The Washington Post National Weekly - January 14, 2018

SUNDAY, JANUARY 14, 2018

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

No longer ‘smothered’ Farmers praise Trump’s rollback of environmental rules, but some worry about the effects PAGE 12

Politics Senate panel’s feud boils over 4

Technology Want to snuggle a robot? 17

5 Myths Exercise 23

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THE FIX

A timely question for Trump BY

A ARON B LAKE

ISTOCKPHOTO

F

or more than a week now, all of Washington has been chewing over Michael Wolff’s new book about President Trump and trying to assess which damning conclusions are actually true. But one of the bleakest scoops about Trump popped up elsewhere last weekend.

Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Trump has significantly curtailed his official schedule as president — to the point where his first meeting is often held at 11 a.m., and he spends almost the whole morning in his White House residence — rather than the West Wing or the Oval Office — watching TV, tweeting and making phone calls.

That chunk of his day, generally between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., is dubbed “executive time,” a phrase that is bound to become the butt of plenty of jokes. Trump then has other periods of “executive time” sprinkled in throughout his official work schedule, which is usually between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Nice work if you can get it. And a short commute, too!)

The idea that Trump spends plenty of time on nonofficial pursuits isn’t completely groundbreaking. A simple perusal of Trump’s Twitter feed shows how much time he spends prosecuting feuds and responding to things he has clearly seen on TV, and it has been reported that being president hasn’t been a particularly joyful pursuit for Trump.

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But the extent to which he is not engaged in the very serious matters of being president has never been so firmly quantified.

As the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman noted in response to Swan’s piece, the White House has bristled at such questions and lashed out at the Times for suggesting Trump watched four to eight hours of TV in a given day.

Notably, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to Swan’s story doesn’t exactly read like an ironclad denial. Instead, she insists that Trump conducts at least some official business during his morning routine, which she concedes includes time in the residence.

“The time in the morning is a mix of residence time and Oval Office time but he always has calls with staff, Hill members, Cabinet members and foreign leaders during this time,” Sanders told Swan. “The president is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him.”

It’s 100 percent true that the Trump presidency can be exhausting, but it’s mostly because of Trump’s penchant for controversy, which he often stokes through his Twitter feed during off-hours. And Trump’s Twitter habit only seems to have increased as a portion of his day in recent weeks.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 14

And the reason Swan’s scoop paints such a bleak picture of Trump is because it suggests he’s not particularly interested in the official duties of being president. Whatever you think about Trump’s policies or his fitness for the job, it requires one to be fully engaged, to be processing information (preferably from sources other than cable news), and to always be, for lack of a better word, on. The idea that Trump doesn’t take his daily intelligence briefing until 11 a.m. is shocking just by itself. And whoever leaked his official schedules to Swan seems to be concerned that Trump just isn’t up to the job right now.

It also is completely counter to Trump’s brand and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Trump said he wouldn’t really take time off as president. “I would rarely leave the White House, because there’s so much work to be done,” he told the Hill newspaper in June 2015. He added in January 2016: “Somebody says, ‘Why don’t you take a vacation before you become president?’ I said because I like doing this.” (As with Sanders’s statement, the White House insists Trump is working even when he’s at Mar-a-Lago or at his property in New Jersey.)

The question increasingly is what “this” is.

And judging by the Axios report, “this” is increasingly spending time outside the Oval Office, watching TV and tweeting. It suggests that, relative to past inhabitants of the Oval Office, we truly do have a part-time president. n

©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SCIENCE BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Dave and Annette Sweeney ride on their property in Alden, Iowa, in August. They support President Trump’s efforts to reduce environmental regulations. Photograph by BONNIE JO MOUNT, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Feud intensifies over FBI, dossier

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

The release of an interview transcript is the latest salvo in a fight over the Senate inquiry

BY D EVLIN B ARRETT AND T OM H AMBURGER

T

he political battle over the FBI and its investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election has intensified after the release of an interview with the head of the firm behind a dossier of allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump.

The transcript of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson’s interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee was released Tuesday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the panel’s senior Democrat, over the objections of Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

Feinstein’s action comes alongside an effort by Republicans to discredit the dossier as a politically motivated document that the FBI

has relied too heavily upon in its investigation. Feinstein sought to push back against that perception and to bolster the FBI’s credibility.

“The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation,” she said.

Grassley, who said Feinstein’s move “undermines the integrity of the committee’s oversight

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that the “misinformation circulating about the [Fusion GPS] transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation” of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

work,” had refused requests by Simpson to release his entire 10hour interview, which was conducted in August.

The Senate committee has been probing how the FBI handled allegations it received from a British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, who compiled a series of memorandums, later collected as a dossier, alleging that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin — a

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POLITICS

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

claim the president has repeatedly denied.

The 312-page transcript shows that Republican staffers on the committee repeatedly pressed Simpson about whether he had political motivations in hiring Steele. Simpson acknowledged that he didn’t like Trump as a candidate but said his job was to find facts, not to push an agenda.

In his testimony, Simpson said Steele contacted the FBI with concerns about Russian meddling in early July 2016. When the bureau re-interviewed Steele in early October, agents made it clear, according to Simpson’s testimony released Tuesday, that they believed some of what Steele had told them.

Simpson also said Steele was told that the FBI had someone inside Trump’s network providing agents with information — a claim he also made in an op-ed for the New York Times.

“My understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris might be credible because they had other

intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,” Simpson said.

Simpson said he didn’t know whether the person was connected to the Trump campaign or a Trump company, adding that his understanding was that the source was “someone like us who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

Several people familiar with the probe said Simpson’s comments refer to a report from an Australian official who contacted U.S. officials in late July with concerns about a conversation months earlier in London with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. In 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators.

At another point in the interview, a lawyer for Fusion GPS, Joshua A. Levy, made a jarring assertion: that the dossier’s publication had led to someone’s death.

“Somebody’s already been

killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work,” Levy said late in the interview, according to the transcript.

Levy did not expand on that claim in the interview, nor is there any public information that would tie a specific killing to the information in the dossier. A person close to the investigation said Fusion GPS has long worried that Steele’s overseas sources could be in danger, given a handful of killings that took place in the months after the dossier’s existence became known.

Representatives for Fusion GPS declined to comment.

Fusion GPS was hired in mid2016 by a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig into Trump’s background. Earlier that year, the firm had investigated Trump for a conservative website funded by a Republican donor, but that client stopped paying for the work after it became clear that Trump would

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) criticized the release of the transcript of the interview with the co-founder of Fusion GPS.

The release “undermines the integrity of the committee’s oversight work.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley

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win the GOP presidential nomination, according to people familiar with the matter.

After Democrats began paying for the research, Fusion GPS hired Steele, a former senior officer with Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, to gather intelligence about any ties between the Kremlin and Trump and his associates.

As the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered momentum in recent weeks, Republicans have expanded their attacks on Fusion GPS, Steele and the FBI. Conservatives have accused the bureau’s senior leaders of being biased or corrupt in their handling of investigations involving Clinton and Trump, attacking the reputation of an institution that has long held itself to a standard of being nonpartisan and evenhanded.

Democrats — and even some Republicans — were alarmed last week when Grassley made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, suggesting it investigate Steele for possibly lying to the FBI. Feinstein countered by releasing the Simpson transcript, a move that at least one senior Republican applauded.

“I think that’s a good idea,’’ said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who said he wanted more transparency on how the FBI gathered information and the extent to which investigators may have used the dossier as a partial basis for obtaining a surveillance warrant.

In urging the committee to release the full transcript of his interview, Simpson has argued that Republicans are trying to obscure what happened in 2016.

Through much of 2017, Feinstein and Grassley made joint requests for information about Russia and the FBI’s investigation of election interference. In the fall, however, tensions between the two senators spilled into the open as Grassley requested information from the FBI and other sources without Feinstein’s support.

Increasingly, the Democrats and Republicans on the committee are going in different directions, with Grassley moving to investigate matters involving Clinton when she was secretary of state and Feinstein concentrating on Russian interference in the election. ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Democrats gripped by Winfrey fever BY

R OBERT C OSTA

F

rom Hollywood to Iowa, a sudden wave of enthusiasm for Oprah Winfrey as a potential presidential candidate swept through the Democratic Party on Monday, beginning as a social-media sensation after her rousing remarks at last Sunday night’s Golden Globes ceremony and escalating nationally as party officials and activists earnestly considered the possibility.

The calls for Winfrey, a cultural icon and friend of former president Barack Obama’s, to look hard at entering the 2020 race against President Trump revealed a longing among Democrats for a global celebrity of their own who could emerge as their standardbearer and his foil.

The clamor also exposed how the crowded class of Democrats mulling over bids for the White House so far lacks a front-runner or someone who could easily unite the party’s key coalitions of women, minorities and workingclass voters.

“Lord, we need passion and excitement,” said state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a prominent Democrat in South Carolina, one of the early-voting states in the race for the nomination. “I know it’s conjecture right now, but I’d ask her to give it serious consideration. If anybody could bring us together, it’s her.”

Winfrey’s inner circle did little Monday to tamp down the frenzy.

Her spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment, but several people close to Winfrey said she was keeping tabs on the news coverage and appreciated the response.

“She’s overwhelmed by the groundswell of support, the absolute avalanche of hashtags and phone calls about running for president,” said Richard Sher, a friend and former broadcasting partner in Baltimore who spoke with Winfrey by phone Monday.

Sher added: “If she set out to do it, she’d win. But at this point it’s other people, not her, that’s talking about it. She’s just taking it all

PAUL DRINKWATER/NBC/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After her Golden Globes speech, many see a 2020 candidate who could take on Trump in and happy that what she had to say struck such a chord around the country.”

Stedman Graham, Winfrey’s longtime partner who joined her at the Globes ceremony, whipped up speculation Sunday evening when he told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “it’s up to the people” and said Winfrey “would absolutely do it,” although he did not specify what she would do.

There were no signs, however, that Winfrey has done anything to formally prepare for a 2020 campaign or has spoken with Democratic operatives. Instead, her speech at the Globes, where she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, was widely seen by Democrats as a visceral moment on the national stage that catapulted her into the discussion, regardless of whether she wanted to be part of it or eventually inches closer to running.

That view was felt not only among Democrats watching the Golden Globes and cheering her

on social media but among Hollywood players who immediately latched onto Winfrey’s speech, putting her in the position of being courted by grass-roots Democrats and Academy Award winners.

Winfrey, tracing her path from her Midwestern roots to the pinnacle of the American media, drew ovations Sunday for her message of hope amid despair, generating praise from those working to counter sexual misconduct as well as, notably, from Democrats troubled by the Trump presidency. A speech without overt political notes became a political rallying cry in an instant.

Winfrey spoke with an impassioned voice of a “culture broken by brutally powerful men” and how “for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.”

Later, she added, “I’ve interviewed and portrayed people

Oprah Winfrey accepts the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globes last Sunday. Winfrey spoke of a “culture broken by brutally powerful men” and how “for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up.”

who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights.”

The 2020 calls came fast and fervently.

“She launched a rocket tonight.

I want her to run for president,” actress Meryl Streep told The Washington Post on Sunday. “I don’t think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesn’t have a choice.”

Talk of Winfrey rippled through Iowa, whose caucuses are traditionally the first contest in the battle for the party’s nomination and have a history of thrusting unconventional candidates forward.

“I can guarantee county chairs in Iowa would love to have a conversation with her,” said Brad Anderson, who ran Obama’s reelection campaign in the state in 2012. “People could be looking for an outsider who could heal the country, and if that’s the case, I have no doubt that Oprah would be powerful.”

Liz Purdy, who led Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary campaign in New Hampshire in 2008, said as long as Winfrey “ran the New Hampshire way and went to Main Street after Main Street,” she could have a path to victory in the state. “If anyone could do retail politics right, it’d be her.”

There were questions about whether Winfrey, 63, a self-made billionaire whose groundbreaking broadcast and media career has made her an admired figure around the world, would ever be willing to take the plunge and enter a presidential race that could be polarizing and force her to tangle daily with a combative president.

“I have no doubt that she’s filled with a desire to make the greatest possible impact in the world,” said former Obama adviser David Axelrod, who heads the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “But whether she would want to submit herself and her brand to

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POLITICS ANALYSIS this process is a real question.

Running for president is relentless, all-involving, sometimes degrading and often annoying.”

Robert Shrum, who has worked on Democratic presidential campaigns for decades and teaches at the University of Southern California, said “media fascination,” more than any particular opening in the field, was driving the interest. He said it did not necessarily mean voters would rush to abandon the current and former officials mentioned as 2020 contenders, such as former vice president Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

“There could be a backlash to Trump and people look for experience,” Shrum said. “She’d have to show that she could formulate an economic message, assemble a top campaign organization.”

The crop of expected 2020 hopefuls, such as Gillibrand, reacted warmly to Winfrey on Monday, seeing her not yet as a rival but as an ally in their effort to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault, an issue that has upended the entertainment industry and prompted congressional resignations.

“Her voice is powerful and important, and whatever she wants to do, she should do,” Gillibrand said in New York.

Trump-aligned Republicans mostly shrugged off Winfrey. Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser, mocked the notion of Winfrey and other celebrities jumping in the 2020 race.

“This is going to be a crowded Democratic primary: Oprah and George Clooney and Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg and Dwayne Johnson, the Rock,” Miller said. “At a certain point, someone’s going to have to remind the Democrats running for president that Hollywood is not an early primary state.”

But some of Trump’s critics on the right argued that Winfrey would immediately be a formidable candidate — and said they could support her over Trump.

“Oprah: sounder on economics than Bernie Sanders, understands Middle America better than Elizabeth Warren, less touchy-feely than Joe Biden,” conservative commentator William Kristol tweeted, adding “#ImWithHer.” n © The Washington Post

WEEKLY

The top 10 gubernatorial races to watch this year BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

G

oing into 2018, Republicans control a near-record high of 33 governor’s mansions, including a number in blue and swing states.

Democrats, meanwhile, hold a near-record low. Which means in 2018, the only place for Democrats to go may be up.

Here are the 10 governor posts most likely to flip parties, ranked in order of least (10) to most (1): 10. Maryland (GOP incumbent): Polls show that two-thirds of this blue state approve of Gov. Larry Hogan (R), and Democrats are mired in a crowded and messy primary to unseat him. But antiTrump sentiment in this liberal state may be too strong for even Hogan to overcome.

9. Ohio (open): Gov. John Kasich (R) is term-limited, and Democrats hope that Republicans’ domination of the state mansion, plus anti-Trump sentiment, plus a liberal hero of sorts in former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray running for the Democratic nomination, could give them the edge.

But Ohio went for President Trump by nearly 10 points.

8. Connecticut (open): Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) has decided not to run for a third term. More than two-thirds of the state disapproves of him, according to a 2016 Quinnipiac poll, and the state is struggling financially. Republicans sense an opening, but first, they’ve got to pick a candidate.

7. Michigan (open): Democrats are bullish about taking the governor’s mansion here for a few reasons. Trump won the state by less than a percentage point, and outgoing governor Rick Snyder (R) is highly unpopular; his handling of the Flint water crisis might taint any Republican nominee. Democrats are excited about Gretchen Whitmer, the former party leader in the state Senate.

6. Florida (Open): This governor’s race got more interesting thanks to Trump, who endorsed

Gubernatorial seats in play in 2018 Currently held by:

Dem.

Rep.

Independent

No election NH VT

WA MT OR

ND

ID WY NV

CA

MN

SD

IA

NE UT

AZ

CO

IL

KS OK

NM TX

AK

WI

HI

MO AR LA

NY

MI

PA

IN OH KY TN

WV VA

Competitive

ME MA RI CT NJ DE MD

NC SC

MS AL

GA FL

26 Republican-held seats in play 15 competitive 6 competitive 9 Democrat-held seats in play Source: Cook Political Report

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) to replace outgoing governor Rick Scott (R), setting up a potentially expensive primary on the Republican side against front-runner Adam Putnam, the state’s agriculture commissioner.

Democrats have their own primary. Former congresswoman Gwen Graham, the daughter of a popular governor, hasn’t been able to stamp out lesser-known challengers.

5. Nevada (open): Voters here went Democratic down the ballot in 2016. This time, term-limited Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) is one of the most popular politicians in the state, and he has so far declined to offer his endorsement to the front-running Republican, Attorney General Adam Laxalt. A potential front-runner on the Democratic side is Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, a well-known figure in the Las Vegas area.

4. Illinois (GOP incumbent): What happens when two billionaires clash? We’re about to find out. Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) is running for reelection in the bluest states in the Midwest and has already given his own campaign $50 million. But that’s peanuts to fellow billionaire J.B. Pritzker, of one of the wealthiest families in

THE WASHINGTON POST

the country, who has said if he wins the nomination, he’ll spend whatever it takes to win the general election. The Illinois race is shaping up to be the most expensive nonpresidential race in U.S. history, which both sides say makes it extremely unpredictable.

3. Alaska (independent incumbent): Gov. Bill Walker is the only independent governor in office, and he could soon realize the perils of not having a major-party backer. Republicans are planning to make an effort to oust him.

2. Maine (open): Term-limited Gov. Paul LePage (R) is one of the most controversial governors.

He’s also one of the least popular, which makes any Republican effort to replace him an uphill battle. Both sides acknowledge this seat is likely to flip to Democrats, especially because Sen. Susan Collins (R) decided not to run for it.

1. New Mexico (open): State voters went for Hillary Clinton by nearly 10 points, and outgoing Republican Gov. Susana Martinez isn’t very popular. She’s leaving behind a high unemployment rate and struggling education system.

This race could come down to Reps. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) and Stevan Pearce (R). n

©The Washington Post

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Seoul credits Trump for Korea talks A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

S

outh Korean President Moon Jae-in must keep up a delicate balancing act between two unpredictable leaders: the one with nukes in the North, and the one in Washington who leads his country’s closest ally.

But Moon — newer in office even than President Trump — appears to be managing that feat.

Last week, he ushered in the first positive news related to North Korea in years, responding to an overture from Kim Jong Un and, on Wednesday, very diplomatically giving much of the credit to Trump.

“I give President Trump huge credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks, and I’d like to thank him for that,” Moon said at a news conference in Seoul.

Moon’s remark came in response to a question about Trump’s tweet the previous Saturday that the talks were taking place because he was “firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North.”

Trump has been calling for “maximum pressure” on North Korea and has sometimes suggested that military action might be needed.

Moon said the fact that North Korea returned to talks — albeit about the Olympics, not about its nuclear weapons program — could be the result of U.S.-led sanctions and pressure.

He assured the United States that South Korea would not act out of step with the international community regarding any sanctions relief that might be needed to facilitate North Korea’s attendance at the Winter Olympics in the South next month.

Yet with the agreement, however modest, Moon has managed to alter the narrative that North Korea cannot be reasoned with.

Moon has dubbed the Games the “Peace Olympics” and desperately wants North Korea to attend.

“South Korea is not intending to ease sanctions on North Korea unilaterally and separately from

KIM HONG-JI/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

South Korea’s president walks a fine diplomatic line between two mercurial personalities the international sanctions,” said Moon, who was elected in a landslide victory last May after the impeachment of disgraced President Park Geun-hye.

After nine months in office, Moon enjoys strong support from the South Korean public, with most polls putting his approval ratings in the 70s.

His government has been going to great lengths to avoid antagonizing the American president, who has been capricious on issues including the South Korea-U.S. trade deal.

But Moon, a liberal who favors engagement with Pyongyang, also needed to make nice with Kim. This is partly because Moon wants to minimize the gap between North and South, but also because he wants to fend off suggestions from some in Washington that military action might be needed as a lesson to Pyongyang.

Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, suggested at

the end of last year that time was running out to deal with North Korea.

A military strike on North Korea would have devastating consequences for South Korea. About 25 million people — half of South Korea’s population — live within range of the North’s conventional artillery, and among them are tens of thousands of Americans.

Moon has resolutely opposed any military action and has warned that no strike must take place without his approval — although these are not the terms of the South Korean security agreement with the United States.

Tuesday’s talks were the immediate result of Kim’s New Year’s Day pronouncement that North Korea would be willing to send a delegation to the Winter Games set to open Feb. 9 in PyeongChang, 40 miles south of the border between the Koreas.

As many as 500 North Koreans — including senior officials, ath-

Seoul will push for more talks to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday.

letes, cheering and performingarts squads, taekwondo teams and journalists — are expected to attend. The exact makeup of the delegation is now under discussion.

Moon said he was “open to any form of meeting, including a summit” with Kim to help improve inter-Korean relations and to make progress on the nuclear issue, although he said he was not interested in “talks for the sake of talks.”

But there is significant skepticism after Tuesday’s tentative agreement on Olympic participation and the resumption of inter-Korean military talks.

Army Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, said it was “notable” that North Korea had taken this step but that caution was warranted.

“What is the motivation? We don’t know,” Brooks said in a speech in Seoul. “We will have to see that over time.”

Some analysts think that Kim is looking to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States, exposing a gap in their alliance.

“Kim Jong Un wants to break the chain of international pressure against North Korea,” said Nam Sung-wook, a former intelligence think tank chief now teaching at Korea University. “And the weakest link in that chain is South Korea.”

This has been a classic North Korean strategy in previous years, when the Kim regime has appealed to its “brethren” in the South to try to weaken the united front against it.

But John Delury, a professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, said it was wrong to write Moon off as naive or as someone who can be manipulated by Kim. “Moon is not trying to claim any of the credit here. He’s giving it to Kim for suggesting these talks in his New Year’s Day speech and to Trump for his tough talk,” Delury said. “This is because Moon has embarked on a patient and steady diplomatic track.” n ©The Washington Post

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Annette Sweeney, rounding up cattle in Hardin County, Iowa, in August, is a Trump voter who supports his rollback of environmental rules. She recently took a Trump administration job in Iowa.

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COVER STORY

Feeling a weight lifted

BY MARY JORDAN AND KEVIN SULLIVAN

“C

ome on! Come on! Go, girls!” Annette Sweeney was on horseback, hollering at her chocolatecolored cows on a perfect Iowa morning, happy that her life is better since Donald Trump became president.

Sweeney, 60, raises Angus cows and corn on the flat, green farmland of central Iowa. One in 7 Americans live in places like this: Rural counties have 72 percent of the nation’s land but a shrinking population as urban areas have ballooned in size and wealth.

In recent years, Sweeney has felt a growing “disconnect” between how people think in cities and in places like Buckeye, a town of 108.

In her view, farmers were too often “shoved aside” during the presidency of Barack Obama, while environmentalists and conservationists, many of whom live nowhere near a farm, took over the national conversation.

Obama set aside millions of acres of undeveloped land as national monuments — more than any other president — preventing huge areas from being mined, logged or farmed.

Obama also implemented more regulations with a significant economic impact than any president in three decades, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. Those actions were cheered by many Americans but widely viewed in rural areas as killing jobs.

Incredibly, Sweeney said, Obama’s Agriculture Department even started pushing Meatless Mondays, an insult to Iowa’s pork, beef continues on next page

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

from previous page

and chicken producers. “I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt a meatless Monday,” Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) tweeted in response. Meatless Mondays felt like a “slap in the face” to Sweeney, who has this bumper sticker on her Buick: “EAT BEEF: The West Wasn’t Won on Salad.”

But nothing galled Sweeney more than a regulation Obama issued in 2015 called Waters of the United States or WOTUS. The Environmental Protection Agency said it was aimed at keeping pollutants — including fertilizer, manure and other farm runoff — out of streams and creeks that feed the nation’s waterways.

Farm runoff is a leading cause of water pollution, contaminating drinking water, spawning toxic algal blooms and killing fish.

To Sweeney, WOTUS felt like the government’s hands on her throat.

Was some bureaucrat now going to show up and police her puddles and tiniest ditches of water? She said that is what happened several years ago: A federal conservation official told Sweeney she had a half-acre of wetland in the middle of a 160-acre field. Wetlands are protected habitats for migrating birds and other wildlife and are important for healthy soil and water.

“Suddenly, this piece of land that we had been farming for 70 years was federally protected, and we had to stop everything,” said Sweeney, who was born on the farm and raised two boys there.

In the end, Sweeney had to pay $5,000 to preserve a small parcel of wetland elsewhere so she could continue farming her own property. The experience contributed to a feeling that “we were smothered” by the federal government, Sweeney said.

That feeling lifted when Trump was elected on a promise to reverse much of what Obama had done. Sweeney, a former Republican state lawmaker who is active in Iowa corn and cattle associations, was so happy that she went online and ordered fancy dresses and flew to Washington to attend her first inauguration.

There, she listened to Trump vow that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

“Now, we have someone we can call,” she said, riding her horse, Cowboy, through the shallows of the Iowa River’s South Fork, which flows through her fields. “Finally, some sensibility is coming back to Washington.”

Most of Iowa is farmland. The bellwether state voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but last year, Trump won 93 of its 99 counties. He lost Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, the largest cities, but he did not need them. Trump’s winning formula was to dominate the vote in rural areas, which have fewer people but outsize clout in the electoral college and the Senate.

Rural areas continue to be Trump’s strongest base of support. Nationally, 52 percent of people in rural areas support Trump, compared with 25 percent in urban areas, accord-

ing to a recent Washington Post-ABC poll.

Republicans are hoping to build on that support as they head into the 2018 congressional elections.

In June, Trump made his first visit to Iowa as president, and Sweeney drove 130 miles to hear him speak in a community college gymnasium. Farmers and agricultural leaders joined Trump onstage as he thanked them for helping to flip the state from Democratic to Republican.

“A lot of places people were not thinking about turned red! Those maps, those electoral maps! They were all red — beautiful red,” Trump said. “I’m not a farmer, but I’d be very happy to be one,” he added. “It’s a very beautiful world to me, and it’s a truly noble American profession.”

As Trump spoke, a huge “PROMISES KEPT” banner hung from the balcony — a reference to the big prize he had already delivered to Iowa and many rural states: rolling back WOTUS. Issued as the 2016 presidential campaign shifted into high gear, the regulation turned out to be an unintended gift to Trump.

The rule sought to clarify that the 1972 Clean Water Act applied not only to major bodies of water but also to their headwaters.

That meant farmers could be fined for polluting small creeks and streams that had a “significant nexus” with larger waterways.

To environmentalists and many others, the rule made sense. Contaminants flush off farms, flow into streams and rivers, and gush into larger bodies of water. In the Gulf of Mexico, a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey has been traced by numerous scientific studies to the tons of fertilizers and pesticides sprayed on farms in the Midwest. The streams that cross Sweeney’s farm, for example, flow into the Iowa River, which feeds the Mississippi, which ultimately empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

But the densely worded clean-water rule, which filled 75 pages in the Federal Register, created more confusion than clarity.

As presidential candidates crisscrossed Iowa, the Farm Bureau said WOTUS could apply to dry creek beds and ditches. The farmers group, the country’s largest agricultural organization, with hundreds of thousands of members, launched a “Ditch the Rule” campaign in videos on Facebook and YouTube.

Neither Sweeney nor any of a dozen Iowa farmers interviewed for this article ever read the regulation. They got all their information from the Farm Bureau. Sweeney said she also spoke to an agricultural attorney she trusts.

What she learned, Sweeney said, was that WOTUS was a “one-size-fits-all” rule that left no room for farmers to exercise their own judgment about their land. “It was like telling us how to raise our children,” said her husband, Dave.

On the campaign trail, Trump capitalized on and added to the growing anger and confusion. The rule explicitly states that it does not apply to “puddles,” but Trump insist-

A changing population Over the past hundred years, the nation’s urban population has ballooned, while the population in rural areas has stayed about the same.

350 million people

Total U.S. population 320.9 million

300 250 200

274.7 million 150

Urban population

100

42.1 million

50 0

50.2 million 1910

’20

’30

46.2 million

Rural population ’40

’50

’60

’70

’80

’90

’00

’10 ’15

About 14 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and about 72 percent of the country’s geography is rural land.

Percentage of county population that is rural

100%

Urban population

86%

54%

100% rural

50.0% to 99.9% rural

Less than 50.0% rural

50%

46% Rural population

14%

0

1910 Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Farmers Annette and Dave Sweeney support the president’s efforts to reduce regulations. “It was like telling us how to raise our children,” Dave said of a rule about farm runoff.

2015 THE WASHINGTON POST

ed it did. He called WOTUS “one of the worst rules ever . . . a disaster!” If elected, he said, he would kill it “on Day One.” “It won him Iowa,” Sweeney said, in her jeans and boots, nudging her last cow into a corral.

In February, with cameras rolling, Trump held an Oval Office ceremony to announce that he was officially suspending the “horrible rule” that covered “nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land.”

Sweeney was thrilled, but a backlash was building in cities and even among some of her neighbors along the South Fork.

John Gilbert, 68, lives four miles downstream from Sweeney and thinks there should be more rules to protect the environment, not fewer.

“People don’t like to be told what to do. I get that. But we do not even have close to enough regulations,” said Gilbert, a soft-spoken grandfather who also lives on the land where he grew up.

“People are saying the big, bad government is out to get us, but I happen to think we need clean water,” he said. “It’s going to take someone with enough guts to say to farmers, ‘Stop plowing right up to the edge of water.’ ” A Democrat in a predominantly Republican county, Gilbert knows he is in the minority. He is a farmer with 60 dairy cows and 150 pigs in a

15 11

SUNDAY, JANUARY JANUARY 14, 2018 SUNDAY, 14, 2018

COVER STORY In Iowa, a snapshot of the rural vs. urban divide Iowa, an early-caucus and battleground state for the general election, is representative of the political divide between rural and urban areas. In the 2016 general election, Donald Trump won 93 of 99 counties.

Iowa population by county (July 1, 2016 estimates) Each circle’s size represents a county’s population

Estherville Spencer

500,000

Algona

Le Mars

50,000

Sioux City

Cedar Falls

Fort Dodge

5,000

Carroll Cedar Rapids

Ames

Denison

Won by Trump

However, Hillary Clinton won the five most populous counties and six of the seven largest cities.

Won by Clinton

Iowa City

Des Moines

Davenport

General election vote totals Clinton

In the end, the accumulated total of rural voters was enough to hand Trump victory.

653,669

Trump

800,983

Rural states have an electoral advantage Electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators a state has in Congress. House seat apportionments are based on population.

Every state is guaranteed at least one seat in the House and two in the Senate.

ME Electoral college representation relative to population in 2016 Population very underrepresented

WI WA

MT ND MN

OR UT WY SD CA NV

OK HI

AK

IL

IA

MI

IN OH

CO NE MO KY WV

AZ NM KS

Population slightly underrepresented Population slightly overrepresented

ID

VT NH

AR

TN NC

LA MS AL

TX

NY MA PA

NJ

CT

RI

VA MD DE SC DC GA FL

The electoral college is supposed to guarantee that populous states cannot dominate an election, but it also sets up a disparity in representation.

California — the most populous state — has one electoral vote per 712,000 people...

1 electoral vote

... but Wyoming — the least populous state in the country — has one electoral vote per 195,000 people.

Each square represents 10,000 people

Note: 2016 population numbers are based on 2015 estimates.

2016 votes-cast numbers are as of Dec. 1.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Iowa Secretary of State

THE WASHINGTON POST

“We hold the land in trust and have an obligation to the public for water quality.

That is completely being lost. It’s scary.”

John Gilbert, 68, farmer

state dominated by far-larger farms. He keeps his pigs in an outdoor pen, rather than indoors in a “mass confinement” facility. And he uses no antibiotics, selling his pork to a company that supplies “natural and humanely raised” meat to select stores and restaurants.

In late summer, Gilbert joined a gathering in the lodge at Pine Lake, 20 miles east of Buckeye, to talk about threats to clean water in the Trump era. Attendees ticked off their concerns: a lack of safeguards on the millions of tons of pig manure generated annually by Iowa hog farms; rising toxicity observed in catfish caught in local rivers; the putrid, pea-soup-colored carpet of algae that had bloomed on local lakes.

“Who enforces the rules?” asked one woman who rose to speak.

“Nobody!” several people shouted back.

State officials had just issued another warning about swimming at Pine Lake after finding E. coli and other contaminants in the water. It was a problem at many Iowa lakes. Robert Hogg, a Democratic state senator from Cedar Rapids, urged people to think of solutions that farmers would find workable.

“We can’t have this urban versus rural divide,” Hogg said.

Gilbert listened quietly. Afterward, he said regulations often benefit the common good.

He mentioned smoking bans on planes and mandatory seat belts in cars.

Gilbert said Trump has been “irresponsible at best and derelict at worst” in his war on regulations. By its own count, the Trump administration has killed 67 rules and “canceled or delayed” 1,500 more. “The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden, screeching and beautiful halt,” Trump said last month.

But Gilbert said the lack of federal oversight is leading to a Wild West atmosphere where “it’s okay to pollute in the name of jobs.”

Iowa has more acres of corn and soybeans than any other state. It has 3 million people and 20 million pigs. The state’s pork industry alone accounts for 40,000 jobs and $7.5 billion a year in revenue. People here joke that the stench of industrial pig pens is the “smell of money.”

“We have too many people saying everything is perfectly fine because it’s more important how much money we can make trying to feed the world,” said Gilbert, who, along with his wife, Beverly, has won awards for sustainable farming.

Gilbert noted that the same neighbors who complain about Washington “overreach” benefit from federal crop subsidies and mandates to use corn-based ethanol in gasoline.

Back at home, Gilbert keeps a stack of Des Moines Register articles on his kitchen table that describe high levels of nitrates in the state capital’s drinking water. The Des Moines Water Works utility recently sued three rural counties, claiming that farm runoff had produced the nitrates, which have been linked to cancer. The suit was dismissed, but the urbanrural water dispute rages on.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Big Ag brings in so much money for the state that it gets a free pass,” Gilbert said. “We hold the land in trust and have an obligation to the public for water quality. That is completely being lost. It’s scary.”

Sweeney thinks all the talk about polluted water is overblown. Decades ago, when she was growing up, the snow banks sometimes turned gray because of pollution. It’s far better now, she said.

She also finds it maddening to be told that she does not care enough about clean water.

“Holy smokes, yes, we do!” Sweeney said, filling a pail of feed for her bull.

She and Gilbert are both active in the Southfork Watershed Alliance, which aims to protect local water quality. The neighbors are divided about their approach: Sweeney believes conservation efforts should be voluntary, while Gilbert says that is not enough to stop pollution.

While serving in the state legislature from 2009 to 2013, Sweeney sponsored a bill that made it illegal to use “false pretenses” to enter any farm or other agricultural facility. The measure was a response to photos and videos taken by undercover animal rights activists who had been hired at farms.

Sweeney said the bill was intended to prevent a person from giving a false name on a job application and then standing by and recording abuse instead of reporting it immediately. But many others, including animal rights groups, called it an “ag-gag” aimed at silencing whistleblowers trying to expose cruelty to animals.

Sweeney dismisses those complaints. During the Obama era, she said, activists with little understanding of farming took center stage. With Trump in the White House, she sees farmers getting more attention: “It’s the difference between feeling like you are being talked to and being listened to.”

But Sweeney still has one big worry: Trump’s threats to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Iowa farmers rely heavily on exports. As Trump neared the end of his first year in office, Sweeney gave him a “seven out of 10.”

After being interviewed for this article, Sweeney got a phone call asking her to join the Trump administration as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She is now Iowa director for rural development, charged with improving the quality of life in rural parts of the state.

Sweeney’s first priority in the job is bringing broadband access to places that are not yet connected to the Internet. In a recent interview on Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network, Sweeney said her own son had a hard time starting a business “because there was no Internet, no satellite, nothing.”

“I believe in the rural areas, I believe in our rural development — what a great opportunity,” she said.

The Iowa rancher who once felt forgotten was now on the inside. n ©The Washington Post

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17 SUNDAY, JANUARY 14, 2018

TECHNOLOGY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Robots to cuddle or fold laundry

BY G EOFFREY A . F OWLER AND H AYLEY T SUKAYAMA

Price hasn’t been set yet; could arrive on the market within two years.

Las Vegas

A

INVI, a bracelet to fight assault: INVI’s stylish bracelet is a

re you ready to talk to your toilet? Or cuddle with a robot?

Those are just a few of the ideas we’ve seen at CES 2018, the annual consumer technology confab in Las Vegas. Sure, there are tech titans battling to control our computers, TVs and smart homes. But our favorite part is the thousands of other companies that gather to launch something new.

While these ideas sometimes catch on, like fitness trackers and wireless ear buds, many go nowhere. But the eager attempts are always interesting and often say something about where we’re headed in our relationships with technology. Here are the most out-there ideas that caught our attention.

Kohler Numi, an Internetconnected toilet: You can now ask

Alexa to flush. Kohler’s latest highend toilet connects to the Internet and responds to voice commands.

Beyond flushing, you can ask Amazon.com’s Alexa (as well as Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri) to lift the seat or activate your favorite bidet-spray configuration. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) There’s no microphone on the toilet itself, but there are speakers to play your favorite tunes. Plus, it keeps track of water usage. $5,625 and up; available in the fourth quarter.

Somnox, a robot you can cuddle with: This bot just wants to

cuddle. Somnox is a bed companion that simulates human breathing. When you hug the robot, the rising and falling sensation subconsciously calms you down and helps you get to sleep faster, its makers say. Somnox can also mimic the soothing sounds of heartbeats and lullabies, and offer guided meditation (activated via an app). Best part: It doesn’t ever snore. $600; ships in December.

Modius, a headband to help you lose weight: Pack on a few

deterrent against sexual assault.

Like a skunk, INVI releases a foul odor to repel attackers — in this case, when you break its clasp. It’s not clear how much of a deterrent a bad smell would be, but we commend the idea to develop tech to help discourage attackers. About $70; shipping now.

ElliQ, a social robot for seniors: Isolation is a significant

SOMNOX

Somnox, a $600 robotic companion for sleepers, simulates human breathing and heartbeats, and also can sing lullabies and offer guided meditation for those moments when you still can’t snooze.

pounds during this cold snap?

Modius has built a headset that stimulates your vestibular nerve, which runs behind your ear and into your brain. You use Modius by attaching a pad to your skin, which has a wire that runs up to the headband. The electrical current, Modius says, stimulates the part of the brain that controls your appetite. It’s meant to be an extra boost to supplement your weight-loss plan. Brain-zapping technology is still somewhat unproven, but several companies claim it can help assuage many issues, including a lack of concentration and pain. $500; ex­ pected in February.

Foldimate and Laundroid, robots that fold your laundry:

These competing robots tackle one of the week’s most arduous chores. Foldimate promises to fold a load of laundry in four minutes but asks you to feed each piece in.

The much pricier Laundroid folds from a drawer of clothes but takes much longer. Neither can tackle socks or sheets yet. $16,000 for Laundroid; $980 for Foldimate.

CES offers glimpse of the wildest tech and gadget offerings

Powerspot, a charging hub with no cords or mats: More gad-

gets? That means more charging cables. But Powercast’s Powerspot hub promises to charge devices such as watches, headphones and keyboards within an 80-foot radius without any charging accessories. It does that by using technology that promises to be like WiFi, but for electricity. With recent approval from the Federal Communications Commission, it’s closer to hitting the market. $100; ex­ pected in the third quarter.

Xeros, a washing machine that could really slash your water bill: Running a laundry load uses a

lot of water — while also subjecting your clothes to some serious roughhousing. Xeros fills washing machines with nylon balls about the size of green peas that help massage away dirt and absorb loose dye, using half as much water. It also jostles your clothes less, leading to energy savings and clothes that last longer. The tech is already used in some commercial washers and is trying to work its way into home models.

problem for some older adults.

ElliQ is a tabletop robot with a swiveling head that connects seniors to friends for messages and video chats, and makes it a bit easier for them to take advantage of online information and services. It suggests physical activities, such as taking medicine or going for a walk, and also makes personalized recommendations for news, music or games.

Headed to beta trials before a launch this year.

3DRudder, a game controller for your feet: Virtual reality is all

about immersion, but in real life, most people don’t move anywhere by using the thumbstick employed by most VR systems. 3DRudder is a foot pad that rocks and turns to simulate footsteps while seated.

We first saw 3DRudder at CES in 2015; its software has come far since then, and it has added straps to keep you from losing your footing. $139; shipping now.

Aibo, a robot dog: Sony’s iconic Aibo dog, discontinued in 2006, has been reborn — cuter and smarter. Originally announced last fall, the new pup stole the show at Sony’s CES news conference, where he was shown to a U.S. audience for the first time. Aibo has a camera in its nose, a microphone to pick up voice commands and 22 adorably articulated parts. The bad news: Sony is selling it only in Japan, for now. $1,800; shipping now. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Conservatives shouldn’t want smaller monuments CRAIG SHIRLEY is a historian and the author of four books on Ronald Reagan. His most recent book is “Citizen Newt: The Making of a Reagan Conservative.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

The Western United States may be the last natural bastion of what it means to be a free American. The image of the Old West brings a sense of beauty, with sky­scraping mountain ranges, deep valleys and endless desert and woods. The feeling of utter freedom is something one has to experience to understand.

That sense of beauty and utter freedom is purely American, and for me, also purely conservative. I first traipsed the romantic desolation of New Mexico as a Boy Scout long ago and came to understand the spiritual magnificence of the American West. It was an awakening.

What does it mean to be American? Abraham Lincoln said in his address to Congress in 1862: “A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.” The United States as a nation may not always exist. The laws of the United States come and go as much as its presidents.

But what the United States contains — the Redwood Forest, the Rocky Mountains, and even the national monuments President Trump might decide to shrink, like Bears Ears — is what will last long past our children’s children. Man-made monuments will have fallen, been torn down or been repaired five times over by the year 2100, but not our national parks.

All that is why conservatives like me find ourselves compelled to speak out against the Trump administration’s decision last month to shrink two national monuments originally established by Democratic presidents. (My public affairs firm, Shirley & Banister, has done work for the American Monuments Alliance, a group of conservative leaders who also oppose shrinking the monuments.) A Republican with

close ties to the administration, Newt Gingrich, recently published an article in Fox News arguing that it borders on hysteria to criticize Trump’s move. The former House speaker wrote that “redefining the boundaries of these monuments will not harm the environment, open the flood gates for dangerous mining or natural resource exploitation.” Maybe. Yet Gingrich, in his 2005 book “Winning the Future,” had made the case that environmental beauty is indeed conservative: “I am a conservative who likes to walk in Central Park in New York and along the Chicago lakefront and along the Chattahoochee recreation area. We can give our children and grandchildren better environments in their lifetimes through reasonable foresight.”

The initial push to shrink these lands was largely due to energy corporations. Take, for example, Energy Fuel Resources, which lobbied the administration to shrink Bears Ears, Utah, by 85 percent, paying lobbying firm Faegre Baker Daniels tens of thousands of dollars in the process. (That firm’s head just so happens to be the nominee for deputy secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler.) The shrunken territory, as planned, has a high concentration of uranium mines — exactly what Energy Fuel Resources wants.

“The uranium deposits are outside the monument now,” Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert told

KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Mule Canyon Cave Towers site is part of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, which was expanded and then scaled back.

The Washington Post last month — but that’s only because the parks have been shrunk.

Extraction corporations already have access to 98 percent of the millions of acres under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. We are talking about setting aside a paltry 2 percent.

Lest we forget, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is already under some scrutiny for his stewardship of natural resources.

His agency was just involved in a suspicious deal to revitalize Puerto Rico’s electrical industry after Hurricane Maria with a contract to a tiny company in Whitefish, Mont., Zinke’s hometown. No bid, naturally.

Millions of dollars, of course. In 2017, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management sold hundreds of thousands of acres to companies, and the first half of 2018 could see nearly 1 million acres sold.

Protecting natural beauty has long been a conservative priority.

Ronald Reagan loved and lived in California. Barry Goldwater loved and lived in Arizona.

Goldwater was in many ways the father of 20th century political conservatism, and he had no greater disciple than Reagan. As president, Reagan called “the preservation of our environment … common sense.”

He signed such preservation laws as the Coastal Barrier Resources Act in 1982, which forbade federal

subsidies to new development in certain areas. He requested “one of the largest percentage budget increases of any agency” to the EPA in 1984, saying that the $157 million budget was for obtaining new lands to conserve.

The framers of the Constitution and Founding Founders would have realized, as most were farmers of their time, that turning the land into infertile soil — as Energy Fuel surely wants to do with the land it claws back from the monuments — would have been unnecessary.

According to a recent poll by the GOP firm of McLaughlin and Associates, 85 percent of Republicans want “more” monuments or wanted to keep them “as is.” Only 15 percent support reduction.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with the generations of Americans after them, looked to the West and saw immense natural beauty and declared that it was Manifest Destiny for these ranges and valleys to be under the Stars and Stripes. If we were to shrink the monuments, we risk turning them into simply more oil fields and mining corporations.

As the great Enlightenment writer and thinker Henry David Thoreau said, “in nature is the preservation of the world.” In the preservation of the world is the preservation of the dignity and privacy of the private and free individual. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MARGULIES

Double trouble for life expectancy THOMAS R. FRIEDEN was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017 and is president and chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of the public-health nonprofit Vital Strategies.

This was written for The Washington Post.

Driven by sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses, U.S. life expectancy declined for a second consecutive year in 2016. Even during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, life expectancy did not decrease over multiple years. Preliminary data suggests that U.S. life expectancy may drop even further in 2017 — a three-year decline not seen since World War I and the global influenza pandemic a century ago.

The dramatic increase in deaths from illegal opioids — particularly illicitly manufactured fentanyl — is driving this alarming trend. The evidence suggests that the increase isn’t because of an increase in the number of people using drugs, but rather because of the greater lethality of the drugs, primarily fentanyl. Until we more effectively address this component, there will probably be further increases in deaths.

But another momentous negative trend has been lost in the appropriate focus on drug overdoses: The decades-long decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease has leveled off. Over a half century, cardiovascular death rates decreased by 60 percent, with this decrease accounting for about three-fourths of the overall U.S. life expectancy gains in that time.

Because increases in drug-related deaths are no longer being offset by decreases in deaths from cardiovascular disease, and because drug overdose tends to kill people at younger ages, the trend toward lowered overall life expectancy has become apparent.

To get the United States back

on track to longer lives, we need to make much more and faster progress against drug overdoses and cardiovascular disease.

On the opioid crisis, we need to drastically improve management of both pain and addiction. This will require improvements in how medical care, including physical therapy and addiction treatment, is provided and paid for. And law enforcement needs to stanch the inflow of illicit heroin and fentanyl.

For those addicted to opioids, easy access to medically assisted treatment, particularly with buprenorphine and methadone, is important. For everyone else, we need to hit the reset button on opioid prescriptions, which,

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

except for terminal palliative care and no more than three days for acute pain, should rarely be used.

These are dangerous medications — a few doses and a patient can be addicted for life, and a few too many pills and a person can die.

At the same time, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, killing more than 15 times as many people as drug overdoses.

Initiatives such as Million Hearts, as well as increased access to low- or no-cost screening and treatment, have helped increase the number of people whose blood pressure and cholesterol levels are controlled. But U.S. blood pressure control rates continue to hover at only around 55 percent, even though some health-care systems and countries have achieved rates of about 70 percent.

To get more value for our health-care dollar, we must embrace a nonpolitical approach to improve the quality of clinical care, starting with cardiovascular disease prevention. This means holding every system accountable for delivering care as the best systems do — getting value by rewarding outcomes of bloodpressure control, cholesterol management, appropriate use of aspirin and smoking cessation

services.

Some contributors to cardiovascular disease are community-wide. The increase in obesity among people reaching the ages at which heart attacks and strokes are more common is a likely major contributor to the slowing of the decrease in cardiovascular deaths. Exhorting people to eat less and exercise more will fail — only systemic approaches to change the food and physical environments have a chance of success, and these are more likely to work to prevent obesity than attempting to reverse it one person at a time.

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages is the single most promising intervention to prevent obesity. Excess dietary sodium intake, mostly from salt added to food during manufacture or commercial preparation, is a leading contributor to high blood pressure. Governments in several countries, including Britain, Kuwait and South Africa, have partnered with the food industry to reduce sodium content and put choice into consumers’ hands; a similar approach here would save money and lives.

With sufficient effort, political courage and resources, we can resume increases in life expectancy. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Exercise BY

M ARK T ARNOPOLSKY

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — for gym owners. Almost 50 percent more people join in January compared with other months, clearly suffused with a commitment to carry out their New Year’s reso­ lutions to exercise. But people often begin their self­improvement plans armed with bad information. Here are five frequent myths.

MYTH NO. 1 You should fight dehydration with sports drinks.

Sports drinks generally help only people who exercise for more than an hour, and the benefit comes mainly from the sugars, not the fluids, particularly if the carbohydrate is a mixed dose of fructose and glucose. Severe dehydration can imperil athletes, but according to studies by South African researcher Timothy Noakes, the author of “Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports,” the body is more than equipped to tolerate mild dehydration, while overhydration may pose more severe risks. In several highprofile cases, overdosing on liquids has led to dangerous and occasionally fatal outcomes. As a consequence, the 2007 American College of Sports Medicine position recommended a more cautious approach: People who exercise for long periods should avoid losing more than 2 percent of their body mass, and within that very broad parameter, fluids containing carbohydrates can be helpful during longer endurance activities. Still, all sports drinks have calories, and consuming them when water will suffice can contribute to fat gain.

MYTH NO. 2 Crunches and abdominal exercise will trim belly fat.

Fat is generally categorized as subcutaneous (under the skin) or visceral (around organs); love handles are the former kind. Fat stores are burned from all areas evenly when you eat less and

exercise more. A six-pack does not emerge when you target the fat in your abdominal area; it comes from bulking up those muscles, which can grow strong enough to show through the layer of subcutaneous fat — they simply appear more pronounced with a lower percentage of overall body fat. As it happens, women tend to maintain fat around the hips and upper thighs, while men keep it around the lower abdomen. An exercise regimen that burns off body fat generally will help slim down all areas, including the subcutaneous and visceral abdominal regions, narrowing the waist and flattening the belly.

MYTH NO. 3 Protein powders are a good way to bulk up.

Yes, you need to consume more protein than your muscles degrade, but the optimal intake for resistance training varies based on your diet, your metabolism and your training.

According to a study I conducted in the late 1980s, the amount of mixed protein needed by verywell-trained weightlifters is only about 50 percent above that needed by sedentary folks.

Varsity-level strength athletes training six days a week and weightlifters during the early stages of a very intensive program need, at most, 100 percent above the requirements for sedentary people. Taking protein beyond these amounts leads to an increase in protein oxidation (you just urinate out the extra nitrogen) with no increase in muscle protein synthesis.

Powders are simply

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

unnecessary, since food more than suffices. The current recommendations of the American Dietetic Association, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine can be met with a proper diet, in which proteins with high biological value (egg whites and milk) are pound for pound better than meat and fish, which themselves are better than plant-based proteins such as soy.

MYTH NO. 4 Endurance exercise is best for cardiovascular health.

Recent evidence suggests that shorter bouts of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — which forces a different kind of oxygenfree energy creation inside the muscles — can provide similar benefits to longer moderateintensity continuous (MICT) workouts, in about one-fifth the time. “The One Minute Workout,” by kinesiologist Martin Gibala, documents the research into these fairly new forms of exercise, which can include burpees and cycling sprints. Work that I have been involved in with his group has shown that the muscle mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cells), maximal aerobic power, and even body fat and glucose improvements are identical between HIIT and MICT. What’s more, high-intensity workouts are

safe and effective for people with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. At the end of the day, it is important to choose the type of exercise that works for you.

MYTH NO. 5 If you work out consistently, you’ll lose weight.

Several studies have clearly shown that, while endurance and HIIT exercise can reduce visceral fat (lower waist circumference) and improve cardiovascular fitness, they often do not result in overall weight loss. Athletes frequently find significant strength improvements with resistance exercise but no change, or even an increase, in total body weight. A 2012 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology followed individuals who worked out for eight months and saw no weight loss (despite other significant health benefits).

The most effective way to knock off weight is by combining exercise with dietary and lifestyle changes — and to focus on the many health benefits of working out without becoming a slave to the scale. n Tarnopolsky is a professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and director of the Neuromuscular and Neurometabolic Clinic there. This was written for The Washington Post.

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