The Washington Post National Weekly - January 22, 2017

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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THE 45TH PRESIDENT A fierce will to win fueled the journey to the White House.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Another great idea BY

A ARON B LAKE

D

onald Trump, who wasted no time after the 2012 presidential election to pick his slogan for 2016, isn’t waiting much longer when it comes to his reelection slogan.

It’s “Keep America Great!” Or maybe just “Keep America Great,” sans exclamation point.

President Trump, who filed the paperwork for “Make America Great Again” just days after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, announced his already-arrived-upon 2020 slogan in an interview held just days before the inauguration with The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty.

The reveal comes in the middle of an interview in which Trump seems to decide, on the spot, to nail down the new slogan and share it with the world.

He even (perhaps for show) calls his lawyer into the room to get the paperwork started.

Check this out: Halfway through his interview with The Washington Post, Trump shared a bit of news: He already has decided on his slogan for a re­ election bid in 2020.

“Are you ready?” he said. “ ‘Keep America Great,’ exclamation point.”

“Get me my lawyer!” the president­elect shouted.

Two minutes later, one arrived.

“Will you trademark and register, if you would, if you like it — I think I like it, right? Do this: ‘Keep America Great,’ with an exclama­ tion point. With and without an exclamation.

‘Keep America Great,’ ” Trump said.

“Got it,” the lawyer replied.

That bit of business out of the way, Trump returned to the interview.

The whole thing is completely Trump for a

KLMNO WEEKLY

CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

President Trump has already decided what slogan will follow “Make America Great Again.”

couple reasons.

The first is that he can barely contain his affection for — and apparent desire to return to — political campaigning. This is a guy who, just days before he was sworn in as the 45th president, was already talking gleefully about the next campaign.

Granted, every politician has at least one eye on the next campaign at all times. They are in the survival business, and that means worrying about how what you do will be perceived next week, next year or even four years from now. But Trump takes this to another level. He basically continued the campaign even after it was over, going on a “thank you tour” that at times seemed to be more about Trump keeping up the fight rather than uniting the country.

(Before taking the inaugural oath, he even reportedly already had plans to keep a campaign office open throughout his first term to work on his reelection.)

The second reason it’s so Trump is that,

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mere days from taking office, Trump has already determined that in four years time, he will have Made America Great Again. He’s banking on it without having passed one bill or signed one executive order.

Which, coming from Trump, isn’t shocking.

He has promised his voters the world and then some. And he did so again while explaining the new slogan.

“I never thought I’d be giving [you] my expression for four years [from now],” he said.

“But I am so confident that we are going to be, it is going to be so amazing. It’s the only reason I give it to you. If I was, like, ambiguous about it, if I wasn’t sure about what is going to happen — the country is going to be great.”

There are things that are outside a president’s control, of course — as former president Barack Obama will attest (and has attested).

External factors will affect America’s greatness for the next four years, however you define “greatness.” n

CONTENTS COVER STORY THE WORLD BOOKS OPINION CYCYCYC BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 16 18 20 X X X X

ON THE COVER President Trump poses for a portrait at Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday. He was sworn in as the 45th president Friday. Photograph by MATT MCCLAIN, The Washington Post

THE 45TH PRESIDENT

He spun early failure into business and political success

BARTON SILVERMAN/NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX

Donald Trump, left, and his father at Trump Village, a cluster of affordable housing in Brooklyn, in 1973.

Although his father urged him to stick to New York’s outer boroughs, Donald Trump set his sights on Manhattan at an early age.

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CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY MICHAEL KRANISH

BORN INTO WEALTH, A REBELLIOUS BOY FROM QUEENS STRUCK A CHORD WITH AVERAGE JOES, DISCOVERING HIS FORMULA FOR SUCCESS IN BUSINESS AND, LATER, POLITICS

The two-story, 23-room house sits grandly on Midland Parkland in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood in Queens, its portico upheld by six white columns, as if a plantation manse from the South had been transplanted to suburbia. It was here, in a mansion built by his father, with a chauffeur-driven limousine in the driveway, that Donald Trump spent most of his childhood. And it was here, in this house that symbolized how the Trumps were bigger and brasher than all around them, that Donald first revealed his rebellious nature.

He punched his music teacher, disobeyed his parents by sneaking into Manhattan and, according to his close friend at the time, bought a switchblade knife. Eventually, his parents sent

him away, enrolling him for five teenage years in New York Military Academy, which tried, and often failed, to calm the most hyperkinetic of all the Trumps. Donald, the family learned, could not be easily contained.

Now, as Trump prepares to move into a far grander, many-columned home, he is once again unlikely to be contained. That, it seems, is what the voters wanted. Trump’s arrival in Washington has excited a cross-section of the country who see in him not an elitist, but a populist who can explode the way business is done in the nation’s capital. The fact that Trump comes from such a privileged background, and that he became fabulously wealthy by catering to some of the world’s richest people, did not put off the millions of workingclass people who supported him. To the con-

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

trary, they see him as their champion, even as he stacks his Cabinet with fellow billionaires.

Trump comes to this moment as a more complex man than is widely realized. He is in some ways still the boy from Queens, who grew up in a bubble amid a melting pot, wanting to be, as he wrote in 2016, “the toughest kid in the neighborhood . . . mouthing off to everybody while backing down to no one.” He moved across the river to cater to the Manhattan glitterati but never quite felt accepted; they were put off by his crude language and boastful manner. He is also a survivor who filed six corporate bankruptcies even as he lived in his three-story gilded aerie at the top of a tower he named after himself.

For much of his 70 years, Trump has been on a roller-coaster ride of rebellion and revolution and upending it all, of risking everything, leaving wreckage in his path when necessary, and, above all, finding a way to survive. To win. It’s all about winning, he said often, and he did win the presidency, much to the surprise of myriad pundits and pollsters, as well as his vanquished rival, Hillary Clinton.

For all the unpredictable nature of his actions, he has remained stubbornly consistent about how he believes the world views America. He fumed in 1987 about the United States being laughed at by the rest of the world. He said the same thing in 2016. Yet his politics changed endlessly: Democrat, Republican, independent, Reform Party, Republican again. So did his positions; first he favored abortion rights, citing his “pro-choice instincts,” then he opposed them. He favored universal healthcare coverage before he called for repealing Obamacare. He called for higher taxes on the superwealthy before suggesting tax cuts. He had no core, his opponents said.

What is now clear is that lack of ideology is his ideology: It’s the ideology of winning. If he is to be successful, that pragmatic side, which has served him so well when he needed it, could be his guiding principle — unless he finds it cannot coexist with his love of rebellion.

Trump’s life, beginning with the street in Queens where grew up, provides a road map to his outlook and vision and failings, showing how he dealt with one crisis after another, touchstones that may foreshadow how he will handle the presidency. *** Descending the 17 steps of the mansion in Jamaica Estates, walking down a treelined street and then turning onto Hillside Avenue, Donald Trump arrived at the Jamaica179th Street subway station, where he often boarded the F train to Manhattan. His parents were unaware that their preteen son was wandering around the city, which the family considered too dangerous. Trump was enthralled with the teeming borough on the opposite side of the East River, and so began his dreams of always doing something bigger.

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WHAT IS NOW CLEAR IS THAT LACK OF IDEOLOGY IS HIS IDEOLOGY: IT’S THE IDEOLOGY OF WINNING. IF HE IS TO BE SUCCESSFUL, THAT PRAGMATIC SIDE . . .

COULD BE HIS GUIDING PRINCIPLE.

These early journeys eventually led him to envision building skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, said the idea was “crazy,” Donald later wrote, and initially tried to keep him within the outer boroughs.

He named Donald the president of Trump Management, which oversaw a real estate empire in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island from a modest office on Avenue Z near Coney Island. The family’s grand achievement was Trump Village, which would have looked at home in the former Soviet Union, a dreary collection of seven 23-story buildings, 2,300 units built as cheaply as possible. The workingclass residents were grateful to Fred Trump for the affordable housing, but Donald later wrote that it “was not a world I found very attractive.”

He continued to dream of building in Manhattan and catering to some of the world’s wealthiest people. His father eventually assented to the idea. Fred once gave a speech that Donald attended in which he laid out the Trump philosophy. “Nine out of 10 people don’t like what they do,” Fred said. “And in not liking what they do, they lose enthusiasm, they go from job to job, and ultimately become a nothing.”

Donald aimed to become something.

Trump’s will was soon tested when the Justice Department sued Donald and his father, alleging that Trump Management officials steered blacks away from buildings that were mostly occupied by whites. It was left to Donald to decide whether to settle the case, and he sought the advice of Roy Cohn, the tenacious former counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who urged him to fight the government, hitting back 100 times harder. Trump eventually settled the case two years later — the first of many times he would say he would never settle and then did —

Donald Trump celebrates his third Atlantic City casino in 1990. Casino bankruptcies brought Trump to the brink of financial ruin, but reality TV revived his fortunes and honed his showman’s skills.

but these events proved to be among the most formative of his life. They define him to this day.

Trump learned to fight, to threaten, to countersue. He harbored an animus to the federal government that never subsided, feeling he was treated unfairly, which could affect his view of lawsuits that his administration might be asked to bring. He remains angry that the first real attention that he received in the media — a front-page story about the case in the New York Times headlined “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City” — in effect suggested that he was racist.

Trump, eager to move on from the outer boroughs and the racial-bias case, determined he would become a major builder in Manhattan, and he succeeded. Taking advantage of a variety of tax incentives, he built a Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower, playing a major role in revitalizing parts of Manhattan. The projects’ success boosted Trump’s ego and power. He had gone against his father’s initial advice to avoid Manhattan, and it had paid off. Now he set his sights on even bigger projects. *** Trump soon traveled by seaplane to Atlantic City and decided that he wanted to be the biggest casino operator in the eastern United States. At first, he said he would follow his father’s second piece of advice: never go deeply into debt. He testified at a New Jersey Casino Control Commission hearing that he would never use “junk bonds” that paid 14 percent interest because they were too risky. But his ambition to be the biggest operator was so intense that he soon relied on the junk bonds he had disdained, and he went deeply into personal debt.

He told the story of walking down Fifth Avenue and seeing an impoverished blind man.

Trump told his companion that the man hawking pencils was $900 million richer than he was — because Trump’s negative worth was precisely that much. (In one of his books, Trump wrote that the blind man was worth $9.2 billion more than he was, but he later said that was a mistake.) He pleaded with Japanese bankers, hid his fleet of helicopters from those who wanted to repossess them, and persuaded a bank to insure a yacht that he couldn’t afford.

He had believed that he could succeed by attracting big-spending gamblers, but his associates gave him a piece of advice that would later resonate in his presidential campaign: It’s fine to have the support of the wealthy big spenders, but the path to profitability would rely on attracting people of more modest means who boarded buses to his casinos to inject a little excitement into their lives; they just wanted to taste the Trump experience and feel wealthy.

On Oct. 10, 1989, just as Trump’s financial problems were coming to a head, he met at Trump Tower with three executives who ran his casinos. The trio then boarded a helicopter to return to Atlantic City. As the chopper headed continues on next page

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BILL PUGLIANO/GETTY IMAGES

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over the Garden State Parkway, a rotor broke, and the aircraft crashed, killing all aboard. A devastated Trump informed the families. As his financial problems mounted, he realized that he had, as he put it, taken his “eye off the ball,” in part because he was having an affair with Marla Maples while he was married to Ivana Trump, the first of his three wives. “For the first time since I had known him, I heard fear and uncertainty in his voice,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino at the time and later wrote a book about the experience.

As Trump tried to regain control, he lashed out at other executives, blamed those who died in the helicopter crash for his problems, and fired employees. It was, to this point, his greatest test. He managed to open his third and

grandest casino, the Taj Mahal, but it cannibalized business from his other two at the very time Atlantic City was experiencing an economic slowdown. Everything Trump built was at risk.

Yet Trump had piled one risk on top of another.

He bought New York’s storied Plaza Hotel for $407 million, admitting that “I can never justify the price I paid” but explaining that he had to have the trophy property, which symbolized wealth, class and elegance. He paid $365 million for an airline that became the Trump Shuttle, even though he knew nothing about the business, which eventually floundered. He put all three casinos into corporate bankruptcy, as well as the Plaza Hotel and two other businesses. He created a public company, paid himself millions of dollars, and saw the stock price fall from $35 a share to 17 cents. Through

it all, investors howled, bondholders cried foul, and contractors — many of them smallbusiness men — said they were stiffed.

Yet Trump survived.

He renegotiated countless contracts, persuaded the banks to let him keep a majority stake in the properties, and avoided personal bankruptcy. He explained it this way in an interview with The Washington Post: “I wasn’t representing the country. I wasn’t representing the banks. . . . I was representing Donald Trump. So for myself, they were all good deals.”

This, said the author of “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” was an even more magnificent chapter, and so he wrote “The Art of the Comeback.”

He had learned a lesson. His father had been right; it was a mistake to go so deeply into debt.

In the future, he decided, he would mostly let

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

others take the risk. He would sell his name to developers who would put it on their buildings; he would get a licensing fee with no downside.

Even if the property failed, he won.

Gradually, as Trump’s name started appearing on more properties around the world, a television producer named Mark Burnett, who had created a show called “Survivor,” came calling. Trump was dismissive; reality television “was for the bottom-feeders of society.” But Burnett was persuasive. Trump would play himself in a show called “The Apprentice,” which would relentlessly promote Trump as the epitome of success. For millions of Americans, this became their image of Trump: in the boardroom, in control, firing people who didn’t measure up to his standard. Trump lived in grand style, flew in a Trump-emblazoned jet or helicopter, and traveled from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Most viewers didn’t realize it, but the show helped transform a man who had nearly suffered catastrophic financial failure into a success. Trump has said he earned $214 million during 14 seasons of the NBC broadcast, and he made more from related licensing deals for products including ties and cologne. His name became a valuable brand. When Trump showed up at a minor event to promote his clothing line, he was asked why he was there. His answer defined his philosophy: “Because I want to win, and I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

Having agreed to host “The Apprentice,” he set out to appeal to the “bottom-feeders” he had derided, and he found that he excelled at his new craft. Showmanship came naturally. His father had promoted housing on Coney Island with an array of stunts, and his mother, an émigré from Scotland, had often told Donald of her love of royal pageantry. Trump had combined these two parental traits and created a political persona unlike any other.

Without “The Apprentice,” there almost certainly would have been no presidential candidacy and no President Trump. The selfdescribed multibillionaire took pride in being able to appeal to the average working person.

One of his most famous comments — that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters” — underscored his belief that he could say or do anything without harming his brand. His family called him a “working-class billionaire”; he liked nothing more than a Big Mac and fries and a binge on television shows. He said he had never read a book about a president, and he didn’t like long briefings or lengthy papers.

Summaries would suffice.

Trump’s incuriosity about much of the world inevitably led to derision that he did not have the intellectual capacity or temperament to be president. But Trump had a different kind of genius. He was a showman who understood the power of television, where most people got their information. (When social media started to play an outsize role, he seized on that, as well.)

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WITHOUT “THE APPRENTICE,” THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE BEEN NO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY AND NO PRESIDENT TRUMP.

He threw himself into the world of professional wrestling, appearing in the ring before 80,000 people in Detroit in 2007, and celebrated the crassness of it all. Just like a pro, he pretended to body-slam an opponent, soaking in the crowd’s roar. In retrospect, the WrestleMania appearances were a warm-up for the rambunctious rallies that Trump would hold during the 2016 campaign; he developed an uncanny sense about how to read the mood in an arena and play to a pumped-up crowd.

Indeed, anyone who was paying attention to Trump’s speeches or read his books (which were typically written by ghostwriters or coauthors) could have seen the antecedents of his presidential campaign strategy. He said he agreed with the idea that paranoia was the key to success. “Now that sounds terrible,” Trump said in a speech earlier in his career. “But you have to realize that people — sadly, sadly — are very vicious. You think we’re so different from the lions in the jungle?”

The Trump style — boasts and bombast, attacks and taunts — were hardly new devices.

He has been using them for decades.

To read Trump’s books is to find a man of contradiction. In “Surviving at the Top” (1990), Trump wrote that one of his rules is “don’t think you’re so smart that you can go it alone.” But in “Think Like a Billionaire” (2004), Trump wrote that one his of rules was to “think of yourself as a one-man army. You’re not only the commander in chief, you’re the soldier as well. You must plan and execute your plan alone.” Trump’s other rules in this latter book included not taking a vacation, having a short attention span, and not relying on technology. “Friends are good, but family is better,” Trump wrote, foreshadowing his heavy reliance during the campaign on his children, particularly his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Some of the most revealing words written by

Trump and wrestler Bobby Lashley, right, shave WWE chief Vince McMahon’s head in 2007.

Trump came in “The Art of the Comeback” (1997), which during the presidential campaign received notice because he had included a picture of himself with Hillary Clinton, writing that “the First Lady is a wonderful woman who has handled pressure incredibly well.”

Much of the book is about how Trump rebounded from his financial nadir. It is a story that he rarely told on the trail, where he depicted himself mostly as an unerring success. But as he told it in his book, “the worst of times can turn to your advantage — my life is a study of that. I learned so much during the tough years. . . . I learned about handling pressure. I was able to home in, buckle down, get back to basics, and make things work. I worked much harder, I focused and I got myself out of a box.” *** Trump teased his candidacy for decades. He first raised the possibility in 1987, traveling to the first-primary state of New Hampshire, but it turned out to be a promotional ploy for his first book, “The Art of the Deal.” In 1988, Trump attended the Republican National Convention to watch George H.W. Bush receive the nomination. Appearing on a CNN show at the convention, Trump was asked by host Larry King about his wealth.

He responded by saying he was a man beloved by average people.

“You know, wealthy people don’t like me because I’m competing against them all the time and I like to win,” Trump said. “The fact is, I go down the streets of New York and the people that really like me are the taxi drivers and the workers.”

“Then why are you a Republican?” King asked.

“I have no idea,” Trump responded.

All he could say was that he believed in “certain principles of the Republican Party.” *** After Trump descended the elevator in his eponymous tower on Fifth Avenue to declare his presidential candidacy in June 2015, his off-the-cuff comment that many illegal Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists led many pundits to dismiss his chances. He stood in the low single digits in the polls.

Yet the polls provided the wrong numbers to study. Trump himself had correctly said in 2000 — when he briefly considered running for the presidency — that it was inevitable that an outsider would be elected president. Economic stagnation had only worsened since he made that prediction. The numbers that mattered most were these: The 117 million Americans in the bottom 50 percent of the nation’s economy had seen practically no real increase in their income since 1980, while the top 1 percent had seen their net worth skyrocket. The status quo, which Hillary Clinton represented, was not acceptable to many. The approval ratings of Congress, and of continues on next page

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Washington in general, were at historic lows.

Trump, who had spent much of his career selling high-end real estate to some of the world’s wealthiest people, may have hardly seemed like the ideal carrier for the message of economic populism. There was little in Trump’s career that indicated he was devoted to the concerns of the working class. But here is where the boy from Queens had an advantage that few seemed to realize at the time.

The essence of Trump’s character could first be seen on the baseball field of his youth. Trump idolized Yogi Berra, the scrappy Yankees catcher, and played the same position, constantly chattering behind the plate, chiding the batter, seeking to rattle the opponent, not unlike his technique on Twitter today. Trump took out his aggression on the field, running hellbent around the bases, crashing into players who stood in his way, leaving the field with the dirtiest uniform. He could hit home runs, but when he struck out, he sometimes slammed the bat against a concrete walk so hard that it splintered. He was often injured. But he loved playing catcher, he told his friends, because it was the roughest position in the field.

“He learned how to be very competitive,” said Trump’s childhood friend, Peter Brant, who played baseball with him in a Queens Little League. “It’s pretty obvious how he conducted himself in this election is very similar to the way he was on the field; he basically wanted to win.”

Brant, who also traveled by subway with Trump on sojourns into Manhattan, said Trump’s upbringing in Queens, in a neighborhood that was racially and economically mixed, goes far in explaining the president-elect. Brant recalled going to ballgames at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, where Trump picked seats with a clear view of the catcher, and sitting with blue-collar fans. They went to Fred Trump’s construction sites and marveled at the artistry of bricklayers. Given Trump’s background, Brant said, it is not surprising that he found a way to relate to average folks.

“Donald can be a regular Joe,” Brant said.

“He grew up in Queens. You have to understand it’s not like growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. This was Queens.”

Although his Queens accent is mostly gone, Trump retains the demeanor that Brant saw long ago. It is a straight line from Trump’s days taunting opponents from the catcher’s position to the outrageous appearances on WrestleMania and then the belittling of adversaries on the campaign trail. Trump learned through his experience with professional wrestling and “The Apprentice,” as well as his many appearances on late-night television shows and shockjock radio programs, that he had a way — sometimes a crude way — of connecting with average people. He sounded equally at ease talking on Howard Stern’s radio show about a woman’s breasts as he was on CNBC discussing the future of interest rates. Before running for

FOR ALL HIS BUSINESS EXPERIENCE, NOTHING IN TRUMP’S CAREER IS COMPARABLE TO THE DEMANDS OF THE PRESIDENCY.

president, his most recent involvement in politics was to suggest, falsely, that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen, a claim it took years for him to abandon.

During his campaign, Trump boasted that he was uniquely prepared for the presidency. He said he knew more than the generals about the Islamic State, that he “alone” could fix the nation’s problems. After winning the election, he said that he didn’t need daily intelligence briefings because he was “smart” and they were often repetitive. His choices for a variety of Cabinet positions often were provocative: He picked Andrew Puzder, an opponent of the minimum wage, to be labor secretary; Betsy DeVos, an advocate of private school vouchers, to be education secretary; and Scott Pruitt, who has said the science on climate change is “far from settled,” to be the Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

For all his business experience, nothing in Trump’s career is comparable to the demands of the presidency. He now controls a massive military and is responsible for deciding whether to launch nuclear weapons, a choice that he might have to make in minutes.

Trump holds a unique place in the pantheon of presidents. He is the only businessman to become president who has not previously worked in some kind of public service, such as the military or the Cabinet, according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “We’ve never had anybody who is just a business person making money for himself and has zero public office” experience, he said.

Will he be “presidential,” as he has promised, or will he revert to campaign mode, relying on insult and bombast and Twitter? He made many promises that will be hard to keep: rebuild America’s infrastructure; replace Obamacare with something “great” at a fraction of the cost; return coal and steel jobs; rebuild manufacturing; unite a deeply divided country.

Part of Trump’s challenge will be coming to terms with his contradictions. He ran against the establishment, of which he is a member as a billionaire. He ran against the media, which he played expertly to promote himself. (“If you say

outrageous things and fight back, they love you,” Trump wrote in his 2016 book, “Crippled America,” about his media strategy.) Trump ran against Washington, which he must now lead. He railed against the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs, which he said had “total control” over Hillary Clinton. Then he appointed current or former Goldman Sachs officials to be treasury secretary, director of the White House National Economic Council, and chief strategist.

Trump ran against not just the Democratic Party but also his fellow Republicans. He blasted Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan, who had said Trump’s words about the heritage of the judge in a case regarding Trump University were “the textbook definition of a racist comment”; now the two must work together. If Trump carries grudges into the White House, as he often did in business, he will have unprecedented power to launch vendettas. Already, he has used Twitter to warn critics that he won’t hesitate to hit them back harder, just as Cohn taught him decades ago. Trump once explained his strategy by quoting what he called the “philosophy” of his longtime friend, boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Trump arrives in Washington with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, which should give him a clear path to pass many of his initiatives. But many Republicans remain skeptical about him, and Democrats in the Senate can try to stop him with filibusters. The public divisions aren’t likely to go away. Trump won the electoral vote, but he would have lost it with a switch of just 107,000 votes in three states, and he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million.

So, how will Trump govern, this man who says one thing, then changes his mind, then attacks, then strives to please? Who tweets and preens and gloats. Who has no record of governance, who has had as much failure as success. He was elected on a wave of angst and anger, embodying an idea expressed by countless supporters: blow up the way Washington works (or doesn’t work).

Not just disruption but explosion.

Trump is well on his way to engineering that explosion, and the impact could reshape the country. Much will depend on how he sells his plans, and whether the economy continues to improve. An unforeseen crisis could emerge.

George W. Bush, for example, had to deal with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Great Recession. Such crises seize a president’s attention, undermine his plans, reroute his vision.

Trump’s leadership skills doubtless will be tested in ways he has not yet imagined.

The prologue of the campaign is past. The tales of Trump’s Queens childhood, as well as his bankruptcies, divorces, vulgar comments, casinos and reality show, are now the backstory of his life, early chapters that shaped his road to the White House.

In the great sweep of history, it is only now, as Trump has ascended to the presidency, that his story truly begins. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

11

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT

Readers offered their advice to the president and shared what they hope to see accomplished in his administration

P

resident-elect Trump: You are about to take the most serious oath of office anyone has the privilege to take. You were not my choice, but I support and respect the office. You must show the American people that unity, security and country come before your own self-interest. You cannot be right all of the time. Do not put your country at risk through tweets, lies and conflicts of interest. Get rid of the people around you who don’t have the best interests of the American people at heart. People are terrified of your presidency. Give them peace.

Kit Keane, 66, Chicago

D

amn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead. Do what’s right for the country, and the politicians will fall away. I am on Obamacare and hate it, but be smart when you replace it. Make America great again.

John Nowak, 57, Charlotte

D

ear Mr. Trump: You are assuming a huge responsibility to the people of the United States and the world. Please be careful with your words and actions so that the quality of life we now enjoy will both remain and extend to those who are disadvantaged.

In particular, please do not sign any bill that compromises the health care of our citizens, be it repeal and delay on the Affordable Care Act or, even worse, a change to Medicare that will cause financial and logistical hardships for older people and their caregivers.

I suggest you talk with ordinary citizens who will be affected by your decisions and those of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Find out. You have a big heart and seem to want to protect people who are vulnerable.

This could be your strength.

Please do not change tax policy in ways that overly benefit the top 10 percent and add to the deficit. Americans are not clamoring for lower taxes now; they are clamoring for improvement in their lives. To the extent that federal support is withdrawn, the states have to find the revenue, which often results in myriad nickel-and-dime tax and fee increases that provide an abrasive irritant to daily life. It’s not like the expenses to maintain civilization disappear when taxes are cut.

Lastly, I encourage you to imagine meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and accounting for all of the good and the bad that you’ve done in your life. What is the best good that could come

from your presidency? And what would you imagine to be your biggest regret? If you think these through now, you can act for the best.

Lee Rowen, 66, Seattle

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ear Mr. Trump, I am filled with the hope that you will show us that you are compassionate, wise, thoughtful, intelligent, caring, generous, honorable, trustworthy, even-tempered, evenhanded, kind, nice, global in perspective, concerned for the less fortunate, supportive of women’s and children’s rights and issues, aware of the potential of every person, open to ideas both agreeable and not, curious, interested and supportive of refugees from warstricken nations, openhearted to people of all ethnicities and religions, pleased by diversity (in race, sex, geography and religion), supportive of education as the route to responsible citizenry, amazed by the beauty of our shared geographical resources and committed to saving them, and committed to our cultural and historic monuments and treasures. Overall, I hope that you love the people of this great nation, rich and poor, healthy and sick, creative and dogmatic. All of the citizens of the United States need to be able to trust you. We need you to be strong and kind. Please don’t let us down.

With all sincerity, Caron Thornton, 69, Chicago

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ear President-elect Trump, First, I would like to thank you. This past presidential race instilled in me a love for politics and the media. I’m planning to study both this fall.

As a woman of color and friend to members of the LGBT community, I am frightened by your administration. Throughout my childhood, I was taught that the president is someone I can trust. After all, Americans put our faith in this person to lead the free world.

I just hope you understand what that means.

The United States of America is not a business that you can drive into the ground and start over tomorrow. Our relations with other countries are not just Twitter fights that can be quickly resolved. At stake are people’s lives — more than 318 million of them in the United States, not to mention the countless others on this planet who would be affected by a war of any kind.

I couldn’t have voted for you even if I had wanted to. All I could do was hope the citizens of our great nation were thinking of the greater

good. Now, that hope has been passed on to you. The greater good isn’t getting friendly with Russia or building a wall between us and Mexico. The greater good is keeping your country safe here and now.

We are putting our faith and trust in you, Mr. President-elect. Please don’t let us down.

Jacqueline Zegler, 18, Clifton, N.J.

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r. President-elect: Your post-election promise of bringing us all together is the one promise I hope you keep. The others — build a wall, repeal the Affordable Care Act, make Russia a friend — all can wait, as they will pull us apart, not bring us together.

Ed Kelly, 75, Newton, Mass.

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resident-elect Trump, You will soon be the leader of the free world. Use your time wisely to try to understand the problems in America and abroad. You are faced with addressing the health-care needs of all Americans, tax reform that is fair and that neither enriches those who have nor punishes those who have not, addressing the issue of continued gun violence, and protecting our air and water. Internationally, we face the threat of the Islamic State and international terrorism, not to mention a ruler in North Korea with a desire to attain nuclear weapons and be able to deliver them anywhere in the world, and Mideast tensions that keep the world on edge.

With all the issues facing us, I ask that you refrain from using Twitter to respond to criticism that comes your way. You need to be bigger than that! Apply yourself to the things that are important, and work to make life better for the American people and the people of the world. Do this, and you will be remembered as a great president.

James Groncki, 67, Annapolis, Md.

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want President-elect Trump to listen to and allow scientists and researchers to do their jobs, particularly as they relate to the environment. I would like to see money spent on researching “What if . . . ” questions that may hold the solutions of the future. I want Mr. Trump to know that climate change is not a hoax. It is not a partisan issue or Chinese plot.

Climate change affects people of every political stripe, and we see it in the changing weather patterns, in the rapid loss of land in Louisiana, and in ever-increasing coastal flooding. (Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in southern Florida is at risk, too.) We also need to continue working at giving people access to clean air and water.

These are not partisan issues. These are human issues.

Anne Hubbard 60, Cambridge, Mass. continues on next page

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m praying God will give President Trump the gifts of humility, compassion and wisdom he needs for the great responsibilities he will have.

Sheila Hillberry, 71, Rapid City, S.D.

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ou were elected President of the United States, not the president of the marketing arm of Trump Inc. Start acting like it.

Stop with the games, the crowd pleasing one-liners, and the fact-free tweets.

This is a monumentally important position, and I don’t think you have the skills or the desire to do the job. Prove me wrong.

Kathy Smith, 58, Minneapolis

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r. Trump, it is imperative that you remain steadfast to America’s international commitments and foreign partners, especially NATO. The global system created after World War II — through the efforts of American leaders of both parties — has given us decades of economic growth and peace, which should not be trivialized or lightly dismissed.

The anxieties of the working class (white or otherwise) are real and powerful, and your campaign spoke to them in a way that no political candidate has in generations. Now is your chance to work for them and prove they were right to entrust you with the most powerful office in the world.

Remember that while creating barriers to the outside world — physical or otherwise — may bring short-term satisfaction, doing so ultimately breeds distrust, suspicion and hate, leaving all sides poorer. In that vein, America has traditionally regarded our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere as mere afterthoughts in geopolitical matters. You can enforce our immigration laws and remove undocumented criminals without alienating the (primarily democratic) nations of Latin America, particularly Mexico. By fostering closer economic, trade and cultural ties between the United States and Latin America, you can strengthen the United States while empowering the people of other countries to improve their own nations as well. Good luck. We are counting on you.

Ian Furman, 34, Houston

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ear Mr. President-elect, You made tremendous promises that you would fix and grow the economy. If you follow through on those promises, all of America will be in your debt, and I will have been completely wrong about you.

You promised to protect Social Security and Medicare. You promised to protect the good parts of Obamacare. You promised to stand by hard-working Americans.

If you do all of this, I will be in your debt.

Good luck, Mr. President-elect.

Michael Sugarman, 66, Santa Fe, N.M.

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r. Trump, in this order: bring us together, keep us safe, revive the economy, build the wall.

Dave Rice, 57, Alexandria, Va.

ear President-elect, Congratulations. I pray for your success. The way I read your rhetoric is that you are not an ideologue. But I worry that you will allow yourself to be manipulated by the extreme right that controls Congress.

Please do not let them repeal Obamacare without a replacement. There are too many of us and our families who depend on it. Moreover, citizens have a right to know what the replacement looks like and its cost before it is chosen as a “better” plan.

Sanjay Saluja, 52, Falling Waters, W.Va.

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ear Mr. Trump: You have spent your entire life serving your own self-interest, often to the detriment of others. Now that you’ve been elected president, your job is to set aside your own self-interest and that of your family, and serve the very best interests of the American people.

Do you get that? Do you know what it means to put yourself at the service of others? Are you capable of serving your country instead of yourself?

Katherine Clark, 54, Pensacola, Fla.

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lease consider the people who will be hurt by your proposed policies. Consider the women, especially poor women, who would be hurt by defunding Planned Parenthood or reversing Roe v. Wade. Planned Parenthood provides essential health-care programs for millions. Talk to providers and patients and you will see that many Republicans are disingenuous about these programs.

Also, do not repeal the Affordable Care Act. My son has three part-time jobs, has an advanced degree, and does well at his work.

But he is not covered by his employers. The ACA has been a lifesaver for him, as it has for millions. There may be problems — fix them.

Don’t get rid of the program and try to start from scratch. The ACA took years of study and work to develop, and it is working well for most people.

Americans will be watching what you do and expecting good things.

Barbara Finlay, 71, Lohn, Tex

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ou have before you an opportunity for greatness, as well as an opportunity to destroy something other men, pronounced great by historians, created in the 18th century. While we are young as a nation,

we have already played a pivotal role on the world stage because we are a free country and an innovative people.

Please use your turn on the world stage not to enrich yourself further but to make your mark as a creative and caring statesman. If you do not think you can do that, please step down.

We live in perilous times, and we need someone at the helm who will take on, and not cater to, the special interests and the other nations that wish us ill.

If you choose to occupy the Oval Office and use it to satisfy your ego while Vice Presidentelect Mike Pence carries out the agenda of the Republican Party, many Americans will be very disappointed in you. Do the right thing, always.

Phyllis Bartoe, 72, Hilton Head Island, S.C.

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o the Honorable President-elect: Complete transparency in your global business dealings is the only way your presidency can succeed. Please release your tax returns and, particularly, the details of any relationships that you, your family or your businesses might have with Russia: both its government and any Russian lenders and investors.

Otherwise, your every move will be clouded by suspicion. Already, your strange defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin — no friend of democracy, the United States, or his own people — raises the strong suspicion that you’re hiding something. It is reasonable for American citizens to fear that you have business interests in Russia that you value more than the national security of the United States, or that Putin has information about you that he will use as leverage to affect your policies.

If you want to refute these suspicions and fears, please come clean.

Robert Honeywell, 52, Claverack, N.Y.

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o President-elect Trump: Good luck — we all need you to succeed. Please remember that the election was actually quite close and that many people oppose some of your signature issues.

Consider showing us how you can make winwin deals that benefit all Americans rather than overreaching based on a nonexistent “mandate.” Surprise us by reaching out to and working with your opposition rather than mocking them.

Noam Stopak, 58, Washington

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did not vote for you, Mr. President-elect, but I do wish you well these next four years.

As a teacher, I make mistakes daily, and when the mistake involves a student, I always, always, always admit the mistake. This would be a good lesson for you and for the young people in our country. Show the nation that honesty trumps pride every time.

Mark Padrnos, 57, Madison, Wis.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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ALL THESE MEN WERE INTENT ON CHANGE But history has some lessons to teach those who seek to upend the status quo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY JOEL ACHENBACH Twenty-four years ago, William Jefferson Clinton promised change.

“Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the very foundations of our nation, we would need dramatic change from time to time,” the 42nd president said in his first inaugural address. “Well, my fellow Americans, this is our time.”

He had been echoing Jefferson promiscuously for days. Jefferson had won the first “change election” in American history, in 1800 — federalists out, “republicans” in — and now Clinton had ended 12 years of Republican occupation of the White House. He had journeyed to Washington from Monticello, re- creating Jefferson’s trip 191 years earlier, this time in a bus with a license plate reading “Hope 1.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Public Law 346, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the GI Bill.

His predecessor had been a heroic World War II pilot, part of the Greatest Generation.

Clinton was a boomer. The Cold War was over, and Clinton vowed to focus on domestic issues, boost the economy, help the middle class, reinvent government and provide universal health care while balancing the budget and just in general being transformational.

Then came reality. “Dramatic change” in Washington is hard to come by — as Clinton and just about every other “change” candidate has learned.

Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp of Washington, but here’s a different metaphor: It’s a fortress, with moats, drawbridges, hidden passageways, secret tunnels, dungeons.

Outsiders struggle to master the place. Among the impediments to change is the Constitution. It fetishizes the distribution of power.

Members of Congress take seriously the notion that they’re part of an equal branch of government. Supreme Court justices and federal judges have life tenure. The president’s own turf, the executive branch, is a bureaucracontinues on next page

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cy staffed by civil servants who do not always jump on command.

And so, although the president of the United States may be the most powerful figure in the world, we recall what Harry Truman said when Dwight Eisenhower was about to succeed him: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army.”

The job of a president today is something that Jefferson could not have recognized when he took the oath in 1801. At the time, the federal government was tiny, and Jefferson vowed to downsize it further, including reductions in the Army and Navy. He wound up nearly doubling the size of the nation, via the Louisiana Purchase, and he pushed a trade embargo that set the stage for the War of 1812.

Sometimes presidents change things in ways they don’t intend.

A populist down on bankers Andrew Jackson was the most prominent change candidate of the first half of the 19th century. He was a populist who ran against the Eastern bankers and ended the grip on the presidency of the Adams family and the Virginia planters. His 1829 inauguration was marked by a wild White House party in which inebriated supporters — a drunken mob, as some saw it — drank whiskey-laden punch and broke china and furniture. Jacksonian democracy had arrived, though for Native Americans it led to the Trail of Tears, and Jackson’s battle against the banks led to economic chaos and eventually, soon after he left office, the depression known as the Panic of ’37.

Nothing brought change to America so dramatically as the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, which triggered secession, civil war, emancipation, the constitutional prohibition of slavery, and a new beginning for the nation in which the words “the United States” would generally be treated as a singular rather than a plural. Some 750,000 Americans died in the war, and Lincoln was fated to be the final casualty.

Change didn’t always require an election.

Teddy Roosevelt, just 42 years old, took the oath after William McKinley died from gunshot wounds. The energetic young president co-opted the press corps and used the presidency’s “bully pulpit” to do battle with monopolists and robber barons and push a progressive agenda.

Every modern change-agent president labors in the long shadow cast by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his first hundred days in office. But the conditions that enabled the passage of FDR’s New Deal were unique. He took the oath of office at the nadir of the Great Depression. Banks were locking their doors.

Unemployment stood at 25 percent. Communism and fascism had taken hold in Europe, and the survival of democracy was in doubt.

Some pundits called for FDR to assume dictatorial powers. Stasis was not an option.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

“FDR was able to accomplish what he did in the first hundred days only because the Great Depression was rewriting the rules of the game,” says Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington.

The Democrats won five straight presidential elections until Dwight Eisenhower captured the White House in 1952. Ike never proclaimed himself a change agent. The New Deal survived.

“What Eisenhower was most brilliant at was bureaucracy. He knew when to threaten, he knew when to pull out, he knew when to bring in outsiders,” said Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College.

Kennedy’s chilling vision Then came John F. Kennedy and a generational change. In his inaugural address, he offered a chilling vision of a nation and a civilization on the eve of destruction. Nuclear holocaust now seemed a plausible fate.

“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” Kennedy said. He spoke of “the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science,” and “mankind’s final war,” and the “hour of maximum danger.” It was scary stuff.

President Ronald Reagan gives a thumbsup to onlookers as his wife, Nancy Reagan, waves from their limousine during the inaugural parade in 1981.

His point, says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, was that he would be just as tough on communism as any Republican. Kennedy flexed his muscles as a Cold Warrior and, just a few months into his term, approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba — a complete fiasco. The young president had to learn on the job.

Kennedy’s assassination put Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Johnson’s mastery of the Washington political machinery is unmatched in modern times, and after his landslide 1964 victory he succeeded in advancing his Great Society agenda of social programs and civil rights laws. LBJ showed what an aggressive president coupled with a friendly Congress can do. “The presidency is a battering ram,” writes historian Stephen Skowronek in his book “The Politics Presidents Make.”

That aggression proved LBJ’s undoing, however. He fully owned America’s escalation in Vietnam, and as the war revealed itself to be a tragic quagmire, he lost public support and went on prime-time television to say he would not seek reelection.

That led to a change in party control of the White House. Richard Nixon had vowed that he, personally, had changed since his younger days.

He was “the new Nixon.” In his first inaugural address he called for political harmony.

“To lower our voices would be a simple thing,” Nixon said.

Voices, however, were not lowered, and not simply because the Vietnam War dragged on for years. Nixon had a deep flaw in his temperament: insecurity, which expressed it-

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World War II. But he didn’t pay a political price for that and won reelection in another landslide.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

self as resentment and paranoia. His White House became a dark place of dirty tricks, slush funds, an enemies list and “plumbers” to plug news leaks.

William Safire, a Nixon aide, later wrote a book that described Nixon as a layer cake.

Formal on top. Below that a progressive. Below that a poker player. “Under that is the hater, the impugner of motives, the man who claims he is not angry with the press because he cannot be angry with somebody he does not respect.”

Watergate destroyed Nixon’s presidency and serves as an enduring lesson that character matters.

‘Their time has run out’ When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he embraced his status as outsider: “The insiders have had their chance and they have not delivered. And their time has run out.”

His inaugural message was high-minded, bordering on moralizing. He talked of “the spiritual strength” and the “moral strength” of the nation, and the obligation to take on “moral duties.” In his inaugural parade, he and the first lady surprised everyone by getting out of their armored limousine and walking on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was just Jimmy, a peanut farmer from Georgia — a dramatic change in presidential style.

But as soon as he entered the White House, he alienated Democrats in Congress by going after their pork-barrel projects. He didn’t think he needed a chief of staff, and so day-to-day, Carter micromanaged, overconfident in his ability to study every issue, read

every report. Things went south in the coming years: gas lines, soaring inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter beat back a Democratic primary challenge from liberal hero Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, but on election night 1980 Carter was buried in the Ronald Reagan landslide.

Historians say Reagan came closest among modern presidents to matching FDR’s success in changing Washington. Though vowing revolution, Reagan was also a pragmatist. He picked his rival, George H.W. Bush (who was ultra-establishment), as his running mate, and installed as his first chief of staff Bush’s campaign chairman, James A. Baker III. Reagan was, as historian Richard Reeves put it, a “clean-desk man,” sticking to a 9-to-6 work schedule with a lunch break upstairs with the first lady and, often, a nap. He ran Cabinet meetings that often ended with the directive, “You fellas work it out.”

In his first inaugural address, Reagan had decried deficit spending: “For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present.”

And then he proved to be the biggest deficit spender since FDR. Reagan pushed through a large tax cut and a huge boost in military spending. Deficits soared to levels not seen since

President Bill Clinton acknowledges the crowd during his second State of the Union address on the floor of the 104th Congress in 1995.

The ‘New Democrat’ After Reagan, the word “liberal” became a pejorative. When Bill Clinton won the presidency, he did so by running as a “New Democrat,” a triangulator, renouncing oldschool Democratic tax-and-spend policies.

Clinton’s goal of “dramatic change” fell victim to Republican intransigence and his own lack of professional and personal discipline. And a more subtle change was also afoot: The political parties had become more ideologically consistent and, thus, more polarized.

Clinton took office with an economic stimulus plan, but he could never get it through the Senate. His push for universal health care failed spectacularly. His successful proposals skewed conservative, and he lamented to his staff that they had become Eisenhower Republicans. After learning early on that Congress had put limitations on new spending, he exploded with frustration.

“I won’t have a goddamn Democratic budget until 1996!” Clinton fumed, according to a memoir by his labor secretary, Robert Reich.

“Education, job training — none of the things I campaigned on. What’ll I be able to tell the average working person I did for him?”

The Democrats were clobbered in the midterm election, losing the House for the first time in 40 years. For Clinton, that was the wrong kind of change.

Barack Obama made change the central theme of his 2008 presidential bid, saying in his convention speech, “Change happens — change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time. America, this is one of those moments.”

And change did happen, as he became the first African American in the White House, coming into office with high approval ratings in the midst of the Great Recession. Republican leaders in Congress chose the path of obstruction. Obama’s successful legislative efforts relied almost exclusively on Democratic votes, and as Democrats lost power on the Hill, he resorted to executive orders — actions that can be wiped out with the stroke of a pen.

Some of Obama’s signature achievements could prove to be ephemeral.

Every presidency is unique and unscripted, except for the oath of office, unchanged since it was written in 1787 — Article II, Section One of the Constitution. Obama in 2009 had to take the oath twice because both he and the chief justice flubbed it the first time.

History isn’t predictive, but it’s a guide. One broad lesson is something Obama said he learned only after he arrived in the White House: “The federal government and our democracy is not a speedboat,” Obama said. “It’s an ocean liner.” n

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Gibraltar feels tremors from Brexit G RIFF W ITTE Gibraltar BY

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hen the apes disappear from the Rock of Gibraltar, the British will go, too.

So says a bit of local lore taken seriously enough that Winston Churchill ordered emergency primate reinforcements at the height of World War II, and residents of this fish-and-chips enclave in the land of flamenco pamper their simian neighbors with meticulous care and feeding.

Yet even as the colony of apes — tailless monkeys, really — thrives in its home at the top of the Rock, the 30,000 Britons who live at the foot of the soaring limestone monolith are feeling nervous.

They may not be going anywhere. But thanks to Brexit, Gibraltar is about to leave the European Union — giving Spain new impetus in its centuries-long quest to retake control of this strategically vital and economically prosperous territory, Britain’s sole continental outpost.

To the residents — who take their Britishness seriously — Spain’s suggestions that Gibraltar could be cut off from the rest of Europe unless it accepts at least partial Spanish sovereignty represent a serious threat.

Gibraltar, they say, embodies the European ideal of shared prosperity through cross-border trade and movement. But as European bonds fray, those living here worry that the coupling of Brexit with Spanish threats could return Gibraltar to a painful past.

“Instead of feeding the goose that lays the golden egg, Spain is trying to kill it,” said Ernest “Tito” Vallejo Smith, a retired military man, local historian and tour guide. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re stuck in limbo.”

In that respect, Gibraltar has company. Since the vote by Britain in June to exit the E.U., the country has been locked in suspended animation, awaiting the outcome of negotiations that will reshape virtually every aspect of its relationship with its European neighbors.

GRIFF WITTE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Leaving the E.U. puts these Brits between a rock and a hard place As Gibraltar’s predicament shows, untangling Britain from the E.U. will not be easy. With the negotiations expected to begin this spring, British Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed that she will deliver results to a population demanding liberation from the Brussels bureaucracy and, in particular, greater freedom to limit migration into Britain.

But she also will have to defend British financial interests, which are heavily intertwined with the E.U. And she will need to look out for each of the United Kingdom’s component parts, some of which — Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar — voted against Brexit.

Meanwhile, European negotiators will seek to use every bit of leverage to drive a hard bargain

with their soon-to-be-former E.U. ally, and to dissuade other wavering members from a rush to the exits.

The negotiations, due to last two years, could leave tiny Gibraltar especially vulnerable. Its residents know this well, and it helps to explain why 96 percent of Gibraltarians who voted in the June referendum opted for “remain.”

Unlike its rainy island motherland some 1,000 miles to the north, sun-splashed Gibraltar relies on daily movement and trade across a European border to supply nearly half of its workforce and the vast majority of its resources. And the country that controls that border is Spain — which gave Gibraltar away to Britain in a peace treaty more than 300 years

A Barbary macaque looks out from high on the immense rock that dominates the British overseas territory of Gibraltar.

Residents worry that Spain could cut them off from Europe if they don’t accept at least partial Spanish sovereignty.

ago and has wanted it back ever since.

With the Brexit vote, Spanish officials seemed to think their moment had finally come. Within hours of the result, then-Foreign Minister José García-Margallo declared that the time to plant “the Spanish flag on the Rock” was close at hand.

Last fall, Spain took its case to the United Nations, arguing that Britain’s hold on Gibraltar represented an outdated relic of colonialism.

Spain’s position has slightly softened in recent weeks, with the country’s new foreign minister acknowledging that Spain has little hope of regaining control as long as the British government and Gibraltar authorities refuse to

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phrase worldwide, but through millennia of war, siege and disputed control, this place has rarely been placid.

Its location — on a peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean, with clear views of the African and European coasts plus the ninemile-wide strait that bears Gibraltar’s name — has made it an incomparable military prize. The Rock itself is a natural fortress, its sheer walls deterring all but the most dogged invaders.

But the same factors that made Gibraltar so coveted have also made it the object of damaging battles, as the tunnels, cannon batteries and pockmarked stone walls that litter the verdant Rock attest.

With only one road in and out, Gibraltar is also highly vulnerable to siege. In 1969, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco took advantage of that weakness, abruptly closing the border. The territory was cut off from supplies and deprived of workers. Families divided by the separation were forced to shout news of births and deaths across a fence, their words dying in the sea wind on particularly blustery days.

The border was not fully re-

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budge. But he also suggested that there will be consequences to Gibraltarians for a spurned Spanish offer of co-sovereignty.

“They have a right to get left out of the E.U., if that’s what they want,” Alfonso Dasits told the Spanish newspaper El País. “But if Gibraltar wants a relationship with the E.U., it will have to go through us.”

To longtime residents, the implication is so clear it doesn’t even need to be stated. With Britain and Gibraltar out of the E.U., Spain could decide to sharply limit movement at the border, choking off the territory’s thriving economy, which is built on financial services, online gambling and e-commerce.

Most people here do not think Spanish authorities actually would go that far. But as residents know from bitter experience, it has been done before.

“Never underestimate the lengths that the Spanish government will go to to damage Gibraltar,” said Edward Macquisten, chief executive of the Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce. “That’s the lesson of our history.”

Indeed, “steady as the Rock of Gibraltar” may be a familiar

Bay of Algeciras

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A Gibraltarian favoring “remain” holds forth a few days before the United Kingdom-wide Brexit vote in 2016.

With “leave” having won, Gibraltarians fear that neighboring Spain may tighten border controls and disrupt normal economic activity.

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opened for 16 years, creating a bitter and lasting memory.

“We don’t want to go back to a situation of history revisiting itself,” said Jennifer Ballantine, director of the Gibraltar Garrison Library. “It was painful enough the first time.”

Chief Minister of Gibraltar Fabian Picardo insists that that is not going to happen — and that neither is any form of Spanish sovereignty, an idea Gibraltarians emphatically rejected in a 2002 referendum.

“The people of France are French, the people of Germany are German and the people of Gibraltar are British,” Picardo said in an interview in his handsome offices off Gibraltar’s Main Street, which is lined with fruit-laden orange trees and red postal boxes bearing the seal of Queen Elizabeth II. Britain’s vote for Brexit, Picardo said, was a moment of “deep sorrow” in Gibraltar — because residents are committed Europeans and because they knew the vote to leave would give Spain leverage.

But now that Britain has made its choice, he said, it is vital for the territory to retain access to the single European market and to preserve fluid movement for the 12,000 workers who cross the border daily. He said Britain’s government will fight for both.

“I have absolutely no doubt that London understands how important those issues are for Gibraltar and for the United Kingdom,” he said.

British officials have, for their part, insisted that they will not submit to Spanish demands. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson made that clear in typically colorful fashion, declaring that Britain would maintain “an implacable, marmoreal and rock-like resistance” to any effort to weaken its control over Gibraltar.

But even so, Gibraltar’s plucky residents are girding themselves for possible hard times. The monkeys — Europe’s only free-range colony — are here to stay, and so are the British. But that doesn’t mean life won’t become rough.

“The Gibraltarian is a born survivor. We’ve been through sieges, through wars, through all kinds of bad times,” said Vallejo Smith, the tour guide, historian and lifelong resident who at 68 speaks from personal experience. “But somehow, we always manage to come out afloat.” n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

How immigrants shaped New York N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M AE N GAI

T CITY OF DREAMS The 400-year Epic History of Immigrant New York

by Tyler Anbinder Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $35. 738 pp.

yler Anbinder probably didn’t know just how timely the publication of his book would be. After inaugurating a president who has espoused nativist views, Anbinder’s “City of Dreams” is a welcome reminder that America is a nation of immigrants and that New York is its quintessential immigrant city.

Beginning with the first Dutch settlement in the 17th century and ending with immigration in our own time, “City of Dreams” is a sweeping narrative of the people from around the world who, over the course of 400 years, made New York. Anbinder, a professor of history at George Washington University, is a masterful guide. He moves seamlessly from details of place and daily life to politics and larger themes as he vividly recounts the successive waves of migrants who continually transformed the city’s economy and culture.

Anbinder’s gifts as a writer are most evident in the stories he tells of individuals, both ordinary and famous. The details of their lives and actions bring history to life.

Anbinder shows us both what was distinctive about each group of immigrant New Yorkers — Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Dominicans, Chinese — and what they have in common.

But “City of Dreams” is not a cliched celebration of multiculturalism. Although some readers will be happy to find “their people” in it, this is not a book about ethnic culture or identity. Rather, Anbinder helps us understand the historical conditions that prompted people to leave their homelands and shape their opportunities in America.

We learn about Annie Moore, a 17-year-old Irish girl, and her little brothers, who were the first to land at Ellis Island station when it opened on Jan. 1, 1892. If you thought you knew this story — its simple arrival narrative is part of Ellis Island lore — Anbinder demonstrates that there’s more to it. He tells us about the public relations

ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Immigrants gather on Ellis Island after their arrival in New York in 1902.

efforts involved in moving the girl to the front of the queue coming off the SS Nevada. He also relays the poignant details of Annie’s life upon settling in New York and her marriage to a German American named Gus Schayer, the son of an immigrant baker. They had 11 children, but only five survived to adulthood. Anbinder recounts the causes of death of Annie’s babies — “exhaustion w/tubercular pneumonia,” “diphtheria and bronchopnemonia,” “enter[o]colitis for 24 days” and m[a]rasmus,” or starvation caused by an inability to gain weight — giving us a glimpse of the human toll of poverty and poor housing conditions. Still, the Schayers were not even the poorest of New Yorkers, and the couple had enough money to buy a family plot at Calvary Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Of course, there’s Emma Lazarus, the poet who, preoccupied with the plight of indigent Russian Jewish immigrants who had fled tyranny and pogroms in Europe,

penned the “New Colossus” for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Anbinder reminds us that the statue had not been intended as a welcome to immigrants but as a monument to the emancipation of slaves. It then was rebranded to celebrate the American and French revolutions.

More recently, we have Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old immigrant from Trinidad living in Brooklyn.

He and two friends drove to south Queens one winter night in 1986 to pick up pay he was owed from his job as a construction worker. After their car broke down, they walked a ways seeking assistance and unknowingly crossed a racial boundary into Howard Beach, a white ethnic enclave. They were attacked by a gang of white youths behind a pizzeria, and Griffith, running away, was hit and killed by a car. It was not the first time in the city’s history that race and immigration intersected in such deadly manner.

Despite its sweep, the book fo-

cuses too heavily on the 19th and early 20th centuries, with too little attention to immigration since 1965. Nevertheless, the benefit of such a long narrative arc is that it enables Anbinder to tell the story of how New York was continually made and remade by the energy and determination of newcomers and outsiders. If New York is a city of dreams, it’s also a city of second chances.

Whether immigrants succeeded or were stymied in achieving their dreams has had less to do with variations in ethnic cultures than with the specific conditions of time and place. If there is a “culture” at work in the process, it might be the broad culture of immigration common across ethnic groups. Immigrants are a selfselected population: They usually come from middling backgrounds in their home societies (because the poorest lack the means and the wealthiest have little reason to migrate). They tend to be risk-takers, ambitious and dogged. They are willing to start at the bottom and work their way up — that is, if there are pathways, such as a general economic expansion. Or if small-business niches open up when an older generation of ethnic entrepreneurs passes (greengrocers, dry cleaners, newsstands). Or if immigrants themselves create new businesses that stimulate demand (ethnic restaurants, nail salons).

But upward mobility might also be hindered by discrimination in the labor market, by laws that make legal migration difficult and by nativist political movements.

The latter are often fueled by native-born Americans who are themselves only a generation or two removed from immigration.

“City of Dreams” shows that immigrants have always persevered against such obstacles to make and claim their place. n Ngai is a professor of history and Asian American studies at Columbia University.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Meditations from a burning building

Why television is better than ever

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

verybody lives differently in Colin Thubron’s new novel, but they all burn to death in the same way.

“Night of Fire” is a collection of stories about the tenants in an old apartment building that’s consumed one evening while they sleep. Older or younger, loved or lonely, each of the victims initially ignores the pungent odor, awakens into smoldering confusion and then succumbs.

Long celebrated for his travel writing — “Mirror to Damascus” appeared 50 years ago — Thubron offers the kind of luxuriant sentences and philosophical ruminations that would feel antique if he weren’t so timelessly elegant. Having wandered the world, he presents a constellation of characters stuck in their rooms as the flames unmake them. Where, each story asks, does the substance of consciousness reside?

Like hanging, the prospect of incineration concentrates the mind, but terror is only a fleeting element of this novel. Instead, the smoke induces revelry in these people before they die. A woman recalls the events that led to her career as a naturalist. A photographer considers the deceptions he perpetrated while dating. The oldest tenant relives a traumatic betrayal in grade school.

Their stories would seem to be entirely independent — the neighbors have barely acknowledged each other for years — but tantalizing echoes gradually emerge. Regret hangs heavy in all these rooms, along with memories of lost mothers, and most of these victims look to the stars as they contemplate the twinkling light of their faith.

In the longest story, an unforgettable piece called “Priest,” an ascetic man living on the ground floor discovers an old photograph from his spiritually tumultuous seminary days. That picture draws the priest back to a trip he took with a few other divinity students to Mount Athos. It’s a plot perfect-

ly drawn to capitalize on Thubron’s skills and past travels. Ushered inside the monastery by Greek Orthodox monks, the students “lapse into baffled wonderment” and experience a level of intimacy they never felt in their British seminary.

But that closeness leads to a tragedy that has troubled the old priest for decades, clouding his faith and leaving him in the shadow of remorse. It’s an extraordinary story about the stain of cowardice, a demonstration that what haunts us longest is often not our actions, but our failures to act, those gaping moments of moral timidity that admit no closure.

Equally powerful, though in a setting far removed from the priest’s exotic travels, is the story of a neurosurgeon dreaming of his upcoming marriage. Thubron uses this doctor’s work to concentrate on the theme that pulses through “Night of Fire”: “He thought of the brain as he might of an unbreakable cipher,” Thubron writes. “In its memories it held the web of human identity. It was the incarnate self.” But of course, that description only opens to greater mystery. How can just a few pounds of matter, “a labyrinth of electro-chemical activity,” contain what seems transcendent and immaterial: our very selves, past and present?

Appropriately, the final tenant we hear from is a retired teacher for whom “travel became a compulsion, a subtle liberation.” While staying in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India, he once saw bodies consigned to funeral pyres and wondered, “What survives death?” A friendly monk leads him to “an ancient understanding” not so different from the neurosurgeon’s up-to-date science.

Thubron’s ability to span that geographical, cultural and philosophical range is just one remarkable element of this profound and exquisite novel. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

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NIGHT OF FIRE

By Colin Thubron Harper. 384 pp. $26.99

THE PLATINUM AGE OF TELEVISION From ‘I Love Lucy’ to ‘The Walking Dead’: How TV Became Terrific

By David Bianculli Doubleday. 576 pp. $32.50

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REVIEWED BY

A MY H ENDERSON

s social media killing television?

Not to worry. According to NPR’s “Fresh Air” TV critic and media historian, David Bianculli, we are living in television’s Platinum Age, so stash the defibrillators and pop the champagne.

Bianculli explains how the “cool medium” morphed from a piece of hearthside furniture into a ubiquitous handheld device. The decisive DNA in this evolution is programming, and Bianculli’s main thrust is to map television’s rise from fixed network scheduling to on-demand selection: a survival of the fittest that, with today’s gazillion channels, offers something for everyone.

“The Platinum Age of Television” is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age (which he covered in his 1992 book, “Teleliteracy”) to today’s era of quality TV. “Rather than reflexively arguing that the good old days were the best,” he writes, “I’m an old dog pointing out that the new tricks are even better.”

He defines the Platinum Age as the period from 1999 — the year “The West Wing” and “The Sopranos” debuted — to 2016 and beyond. But he reaches back to TV’s early days to trace the development of 18 TV genres, citing five notable shows in each category.

For instance, animation evolved from “Rocky and His Friends” to “South Park”; variety moved from “The Ed Sullivan Show” to “Saturday Night Live”; and family sitcoms grew from “I Love Lucy” to “Modern Family.”

Bianculli has researched with gusto, watching thousands of hours of TV, digging through manuscript archives and talking with legendary TV figures. High points of this history are the author’s interviews with Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Bob Newhart, Matt Groening, Larry David, Amy Schumer and many others.

Bianculli launches his chapter on miniseries with “Roots” (1977)

and then explores how the “the long-form TV drama” has gotten a recent rebirth with such popular shows as “Downton Abbey” (201015). As was also true with “Poirot,” the miniseries format changed television by adopting “more of the standard British model, which is to produce a small number of hours, call it a season, and, after a suitable waiting period, perhaps make some more. It’s a more civilized way of making television.”

In 2013, Netflix injected another revolution in viewing habits by creating its streaming hit series “House of Cards.” Kevin Spacey, who stars as Frank Underwood, tells Bianculli that everyone thought Netflix was making a huge mistake. But as Bianculli writes, the series “changed all the rules and influenced countless quality shows that came in its wake.”

Bianculli has written a highly readable history, but he could have delved more deeply into how technology has transformed television from a solitary pastime into an interactive and communal experience. He has also not addressed the sea change in television news from landmark programs such as “The CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite to Platinum Age shows such as MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Redefining news as entertainment is a major shift in media history, and it has had serious consequences: A recent Gallup Poll reports that “trust in mass media in the United States is lower than it has ever been” since Gallup began taking that measure in 1972.

The media landscape continues to reinvent itself, and Bianculli appears optimistic that the future “will continue to encourage quality TV to thrive.” What’s next? Stay tuned. n Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery. She writes frequently on media and culture and is the author of “On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Here’s how Trump could improve voting system MARTIN LUTHER KING III is president and co-founder of the Drum Major Institute.

In 1965, fewer than 2 percent of eligible African Americans living in Selma, Ala., were registered to vote. As we all know, this was the result of laws and policies whose purpose was to keep African Americans out of the voting booth. It took decades of blood, sweat and tears to reverse this deeply embedded discrimination. Having lost my father to that struggle when I was still a small child, I cannot begin to express what it meant to see a black man take the presidential oath of office in 2008.

What a difference eight years makes. While Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, fewer than 80,000 votes divided among Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan made Donald Trump the electoral college winner. In each of these states, Clinton saw a significant decline in minority vote totals of 10 percent or more. And in each of these states — along with swing states North Carolina and Florida — that difference in turnout may be attributed to legislative efforts to make it harder to vote. In fact, a federal appeals court described North Carolina’s lawmakers as targeting minority voters with “almost surgical precision.”

While we can’t know how those affected would have voted, we can agree that every citizen should have the unfettered opportunity to vote. Indeed, my concern is not how people vote, but simply that they vote.

No one could have done more to call attention to the importance of maximum participation in the election than President Barack Obama. He told an African American audience that “if you care about our legacy, realize everything we stand for is at stake. . . . I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election.” In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama said: “When any American, no matter where they

live or what their party, are denied that right [to vote] because they can’t afford to wait for five or six or seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals.” And he doubled down in his last State of the Union: “We’ve got to make it easier to vote, not harder. We need to modernize it for the way we live now. This is America: We want to make it easier for people to participate.”

Fortunately, President Trump agrees. Throughout the campaign, he consistently reminded the electorate that the system is broken.

Even more fortunately, it is indisputable that nonpartisan, common-sense solutions are available. In 2014, as the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary

LUCIAN PERKINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Cheryl Ann Moore, 53, who spent half her vacation day at the Department of Transportation in Philadelphia, finally gets her voter ID. Putting photos on Social Security cards could help more people vote.

of the Civil Rights Act at the LBJ Presidential Library, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton endorsed my friend Andrew Young’s proposal that all citizens be able to obtain a photo ID card that would meet the voting requirements in every state. After the event, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly voiced his support for the plan, saying they were “doing the country a service” and declaring, “Let’s get the pictures on the Social Security card, stop the nonsense and be a responsible country.” As Young has said, “The challenge with voter ID laws isn’t the requirement to show ID, it’s that so many people lack ID. That is the problem that needs to be fixed — and not just for voting. In today’s world, you can’t open a bank account without a photo ID — and the only people happy about that are check cashers.”

All Trump has to do is direct the Social Security Administration to add a photo to the Social Security card of any citizen who needs it. Carter said if he were president he would sign that executive order “in a New York minute.” The likely cost of this move — about $18 million — would be virtually insignificant given the benefit of ensuring that every citizen has the opportunity to exercise his or her right to vote.

Here’s another simple act the

new president can take. He can direct the State Department to waive the $55 passport card fee for low-income Americans. Passport cards with photos are readily available at more than 9,000 post offices, even if a person doesn’t have any other form of photo ID. Either approach is within the president’s authority and would impose minimal costs to secure the most fundamental right for all Americans — a right that most people consider priceless.

Many people are concerned that our new president could undo much of what the former president has achieved. But in the area of voting rights, I am the opposite of concerned; I am hopeful in recognition that there is an opportunity to build a better system. And because Trump surely knows that if you build a hotel, you have to fill the rooms, I hope he also agrees that when you build a democracy, as my father, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) did a generation ago, you have to fill the voting booths.

Because at the end of the day, the right to vote is not a Republican right or a Democratic right — it is an American right. If Trump enables more Americans to exercise that right in future elections, he will be able to say that in no small measure he really did make America great again. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

I can’t prescribe a vital drug DOUGLAS JACOBS is a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Mr. B undid his arm bandages and revealed two large, gaping wounds where he injected his heroin. He lay back in his hospital bed, looked up at the ceiling and said with a quivering voice, “I can’t inject into my veins anymore because they are all shot. I know I have a problem, Doctor. I’ve been trying to quit, but it’s so hard.”

Mr. B (I’m identifying him only by his initial to protect his privacy) had been using heroin for 20 years after originally being prescribed a common opioid, oxycodone, to treat his pain. He, like many others who had fallen victim to the opioid epidemic, was trying to quit, but methadone hadn’t worked for him. “It made me feel ill,” he said.

I knew of a medication that would treat his addiction and possibly save his life. It has been around for years, is simple to use and is safer than other options.

Sadly, I can’t prescribe it. We need to fix this.

The drug’s name is buprenorphine, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2002. Once absorbed into the blood, buprenorphine targets the same receptor as opiates, partially blocking their effect and limiting the symptoms of withdrawal.

Decreased respiratory drive, which can occur with other opioids and can lead to death in overdose, occurs at a very low rate with buprenorphine. As such, it has become the first-line treatment for opioid addiction,

but many patients like Mr. B still have trouble getting access to the drug.

Unfortunately, buprenorphine has been limited by regulations that significantly hinder the drug’s widespread acceptance.

Any physician who wishes to prescribe buprenorphine has to take an eight-hour online training course. Physicians don’t have to be specially certified to prescribe other medications, and so most physicians aren’t even aware that such barriers exist.

Unsurprisingly, 97 percent of physicians are not certified to prescribe buprenorphine.

Arbitrary rules handcuff the few physicians who can prescribe buprenorphine, capping the number of patients that each certified physician can treat. In

2000, federal legislation limited the number of patients undergoing buprenorphine treatment to 30 per physician in the first year, and 100 thereafter.

In July, new legislative changes increased the cap to 275 patients.

While this represents an improvement, it still limits access to crucial addiction treatment and prevents physicians from devoting their entire practice to opioid treatment. Because of these caps, some stable patients may be forced out of buprenorphine treatment prematurely to make room for a new patient with a more urgent need. Patients like Mr. B may have nowhere to turn.

Buprenorphine has been singled out for regulation because it is the first addiction treatment that is safe enough to be prescribed at a regular doctor’s appointment. The United States has always placed strict rules on addiction treatment, partly because past addiction medications such as methadone could lead to overdose or illicit sale on the black market.

But buprenorphine is different. While buprenorphine can be sold illicitly, physicians can switch a patient-turned-seller to methadone, which is administered in specialized clinics to prevent such activity.

Additionally, the risk of buprenorphine overdose is onefourth that of methadone, as a 2009 study of 16,000 people in Australia demonstrated.

To unleash the potential of well-meaning physicians in combating our nation’s opioid epidemic, the first step must be to remove the barriers to prescribing this medication.

Herein lies our nonsensical system: We physicians have little trouble prescribing opioids, the very drugs that get people addicted. But despite an epidemic where 91 Americans die every day of opioid use, we face arbitrary roadblocks to prescribing addiction treatment such as training sessions and caps on the number of patients who can receive lifesaving medications.

Mr. B was found to have a bacterial infection in his blood, an extremely dangerous condition. Even so, he left the hospital before he could complete a course of antibiotic treatment.

He left, in part, because his opioid withdrawal symptoms were too disabling for him to deal with. He probably won’t be counted among those who die of an opioid overdose. But when his infection finally overtakes his body, it will be the lack of access to addiction treatment that truly is to blame. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

Obama let a terrorist go free CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” Shakespeare wrote. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

In that spirit, and unconstrained by reelection politics, President Obama used his last week in office to grant clemency to hundreds of federal prisoners, reducing the sentences of some and pardoning others outright.

Obama’s most controversial decision was to let Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning go after seven years of what was supposed to be a 35-year sentence for passing secret documents to WikiLeaks.

Military and intelligence professionals were angered at the indulgent signal this might send.

Still, damaging as Manning’s leaks might have been, she committed no direct violence, and she’s hardly gotten off scot-free.

The vast majority of Obama’s executive clemency orders affected people considered lowlevel, nonviolent participants in drug-dealing.

What was Obama thinking, however, when he ordered the release of Oscar Lopez Rivera?

During the 1970s, Lopez Rivera headed a Chicago-based cell of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which waged a futile but violent struggle to win

Puerto Rican independence.

The FALN claimed responsibility for more than 120 bombings between 1974 and 1983 in a wave of senseless destruction that killed six and injured dozens.

In 1981, a federal court in Chicago sentenced Lopez Rivera, then 37, to 55 years for seditious conspiracy, armed robbery, interstate transportation of firearms and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property.

Notably, the seditiousconspiracy charge was not some “thought crime,” as Lopez Rivera’s lawyer has said: The indictment listed 28 Chicago-area bombings, some of which caused injuries, as “overt acts” in support of the conspiracy.

FBI agents discovered dynamite, detonators and firearms at two residences occupied by Lopez Rivera. At trial,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

a cooperating witness from the FALN testified that Lopez Rivera personally trained him in bombmaking.

So Lopez Rivera is neither a low-level offender nor a nonviolent one. Nor, crucially, is he repentant.

He defiantly challenged the legitimacy of the court that tried him. Shortly after entering federal prison at Leavenworth, Kan., he and FALN members on the outside hatched an escape plan; the FBI foiled it by arresting Lopez Rivera’s would-be helpers, who were armed with guns and explosives. A conviction for that escape attempt added 15 years to his sentence.

In 1999, Lopez Rivera was one of 16 imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists to whom thenPresident Bill Clinton offered executive clemency. He refused, reportedly because Clinton’s offer did not include one of the FALN members who had tried to break him out of Leavenworth.

In addition, Clinton required the Puerto Ricans to renounce violence as a condition of receiving clemency.

Obama’s offer this week came with no such requirement — in puzzling contrast not only to Clinton’s policy in 1999, but also to White House statements that Chelsea Manning deserved

clemency because she accepted responsibility and showed remorse.

Not so Lopez Rivera. True, the 74-year-old probably no longer threatens the community; and yes, 35 years is a long time, perhaps even “a sufficient amount of time,” as a senior administration official put it.

Lopez Rivera served honorably in Vietnam before undergoing what today might be called “selfradicalization.”

Still, unconditional release, for someone who claimed a right to wage war on the United States and repeatedly put innocent civilian lives at risk?

The presidential pardon descends from similar power wielded by British kings.

Alexander Hamilton wanted it in the U.S. Constitution, partly for use “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion . . . when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

The FALN’s season of insurrection is long over. But for the group’s victims, as well as for all Americans concerned with the consequences our government applies to terrorists, this lastminute get-out-of-jail-free card for Oscar Lopez Rivera seems anything but well-timed. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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A PRESIDENT UNLIKE ANY OTHER

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BY

K AREN H ELLER

e think of presidents as different from us. And, in many ways, they are, starting with the confidence to gaze in the bathroom mirror and think, “I should be leader of the free world.” ¶ The presidency is among America’s most exclusive clubs. Its members’ every decision, speech, interview and now tweet are reported around the globe. Unlike mere mortals generally confined to the dustbin of history, presidents are memorialized with monuments, presidential libraries, biographies, highways, airports, public schools, coffee mugs and possibly legal tender. ¶ In this club, which remains singularly male, there are distinctions. ¶ Millard Fillmore remains the sole Millard, possibly for eternity. Andrew Johnson was the first president to be impeached, though certainly not the last. ¶ Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only president to be elected four times. Also, to marry a woman who shared the same surname. ¶ John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president; Ronald Reagan, the first actor and also the first to have divorced; Barack Obama, the first African American. ¶ Even among firsts, the 45th president is unprecedented. President Trump can boast more firsts than the men who presided before him.

one of multiple presidents who share an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the sport.) l

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The first president to have never performed public service, either by holding public office or serving in the military.

The first to be born and raised in Queens.

The first to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, specifically its Wharton School.

And to attend Fordham before

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At age 70, the oldest man to be inaugurated president. (Ronald Reagan was 69.)

The first president to build and reside at the top of a 58-story skyscraper. And to develop hotels. And casinos. And golf courses. (However, he becomes

President Trump is the first president to own an airliner, the first to sell his own brand of bottled water and fragrances, and the first to have written or co-written more than a dozen books.

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The first president to be the subject of a Comedy Central Roast.

Among the nation’s richest presidents, and the first who is a billionaire.

The first president to have not disclosed his tax returns during the campaign since the tradition began in 1976.

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The first to own an airliner. His, a Boeing 757, features more gold-plated features than Air Force One — gold-plated seat belts and bathroom fixtures, plus a family crest — though it is not larger, as Trump has claimed.

The first president to really love Twitter, unleashing more than 34,000 tweets — twice as many as his White House predecessor — with no signs of stopping.

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The first president to have hosted a reality show.

And the first to still hold the title of executive producer of one.

The first president to marry three times and divorce twice.

(He will not be the first president with a foreign-born first lady; John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, was born in London. But Trump will be the first in almost two centuries.

(He will not be the first to be married to a former model.

Betty Ford also modeled.

However, he will be the first to be married to a former model who posed topless.)

The first president to write or co-write a veritable library of motivational books — more than a dozen — before taking the oath of office.

Also, the first president to be a brand. The first to have bottled water bearing his name. And steaks. And a clothing line.

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The first president to have hosted “Saturday Night Live.”

(He did it twice.) Or to have made myriad television and film appearances, including on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Jeffersons,” “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” “The Nanny,” “Sex and the City,” “WWE Raw” and “WrestleMania,” virtually all of them in his favored role, “Himself.”

The first president to appear on Howard Stern’s radio program.

Repeatedly. And brag about his sex life and discuss women’s appearances. (In all likelihood, he will not be the first president to use vulgar language while discussing women. He will be the first to be recorded using such language, have it widely reported, and still be elected.)

The first president to have owned beauty pageants.

The first to reside in a threestory Fifth Avenue penthouse inspired by the style of Louis XIV, with ornate marble columns and flourishes of 24karat gold.

The first president to have been the focus of a Justice Department discrimination investigation and civil suit.

The first to have an eponymous “university,” which was more of a real-estate-seminar program than an institution of higher education. (Jefferson founded the University of Virginia but did not name it for himself.

George Washington allowed the use of his moniker to rename a college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.)

The first president to have so many items for sale named after himself, from shirts to fragrance to vodka. (Trump, like many presidents before him, does not drink alcohol.)

The first to have his companies file for bankruptcy six times.

The first Donald. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017

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