he follows the Trump policies and he’s a heavy Trump supporter,” Wadsworth, a fellow Trump originalist who had joined Sessions at that early rally in Mobile, told me at Chef Troy’s.

“Bradley Byrne, Tommy Tuberville, none of those folks that are running were there in August of ’15. These folks that want to be associated by name down the road, they weren’t there from Day 1.”

Sessions “did what he thought he was supposed to do,” Randy Lee, a member of the county school board, said of the recusal. “He felt like that’s what the Constitution told him to do, and I respect him for his decision, because it eventually cost him his job. He wouldn’t be sitting right there now if he had gone along with the president, I’m sure. I think they’ll work together when they get back there.”

Those were voices of official Winston County, the institutional view. Sessions has always found support (and campaign contributions) from institutional sectors of Alabama — political, industrial, commercial, civic, agricultural (not counting the recent defection of the farmers PAC to Tuberville).

I left Chef Troy’s to find what others might think. Across the street is the sprawling work yard of Houston Wood, which specializes in giving a look of weathered timelessness to freshcut boards. I met the operation’s founder, Ellis Wade, in his trailer office. “I’m a Trump guy,” Wade declared. “Obamanomics was not good for us at all. . . . The economy has never been this good. We had the busiest December we ever had.”

He used to be a Sessions guy, too — “bless his heart” — but he said he hadn’t bothered to attend the lunch for Sessions at Chef Troy’s. Now, he said, “I’m a Tuberville man.” Many factors went into his conversion, including Sessions’s increasing resemblance to a “career politician.”

Wade read an interview with Tuberville in the local Daily Mountain Eagle and was impressed.

When I looked up the piece later, it consisted of Tuberville taking Trumpian positions on immigration, health care, economics and trade, plus

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some choice zingers such as: “There is one person that changes climate in this country and that is God.” “I didn’t see that he really needed to excuse his self,” Wade continued about Sessions. “I think he was looking at all of the pressure that was coming from the left, and there’s so much of it. Listen, I felt for him. I felt for the man, I really did.” I asked if it had been hard to hear all the harsh things Trump said about Sessions. “It was terrible hard,” Wade said, “because he has represented Alabama so good.”

Wade’s voice was sorrowful, as if he were lamenting a family member gone astray. I heard that tone many times across Alabama, as voters puzzled over what had become of the Sessions they had known before his doomed tour in the Trump administration. “I feel like that he’s lost a lot of respect,” Wade said. “And the thing of it is, there is probably no finer person than Jeff Sessions.”

A few miles down a winding road, in the town of Arley, I stopped at a coffee shop. A “Trump 2020” T-shirt was for sale for $15.

At a table sat Ronnie Scott and a friend. “I probably won’t support him, and I always have in the past,” said Scott. “If he was younger, he would have a chance to rebuild his credibility, but I don’t think at his age — to me, it’s a good time for him to just fade away.”

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nlike many Southern conservatives of a certain age who started as Democrats early in their careers before switching to the GOP — including Richard Shelby and Bradley Byrne — Sessions has been a self-consciously active Republican his entire adult life.

He started reading the conservative journal National Review in high school. “I was able to tell Mr. Buckley” — the late National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. — “ ‘Mr. Buckley, you warped my brain when I was a teenager, and I’ve never recovered from it!’ ” Sessions said recently on the campaign trail.

In a television ad during his first race for the Senate, a boyish-looking Sessions sketches aspects of the worldview that would define him: “I am a conservative, I believe in fundamental values, I believe there is truth. I believe there are principles which are unchanging, that there is a God in heaven who orders this universe, that honesty and hard work and discipline of our millions of Americans is the key to success.”

His victory margins got larger with each election as he became more popular with voters and invincible to potential opponents. Presaging Trump’s top campaign issue a decade before Trump took it up, Sessions was a leading opponent of any compromise on illegal immigration and a proponent of a border fence. He was already at work trying to scuttle the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in 2015 before Trump joined the cause and delivered the coup de grace. Stephen Miller, architect and advocate for Trump’s anti-immigrant, Americafirst portfolio in the White House, got his start as communications director in Sessions’s Senate office.

There is a deep well of affection and nostalgia for this version of Sessions among Alabama primary voters — the pre-recusal Sessions, the crusading conservative senator.

For many it’s enough to compensate for the ambiguities of his two-year interlude as attorney general.

“I think he’s an amazing man,” said Joy Gunn, a registered nurse for the state veterans home in Bay Minette, the county seat of Baldwin County, outside Mobile, where Trump got 77 percent of the vote in 2016. She and her husband were having the lunch buffet at Street’s Seafood Restaurant. “He cares about the people of Alabama,” Gunn said. “He cares about the economy here. He’s always been straightforward. I was kind of sad when he went to Washington because we were losing him in Alabama, and I’m really excited about the fact that he’s coming back.” In case there was any doubt, she added: “President Trump is my president. I’ll vote for him 50 times, I don’t care.”

But she sees strength, not wobbliness, in Sessions’s recusal. “I have a lot more respect for him standing by what he believed in than if he had just buddied up with President Trump to do what he wanted him to do.”

“Sessions is my man,” said Arthur Glennon Gunn, Joy’s husband and a retired Marine. He added, “Now, I love President Trump. I’ll vote

From top: Pete Weaver at Street’s Seafood Restaurant in Bay Minette, Ala. Weaver said he plans to vote for Byrne; Joy Gunn at Street’s. She sees strength, not wobbliness, in Sessions’s recusal.

“I have a lot more respect for him standing by what he believed in than if he had just buddied up with President Trump to do what he wanted him to do,” she says.

Opposite page: Sessions before speaking at the Alabama Sheriffs Association conference in Montgomery.

for him, I don’t care what he’s running for.” I asked how he can reconcile his love for Trump and his support for Sessions given Trump’s own opinion of Sessions. “The president is the main man,” Gunn said. “And if he didn’t think Jeff Sessions should have excused his self, that’s his opinion. He’s the boss, and when he makes a decision, we all should support it, whether it’s right, whether it’s wrong.”

What gets lost in the Sessions narrative is that while Trump spent nearly two years belittling his attorney general, Sessions went about methodically dismantling significant portions of the legacy of Barack Obama’s Justice Department. “He was a staunch ally of the president’s, and that was the cruel irony of their relationship,” Charles J. Cooper, a former assistant attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and a friend of Sessions’s, told me. “He became, and for two years I believe was, President Trump’s most consequentially effective Cabinet minister.”

Under Sessions, the Justice Department rolled back federal oversight of troubled police departments, defended Trump’s immigration crackdowns and travel restrictions, reversed workplace-discrimination protections for transgender people, encouraged federal agencies to take a more conservative approach to disputes over religious freedom and became more skeptical of alleged voting rights violations. In his resignation letter to Trump, Sessions emphasized other achievements, including prosecuting a record number of violent offenders, targeting transnational gangs and cracking down on enablers of the opioid epidemic. He also took credit for a drop in violent crime and homicides.

As striking as this record is — whether one admires it or not — voters I spoke with in Alabama had not heard much about it. Trump effectively defined Sessions as the recuser, as if Sessions had done nothing to advance the president’s agenda in the 20 months afterward.

“Sessions kind of disappointed me as an AG, mainly because he didn’t do an incredible amount,” said Michael Pinkston, a software engineer I met eating a bowl of ramen in Huntsville. “But as a senator, I loved him. So I don’t know if I would vote for him again.” When I mentioned some of Sessions’s record as attorney general, Pinkston replied: “It wasn’t things that made the headlines. What made the headlines was recusing himself from the Russia probe.”

“I’m so disappointed that he was there and then you didn’t hear anything else about Jeff Sessions for the entire time he was there,” said Sue Graham, an interpreter for the deaf from Sylacauga, who is voting for Tuberville. “I’m sure he did something right, but I’m not aware of anything that he did.”

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he phone lines were jammed with a half-dozen callers stacked up on newstalk station 93.1 FM WACV in the state capital of Montgomery — slogan: “All the headlines the mainstream media won’t touch!”

— where co-hosts Joey Clark and Jack Camp-

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bell chew over Alabama and national politics for three hours every weekday morning. On this Friday in January, they had asked listeners to call in to their show “News and Views” and say whom they were voting for in the Senate primary and why. They also invited me to the studio, a detail they shared on the air. “He’s here on a fact-finding mission,” Campbell told listeners. “You know, Yankee coming down here and getting in our business.”

Tuberville jumped out to an early lead in the radio straw poll. Because he’s not a politician was the leading reason his supporters gave to vote for the man they simply refer to as “Coach.” They also liked his open emphasis of his Christian faith and his promise to make education a priority.

Soon enough, callers for Byrne began chiming in, as if in response to the Tuberville surge.

They said Byrne was better prepared for the blood sport of Washington. “We don’t need a football coach” in the Senate, said one. They praised Byrne’s record of cleaning up problems in the Alabama community college system as a state official and his advocacy for Trump in Congress.

The radio hosts knew an organized call-in campaign when they saw it. “It seems to me that the Bradley Byrne people have been calling their people, because they’re all calling at the same time,” Campbell teased on the air.

“With good talking points, I might add.”

I kept waiting for Sessions partisans to mount a response, but they weren’t dialing in.

“We have, like, two or three callers that are still in the Sessions camp that call regularly,” Clark told me off-air, during a station break. “And also, a lot of his supporters I would guess tend

“He was a staunch ally of the president’s, and that was the cruel irony of their relationship,” says Charles J. Cooper, a former Reagan official and Sessions’s friend.

to be a little older, have been around the block, so they don’t necessarily engage quite as much in talk radio.” Clark, who said he was still undecided on his primary vote, added: “I think Jeff Sessions may have had to recuse himself, but I think he was so quiet for so long that it was jarring to see him on Tucker Carlson making that announcement. It was like: Where’s this guy been? And so he needs to do a lot to repair the reputation just from his stint with the Trump administration.”

After 90 minutes, Campbell announced the results of the call-in poll, for whatever they might be worth: 24 calls for Tuberville, 14 for Byrne, 3 for Sessions.

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iolent thunderstorms and likely tornadoes were forecast, but that didn’t stop 150 people from filling a community room in the Vestavia Hills Public Library, outside Birmingham, for the monthly meeting of the Mid Alabama Republican Club on a Saturday morning in January. They wanted to hear from Jeff Sessions, after having listened to Tommy Tuberville and Bradley Byrne at previous meetings.

Here, as everywhere, some Alabama Republicans were still making up their minds, still taking the measure of the man they used to reflexively send to the Senate.

Before the program, as Sessions mingled, club board member Randy Mazer, who used to own a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, was chatting with Mike Morgan, also a board member. “I hope he addresses the fact of his recusal,” said Mazer, who was thinking about voting for Tuberville but hadn’t decided.

KLMNO Weekly

A few minutes later, Sessions passed near and Mazer seized the opportunity. They shook hands. “I hope you’re going to address your recusal,” Mazer said point blank.

Sessions stared at him and measured his words. “Well, we don’t need to argue that every day,” he said amiably. “I don’t want to do anything that — ” “I think a lot of people want to hear it,” Mazer interrupted.

“Okay, all right,” Sessions said. Then he leaned in close to Mazer as if to pass on a secret.

“You know what I’m seeing?” he said. “The media has been trying to get me relentlessly to [criticize] Trump. . . . I refuse because I don’t want to undermine him in any way, you understand that? So it’s a very difficult thing. Anyway, I get you.” After Sessions moved on, Mazer told me he agrees that the media is trying to exploit Sessions’s rift with Trump — but he still wanted to hear Sessions talk about the recusal.

Sessions had a much warmer exchange with Luisa Kay Reyes, a lawyer, who afterward told me that he had been right to recuse himself: “I think it speaks very well for Sessions how gallant he’s been about the whole matter. . . .

It’s a quality he has, and it’s why we want him back as senator.”

When it came time for Sessions to address the group as a whole, he stepped away from the lectern toward the people and adopted the deferential tone of a candidate alert to the warning signs that he has something to earn all over again.

He reminded the audience of his battles against “amnesty” and globalism; of how, despite having supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he agrees with Trump that foreign entanglements must be more carefully scrutinized; and of his prowess as a culture warrior: “Y’all know one of the biggest things in America today is whether or not that people actually believe there is a truth and a right and wrong. This crowd, this left-wing group, are socialist, they’re secularist, they believe in their revolution, and they don’t believe in tradition and order and law and the Constitution. It’s a big deal. I feel strongly about it, and if we do this thing right, the American people agree with us. Don’t you think?” Yes! came the reply from the audience.

But as if introducing himself for the first time, he also dwelled on his origin story as a young Republican, and his rebirth as a precocious campaigner for Trump. “I had never endorsed another presidential candidate,” he said. He argued that he is the candidate to help usher in a lasting Trumpian future. “I believe steadfastly that if this Republican Party will welcome the new voters Donald Trump identified . . . and make them a part of our party enthusiastically, we can have a majority, a working Republican conservative majority in America for a decade, maybe two,” he said.

In his 20-minute address, he never did get around to mentioning his recusal. But he offered the pledge he has been making across the state: “I’ll say one more time, if you elect me, send me again, I won’t go wobbly on you.” n

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Weinstein trial recognizes the truth in messy stories Monica Hesse is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

The Harvey Weinstein verdict isn’t the end of an era, but you could correctly view it as the end of a chapter. The #MeToo movement began in 2017 with allegations that the movie mogul had been systemically assaulting women since the beginning of his career. Now, in 2020, we’ll bookmark the spot where a New York jury convicted him of rape in the third degree. Yes, the legal system acknowledged, he had assaulted production assistant Mimi Haleyi and former aspiring actress Jessica Mann. The jury voted to acquit on other charges related to actress Annabella Sciorra, but nonetheless: The bad man is going to prison.

I don’t want to get too meta here, but as I’m trying to write this column, my inbox keeps interrupting me with media requests: people want me to interview them so they can tell me what it all means; or people want to interview me so I can tell them. These emails followed a week of news releases offering prognostication: If Weinstein is found guilty, the #MeToo movement has triumphed! If Weinstein is acquitted, the #MeToo movement has failed!

Now that Weinstein has been found guilty on two of his five charges, we could theoretically translate #MeToo’s success into a percentage, but I would argue that that’s the wrong measurement entirely. What the verdict means for Weinstein, who is 67 and infirm, is that he may die in a prison cell. What it means for his victims is that maybe they’ll find a modicum of peace, albeit a tardy one.

But as for what it means for #MeToo? You’ll only find a satisfying answer if you assumed the movement was solely about converting pain into prison time, about developing a rigid code of transgression and punishment.

The #MeToo movement isn’t about issuing punishment. It’s

about inviting enlightenment.

How do we talk about rape?

How do we talk about consent?

How do we talk about sex that we didn’t want but felt we had to agree to, for our physical safety or our careers? How do we talk about the confusing aftermath of those encounters — the compulsion to avoid our attackers forever, or, conversely, the compulsion to stay in contact with our attackers because that contact allows us to take control of the narrative?

How do we explain that when we say “Believe women,” we’re not saying that women never lie — we’re merely saying that for years we’ve behaved as if they always do. Believe women, rather than just defaulting to believing the men who claim the sex was consensual, she asked for it, she was wearing a skirt.

There’s a reason that, in the past three years, much of the #MeToo reckoning took place in the court of public opinion rather than the court of law. In case after case, the victims who were coming forward did not have meticulously collected rape kits and DNA samples from their assaults. What they had were stories. Messy and complicated ones, the kinds we might have once ignored, or

Seth Wenig/Associated Press; David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Production assistant Mimi Haleyi, left, and former aspiring actress Jessica Mann were the key witnesses in the trial of onetime movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted on two of five counts.

shrugged off as impossible to parse: He said, she said, what are you gonna do?

Given the criminal justice system’s extraordinarily low conviction rate of sexual assault charges, it was a wonder that Harvey Weinstein was even indicted.

It was a miracle that he was convicted.

But the most remarkable, lasting legacy of Harvey Weinstein’s trial is that it dealt with messy stories. It engaged with the tangled, confusing narratives that, a short while ago, we would have determined were impossible to figure out.

Jessica Mann was raped by Weinstein, but there were also times she consented to sex.

Mimi Haleyi was terrified of Weinstein after he forcibly performed oral sex on her, but she still agreed to meet him for drinks several weeks later. “I was still trying to make sense of what had happened,” she said.

She had still pitched Weinstein projects. She still hoped they could have a professional relationship.

The verdict took several days to be delivered, which must have been agony for the victims. At

one point, the jury sent a message to the judge, asking whether they were allowed to be unanimous on some verdicts and hung on others. The jury was told, no — go back and figure it out.

But, for an outside observer there was something admirable in the wait. It signified that the jurors were wrestling with the difficult parts as only flawed humans can. They were not jumping to obvious guilt or innocence; they were digging into how nuanced all of this can be.

Their ultimate guilty verdict says imperfect victims are still victims. It says maybe all of this is messier than we thought.

What does the Harvey Weinstein verdict mean for the #MeToo movement? The movement didn’t deliver his guilt, but it opened the door for more complicated understandings of victims and victimhood, power and relationships. Inside the courtroom, yes — but also outside the courtroom, for the rest of us.

His sentence will be just one sentence in the story. On to the next chapter. n

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BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

Unity in the face of a pandemic David Ignatius is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

Doctors have been preparing for 15 years for “the big one,” a pandemic that will rock the global public health system like an earthquake. Now, with the rapid spread of coronavirus, it may be happening.

This viral outbreak probably won’t look like anything that most of us have seen. Some schools may be closed; sports schedules will be modified; travel plans will be shelved; and some workers will be advised to stay at home and telecommute. The infrastructure for delivering food and other essentials will be stretched.

U.S. public health officials on Tuesday warned of the “inevitable” spread of the virus in the United States. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Statements like that sent the financial markets into a swoon for a second-straight day.

Doctors are caught between the obligation to alert the public and the desire to avoid a panic.

The World Health Organization warns of an “infodemic” in which bad information and rumors amplify the danger.

Back in 2006, the United States issued its first “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan,” updated regularly since. That first version

contained this stark admonition: “Uncertainty during a pandemic will drive many of the outcomes we fear, including panic among the public, unpredictable, and unilateral actions by governments, instability in markets, and potentially devastating impacts on the economy. The need for timely, accurate, credible, and consistent information that is tailored to specific audiences cannot be overstated.”

Google, Facebook and Twitter, the private guardians of the information space, have been working to keep it sanitary. Twitter has been trying to ensure that #coronaovirus delivers “credible, authoritative information.”

Facebook is removing inaccurate information about the disease.

Google is making verified, factchecked information prominent in search results.

BY SHENEMAN

The WHO, meanwhile, is publishing simple “myth busters.”

Examples: Do garlic or sesame oil prevent infection? No. Is it safe to receive mail from China? Yes. Health authorities so far have mostly been taking the right steps. The virus was quickly sequenced genetically, vaccines are already being developed and epidemiologists are closely monitoring the spread. Doctors in Wuhan, China, where the virus began, have carefully mapped the early cases and mortality rates.

Doctors caution that people should focus on the basics of good health: Washing your hands regularly is a better preventive measure than wearing a face mask; getting a flu shot is essential; if someone gets sick, they need supportive care while their own immune system fights the virus.

Health officials have tried to check the epidemic with screenings, lockdowns and quarantines. But these have had limited effect. Some travelers who arrived in Germany from Wuhan and tested negative for the virus were later found to be infected.

Some clusters, in Iran and Italy, have mysterious origins.

The politics of this crisis matter.

China was initially slow to react because officials there wanted to suppress bad news; Iranian authorities, similarly, may have

undercounted cases initially in a cluster there. President Trump’s pronouncement that the virus was likely to “go away” in April missed the mark.

The intersection of a publichealth crisis and a U.S. presidential election campaign is also worrisome. The U.S. and global economy will inevitably contract; as that happens, Trump will look for people to blame; he may also be tempted to take steps that would make the economic and health cost of the crisis even worse.

This is a moment when expert advice is essential to calm fears and develop effective treatments.

But the viral outbreak comes at a time when the body politic is weakened in America and abroad by populist politicians and rumormongers. health measures around the world.

Here’s a simple, five-word statement I’d like to hear from Trump: Folks, listen to your doctor.

We sometimes say that a global crisis — a catastrophic natural disaster, say — could unite the planet and encourage everyone to pull together. With coronavirus, we’ll have a test of that proposition. This outbreak is manageable with good medicine, good information and global cooperation. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride for a while. n

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