The Washington Post National Weekly - January 27, 2019

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THE FIX

The case for ending shutdowns BY

A ARON B LAKE

H

undreds of thousands of federal workers went without their second paycheck Friday, which was the 35th day of the shutdown. But if there’s a silver lining for them, it might be this: The messier this gets, the more momentum there could be for a mechanism to effectively outlaw future shutdowns.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) this past week introduced a bill called the Stop STUPIDITY Act. In the event of a lapse in government funding, the act would reinstate funding levels from the previous fiscal year — except for Congress and the office of the president, which would not receive funding until they reached an agreement.

Warner’s Republican colleague Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) reintroduced his own proposal a week earlier. Rather than shut down the government in the absence of a budget, it would institute an across-the-board 1 percent funding cut for all agencies and would cut another 1 percent every 90 days that no agreement is reached.

Lawmakers introduce bills all the time, and there’s little reason to believe that either of these plans will pass or even earn a vote. But if there were ever an environment conducive to such a bill, this could be it.

One of the dirty little secrets of the shutdown is that it’s not even a fight Republicans particularly desired. In fact, the GOP-controlled Senate passed a regular government funding bill via unanimous voice vote last month, before President Trump changed his mind and insisted on money for a border wall. Republicans largely have stood behind Trump, but they seem to be tolerating him more than cheering his strategy.

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AL DRAGO/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) has introduced a bill to end shutdowns once and for all.

It’s a strategy they could pay a price for.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans blame the GOP and Trump for the shutdown.

Republicans seem to be jammed between that political reality and their deathly aversion to angering the president.

The Senate on Thursday rejected competing Republican and Democratic plans to end the shutdown. The Republican bill included funding for Trump’s border wall while the Democratic plan did not. Both measures failed to win the 60 votes needed to move forward.

Senate Republicans could try to end the shutdown by passing a clean government funding bill, but doing so would come at a significant cost to the president’s political capital.

Democrats would probably support such a proposal, given that shutdowns tend to be a weapon used by Republicans. Democrats did force a brief shutdown last year, over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but the last big one came in 2013, when

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Republicans tried to defund Obamacare. The last lengthy shutdown before that came in the mid-1990s, when Republicans insisted that President Bill Clinton balance the budget with specific estimates.

None of these shutdowns really worked, which is another argument for taking the option off the table. Similar to this shutdown, the 2013 version was basically forced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and tolerated by GOP leaders, even though they had to know it was a fool’s errand. Shutdowns are a great way for the more extreme elements of a party to hijack the government for potential leverage, leaving more moderate leaders to figure out the details.

A logical solution for those moderates would be to get rid of the shutdown option when passions aren’t running so high.

All that said, permanently removing the option would rightly be seen as an anti-Trump move. Coming off the longest shutdown, and one spurred by the president, Republicans would be making their unhappiness with the results of Trump’s strategy pretty clear. It would be a tough needle to thread.

But we’ve already seen some movement toward mitigating the impacts of the shutdown. Congress has passed a bill assuring back pay for all federal workers once the shutdown ends. Practically speaking, though, that means all the work that would have been performed by those employees will now be lost productivity, as the government will have to pay people for work they didn’t do. Last time, when back pay was awarded after the shutdown concluded, this cost the government an estimated $2 billion.

Which, again, would seem to be a pretty good reason to do something that would prevent this from happening again. n ©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER From top left, clockwise: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban; Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte; Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro; Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales. Photos from AFP via GETTY IMAGES

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POLITICS

Turned off by the shutdown B Y M ATT V ISER

in Macomb County, Mich.

NICK HAGEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In places like Macomb County, Mich., working-class voters are frustrated with Trump

T

wo years ago, Jeff Daudert was fed up with politics.

He wanted to shake up the status quo. He didn’t mind sending a message to the establishment — and, frankly, he liked the idea of a disruptive president.

But the 49-year-old retired Navy reservist has had some second thoughts.

“What the [expletive] were we thinking?” he asked the other night inside a Walmart here, in an area of blue-collar suburban Detroit that helped deliver the presidency to Trump.

While Trump’s relationship

with much of his base remains strong, two years after his inauguration his ties are fraying with voters like Daudert, the kind who voted in droves for Trump in key pockets throughout the industrial Midwest, flipping previously Democratic states to him in 2016.

The shutdown fight, as it has played out for more than a month, is further eroding the president’s support among voters who like the idea of beefing up border security — but not enough to close the government.

Many here, even those who still support Trump, say they hold him most responsible. They recite his

Jeremiah Wilburn shops at a Walmart in Roseville, Mich.

He voted for Barack Obama before supporting Donald Trump in 2016.

comment from the Oval Office that he would be “proud to shut down the government.” When he said it, they listened.

“It’s silly. It’s destructive,” Daudert said, adding that all he knows about 2020 is that he won’t be supporting Trump. “I was certainly for the anti-status quo . . .

I’ll be more status quo next time.”

Here, far from the nation’s capital and in an area not dominated by federal workers, the government shutdown has been resonating in an unusual way. A trampoline park is giving government employees and their families an hour of free jumping. A local cred-

it union is offering low-interest loans for furloughed employees who need to replace lost salaries.

Some local governments in the area are beginning to allow federal workers to defer payments on property taxes, utility bills and parking tickets. Food drives are being discussed to help Transportation Security Administration workers at Detroit’s airport, and a yoga studio is offering free classes for federal employees.

“As a community it affects us because other people are being affected,” said Jasmin Cromwell, who runs Bodhi Seed Yoga & Wellness Studio, “whether we know

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POLITICS them or not. Maybe I’m getting too yoga-like, but we are all connected. It affects everyone. It affects us as a nation.”

Recent polling indicates that the government shutdown has caused skittishness among parts of Trump’s base, which has been one of the most enduring strengths of his presidency. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, conducted Jan. 10 to Jan. 13, found that his net approval rating had dropped seven points since December.

One of the biggest declines came among suburban men, whose approval rating of Trump fell a net 18 percentage points, while support from evangelicals and Republicans dipped by smaller margins. Among men without a college degree, the downward change was seven points.

As Jeremiah Wilburn, a 45year-old operating engineer, browsed the aisles at Walmart for a new pair of coveralls, he reflected on some of those shifts. Like many voters here, after siding with Barack Obama in two elections, he decided to gamble with Trump in 2016. And for most of the past two years, he was pleased.

The economy was humming, jobs were flowing, and wages seemed stable.

Until now.

“I was doing fine with him up until this government shutdown,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. You’re not getting the wall built for $5 billion. And Mexico is not paying for it, we all know that, too. Meanwhile, it’s starting to turn people like me away.”

He worries about the shutdown’s effect on the economy. He’s concerned about the impact on his brother, who works for the TSA in Florida.

To him, the shutdown standoff has also poked holes in Trump’s ability to say he cares for the working class, given that 800,000 federal employees and an additional number of contractors have been going without paychecks.

“You can’t expect people to come to work without getting paid,” Wilburn said. “If I were them, I certainly wouldn’t come to work.”

Macomb County, in the suburbs north of Detroit, has been a perennial political battleground and a place where the broad sweeps of American politics can be seen. It was the most Democratic suburb

NICK HAGEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

in the country when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, and then it helped usher in the phrase “Reagan Democrats” when Ronald Reagan won the White House two decades later.

Obama won the county twice, and then Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here by 12 points. The county is filled with the kind of white working-class voters whose flip to Trump has been the most heralded part of his coalition.

Trump came here during his campaign and again in the final days before the 2016 election. He returned last year for a rally meant to pointedly spurn the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that same night. It’s an area he has continued to nurture.

But in the midterm elections, some of those voters started to peel away. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) carried the county by two points, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) won by four points.

Whitmer ran a campaign that barely mentioned Trump and instead promoted basic bipartisan governance, with the slogan: “Fix the Damn Roads.”

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest is expected to include a heavy dose of debate over how to balance attempts to win back white working-class voters — those who live here as well as in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Trump also won — with the energy around

Jasmine Cromwell runs Bodhi Seed Yoga & Wellness Studio, which hosts a free yoga class for furloughed federal workers.

ascendant women and minorities.

Those attempts will also draw into question whether Democrats can find a way to articulate an immigration plan in areas like this, where the issue resonates.

Trump’s insistence on building a border wall has hardened Democrats, whose most prominent policy now is to stop the wall. They rarely tout their own views on border security, but that issue remains important to many voters in industrial states.

In focus groups after Clinton’s loss, Democrats discovered that immigration played a bigger role here than they thought it would.

“People do want immigration managed,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who has been studying Macomb County voters since the 1980s. “Trump makes it hard because he’s so outrageous.

You don’t want to give him an inch. But immigration is still an important issue, and Democrats will have to speak to it.”

Trump faces a countering demand of his own, placating former supporters who saw the border wall as a stand-in for more security and those who want his promise delivered.

Ken Janicki, a 66-year-old retired technology worker who voted for Trump, sipped his coffee the other day and put it in blunt terms.

“I am all for border security, a full wall around this country,” he

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said. “You come in legally, I’ll welcome you to be my neighbor.

But you come in illegally, and I’ll introduce you to my friend Smith and my other friend Wesson.”

Even with the shutdown, most in this land of strip malls and six-lane boulevards, automotive plants and single-family homes seem to feel better about the economy.

“We’re booming right now.

How can I not like a guy that gives me more money and lowers my taxes?” said Jeff Cordel, a 57-yearold construction worker. “I haven’t heard the word ‘layoff’ since he’s been in, and that’s saying something around here.”

But there is also a nagging concern that a downturn could be coming, in part because of forces Trump has unleashed. Some overtime shifts have gone away. Several large buildings that once housed a Kmart or a bowling alley or a restaurant are now empty.

“Times have been good. But things are slowing down a bit,” said Matt DeVuyst, a 62-year-old electrician who had just polished off a large breakfast at Coney Island, a staple of the Michigan diner scene. “If they don’t find common ground with China, who knows? We’re stable but nervous.

It’s the fear of the unknown.”

At a Kroger in St. Clair Shores, across a lake from Canada, residents were deeply divided.

In the cereal aisle, Henry Black, a 69-year-old who spent his career at General Motors, voted for Trump, likes what the president has done and had a dire warning for him if he shifts course on the border wall.

“Trump needs to stand firm on this,” he said. “If he gives in to the Democrats on this, he’s finished.”

Near the pharmacy, Erica McQueen, a 38-year-old from St. Clair Shores, voted for Trump and also has liked a lot of what he’s done. “But it gets overshadowed by the stunts he pulls,” she said.

The shutdown, she said, is one of them.

“The wall is getting out of hand,” she said. “It’s too much. It’s ridiculous. I’m sick of seeing it, I’m sick of hearing about it.”

Like other onetime Trump supporters, she’s now openly wondering if she can back him again.

“Something miraculous has to happen,” she said, “for me to vote for him again.” n ©The Washington Post

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For Democrats, a push to the left B Y D AVID W EIGEL AND J ENNA J OHNSON in Des Moines

T

he last time Democrats scouted for a presidential nominee who could strip the White House from Republicans, the party supported additional fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. Same-sex marriage was illegal in 49 states, and few Democratic candidates were pushing to change that. And only one long-shot hopeful talked about “Medicare for all.”

A dozen years later, Democratic candidates and potential ones now argue that the southern border is adequately barricaded.

Candidates who once dodged questions about gay marriage now support it and are calling for greater protection of transgender individuals. “Medicare for all” — or something like it — has become standard, along with promises to combat racism, sexism and global climate change.

For years, Democratic presidential candidates have been skittish about taking positions considered too liberal, for fear of scaring off moderates and independents. That caution seems to be gone, along with soul-searching about making explicit appeals to conservative voters.

It’s not just Democratic candidates who have undergone a political transformation — the party’s voters have also shifted to the left on many issues, and have become much more partisan.

Nine in 10 Democrats supported stricter laws covering the sale of firearms in a 2018 Gallup poll, up from about 2-in-3 a decade earlier. Forty-percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents support increasing legal immigration, according to Pew Research Center data, up from 20 percent in 2006. And support for gay marriage is up in both parties.

The party’s swift shift has left vulnerable several candidates or likely ones who have voting records and previous stances out-ofline with current party thinking.

Those who defend their earlier stances risk seeming stuck in

BRIAN POWERS/DES MOINES REGISTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Presidential candidates’ caution about taking liberal positions has given way to confidence time, while those who have changed positions risk being labeled as flip-floppers and opportunists.

Joe Biden, who is contemplating a run, has defended his leading role in the Senate passage of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which activists say accelerated the rate of mass incarceration and disproportionately affected minorities Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who announced her candidacy Monday, has faced questions about her actions as a prosecutor and attorney general of California, including her push to criminalize truancy Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who also is running, apologized in a three-minute video recently for “wrong” and “hurtful” things she said while working with the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, an anti-gay group that

opposed same-sex marriage.

In Sioux City, Iowa, a likely caucus-goer asked New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand to explain how her rating from the National Rifle Association fell from “A” as a House member to “F” as a senator.

Gillibrand said that early in her career, “I only really looked at guns through the lens of hunting,” but she changed her mind after meeting with parents who lost their daughter to gun violence.

As Gillibrand traveled across Iowa a few weeks ago, she was greeted by longtime voters, some of whom say they’ve undergone similar evolutions in political beliefs — and that it’s healthy to do so. Even in conservative areas of Iowa, local leaders shrugged off concerns that liberal platforms scare off voters.

Tim Winter, the chairman of the Boone County Democratic Party who introduced Gillibrand

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), center, who has announced her candidacy for president, said she changed her position on guns after meeting parents who lost a daughter to gun violence.

at one gathering, said that his own views on gun control have evolved: As a young man who loved pheasant hunting, he didn’t think any gun laws were needed.

Now, as a father of two, he thinks lawmakers need to draw lines.

Teresa Wolff, a longtime organizer in the Sioux City area, said her two grown daughters are often “enlightening me on things I have held firm on.” Even though Wolff has long considered herself a feminist, she said her daughters will sometimes reprimand her for hesitating to speak out or privately saying that a female candidate “needs to wait, learn her place” before running for office.

While Wolff says she has always supported gay marriage, she remembers a time when it was just not a issue that was publicly discussed — and now her daughters are coaching her on LGBTQ issues and helping her understand gender matters.

Most prominent Democrats aren’t publicly challenging this evolution, citing the party’s successes during the midterm election when Democrats won races in rural areas that had voted for both Obama and Trump. In some of those cases, however, the Democratic nominees beat out candidates with more liberal positions in the primaries.

Republicans are already painting the opposition as completely out of touch with most Americans and too liberal to win back the White House from a president who in 2016 demonstrated appeal in culturally conservative states that usually voted with Democrats.

Iowa, the earliest-voting state, is the sort of place where Republicans hope they can continue to win the votes of Democratic-leaning independents who are scared off by the party’s shift to the left.

Iowa saw a dramatic shift away from Democrats in 2016. Thirtytwo of Iowa’s 99 counties voted twice for Barack Obama, then for Donald Trump; rural Democratic legislators who had held office for years were swept out in the wave. n ©The Washington Post

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Court sidesteps controversy — for now BY

R OBERT B ARNES

T

wo somewhat contradictory sides of the new Supreme Court were on display this week: The justices extended their efforts to maintain a low-key term mostly free of hot-button issues, while at the same time the court’s reinforced conservatives gave notice that big changes may be on the way.

After the bruising confirmation fight over President Trump’s nomination of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and an unwelcome turn in the partisan political spotlight, the justices largely avoided the high-profile controversies that have marked the court’s work in recent years.

The justices delayed taking up a host of divisive issues, including immigration, abortion and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The court could still take up those issues, but unless it abandons its usual procedures, it is too late to hear them this term.

Meanwhile, the court’s conservative majority, fortified by Kavanaugh and Trump’s other nominee, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, was at work.

It gave the Trump administration the green light to impose restrictions on transgender service members. The court answered the pleas of gun rights advocates by taking a case next term that could clamp down on local gun restrictions and give new definition to Second Amendment rights. And its four most conservative members — again, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — indicated they were eager to take on a case that could reexamine long-standing precedents and provide new protection for openly religious public employees.

In Tuesday’s push-and-pull, the decision to take the gun case may have been the most telling about the court’s future.

“Nothing illustrates that change is on the way than the decision to take the Second Amendment case,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Justices delay action on divisive issues, but choice to take gun rights case is telling of future battles University of California at Los Angeles who wrote “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

The justices have not accepted a case involving gun restrictions since 2010, when they ruled that the Second Amendment right for individual gun ownership protected against state and local laws that would unduly limit it.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to hear this case sets the stage for affirming the individual right to self-defense outside of the home,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action.

The speculation had been that neither conservatives nor liberals knew whether they could count on the vote of the court’s median justice, Anthony M. Kennedy. The court turned aside numerous challenges to restrictions on the kinds of guns that could be purchased, and whether they could be carried outside the home.

After one such decision in 2018,

a frustrated Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “as evidenced by our continued inaction in this area, the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this court.”

But, Winkler said, “there is no hesitancy in Justice Kavanaugh,” who replaced Kennedy and has an expansive view of gun rights.

On the surface, the New York City law at issue might seem an odd choice for the next gun rights battle.

It is not replicated elsewhere, and it forbids the transport of even unloaded and locked-up handguns anywhere except to a firing range within the city. The challengers included licensed handgun owners who wanted to take their weapons to a firing range across the river, and to a second home upstate.

Winkler said the case could be decided with a narrow ruling. But it is also “the first case on the right to have a gun outside the home,” he said, and could have great implications for how judges must consider challenges to laws in Washing-

After Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation fight, the Supreme Court delayed taking up hot-button issues, including immigration, abortion and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

ton, Los Angeles and other cities where there are rigorous — activists say onerous — regulations on carrying a weapon.

The court’s conservatives turned down the Trump administration’s attempt to have the court take up the challenges to the restrictions on transgender troops, where it generally has been on the losing side. But they granted the administration’s request to have the policy go into effect while the legal wrangling continued, most likely reaching the court next term.

The court also took no action on the legal battle over the program that shields young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation, leaving in place the Obamaera initiative that the Trump administration has tried to end.

The justices would likely have had to act Tuesday to accept the administration’s request that it review the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected nearly 700,000 people brought to this country as children, commonly known as “dreamers.”

If the court sticks to its normal procedures, that would mean that even if it accepts the case at a later date, it would not be argued until the new term starting in October, with a decision likely in 2020. It is possible the justices saw no reason to take on DACA now, when it has emerged as an issue in the negotiations over ending the partial government shutdown.

Trump has offered extended but temporary protection for those in the program in exchange for billions of dollars to build a border wall. Democrats have rejected the offer as “hostage-taking.”

If the issue is resolved by the political branches, the court might not have to get involved.

Other issues, however, might simply be a matter of time. The court still has not acted on Indiana’s recent restrictions on abortion, which were struck down by a lower court and are emblematic of moves by conservative states to restrict the procedure. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Costs push police to ditch body cams BY

K IMBERLY K INDY

W

hen East Dundee, a tiny suburb of Chicago, ordered body cameras for its 17 police officers, Terry Mee, the police chief at the time, told local reporters they would promote “officer safety” and “positive interaction with the public.”

But before a single incident could be recorded in the village of 3,000 people, Mee retired and the new chief, George Carpenter, persuaded the Village Board in February to cancel the program, arguing that the $20,000 annual fee for the cameras and video storage couldn’t be justified amid budget concerns.

Body cameras “are wonderful for winning public trust,” Carpenter said. “But it’s expensive.”

In recent years, after a spate of fatal police shootings sparked nationwide protests, politicians and community activists seized on police body cameras as a way to restore public trust. But although the cameras were widely adopted, many departments — especially in smaller jurisdictions — are now dropping or delaying their programs, finding it too expensive to store and manage the thousands of hours of footage.

The police department in Wahoo, Neb., ended its program last year after a new state law required video to be stored for at least 90 days, causing the annual price to spike to $15,000 — a big cost for a force of five officers. The Arlington County Police Department in Virginia decided not to use body cameras after a pilot project revealed an estimated annual cost of $300,000.

And city officials in Madison, Wis., in November rejected a proposal to spend $104,000 on a body-camera pilot program.

While cost was a primary concern, activists and city officials also worried that the videos might be turned over to federal immigration officials and used against undocumented immigrants in the community.

“A call for transparency is not

BRIANA SANCHEZ/ARGUS LEADER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Smaller departments struggle with the price of equipment and ongoing fees for storage of data the same thing as accountability,” activist M Adams told the Madison Common Council. “If we as a community don’t have the power to interpret the footage, if we as a community don’t have the power to make a decision about the outcome of the footage, then it makes no difference how much footage that there actually is.”

Most departments that have ended body-camera programs are in smaller jurisdictions; Axon, a body-camera manufacturer, said every one of its clients that have canceled contracts cited costs.

“The easy part is buying the body cameras and issuing them to the officers. They are not that expensive,” said Jim Pasco, executive director at the National Fraternal Order of Police. “But storing all the data that they collect — that cost is extraordinary. The smaller the department, the tougher it tends to be for them.”

Though urban areas with high crime rates are often viewed as having the greatest need for po-

lice body cameras, a Washington Post database that tracks fatal police shootings shows that fatal shootings by police occur more frequently in small communities.

Of the 1,800 departments that have reported a fatal officer-involved shooting since 2015, nearly 1,300 were smaller departments with 50 or fewer officers.

Approximately half of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies have some type of bodycamera program, with many still in the pilot project stage. Some outfit patrol officers with the cameras, while others require everyone to wear a camera, including police chiefs. No government agency or industry group tracks the number of departments that have ended their body-camera programs.

Costs have spiked in recent years in some regions of the country due to new state laws that require long-term storage of video footage. One of the first police agencies to stop using body

Axon, a body-camera manufacturer, said every one of its clients that has canceled a contract cited costs.

cameras was in Jeffersonville, Ind., where police ended their year-old program in 2016 after state lawmakers voted to require storing the videos for at least 190 days.

At the time, at least seven other states had similar storage laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now, at least 14 states have passed laws that set storage requirements.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice surveyed police departments that had not yet begun using body cameras, seeking to identify possible deterrents to the programs. Seventy-seven percent cited costs, including for data storage. Thirty-nine percent cited privacy concerns, including times when domestic violence victims and the mentally ill are captured on video during police response calls.

The Bureau of Justice Assistance, a division within the Justice Department, offers grants to help agencies finance their programs, and 339 grants worth nearly $70 million have so far been awarded.

But the grants cover only the initial equipment purchase, not ongoing storage fees. Justice Department officials said the grants are meant to “foster novel and innovative practices” that become “self-sustaining.”

Prosecutors, too, are struggling to keep up with the added workload and cost of body-camera footage. In Wayne County, Mich., a jurisdiction that includes Detroit, prosecutors were hit with $2.5 million in unexpected personnel costs — nearly an 8 percent increase in their annual budget — for work associated with preparing videos to be presented as evidence at trial.

Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney Colin Stolle said video evidence has increased costs for his office by more than $1 million a year, a significant impact on a $10 million annual budget. Stolle is adding 14 employees — lawyers, paralegals and clerks — to a 93-member staff to handle the added workload. n ©The Washington Post

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Private colleges’ new tactic: Price cuts BY

N ICK A NDERSON

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s soaring tuition scares off many families, a growing number of private colleges have embraced a marketing tactic associated more with selling airline tickets or flatscreen televisions than higher education: a price cut.

St. John’s College slashed tuition from $52,734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.

The liberal arts school, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, joined more than 20 others nationwide that have reduced prices in the past three years.

The movement exposes a reality of higher education long hidden in plain sight: The difference between sticker prices and what the average student actually pays is often vast.

St. John’s started pondering a shift in 2017, as its total charge for tuition, fees and room and board neared $70,000 a year. Few would ever pay that much at the school, which provides financial aid or merit scholarships to almost all of its students. Still, the college worried about the optics of a $70,000 sticker price.

“Is that tenable? Is that right?

Is that who we are?” asked Panayiotis Kanelos, president of the campus in Annapolis, Md. “Is it right for us to expect families to bear that burden?”

The answer, he said, was no.

The new price, counting fees and room and board, will be about $49,300. The average financialaid award would reduce the bill to less than $25,000.

Twenty-three private institutions have reduced tuition since 2016, according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “The trend is beginning to pick up,” said David L. Warren, the association’s president. These schools view cuts as “an important tool,” he said, to help them stand out in a crowded market.

Their reasons vary. Some need to bolster recruiting in the face of major financial challenges. Others want to escape a pricing formula that assumes prospective

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sticker shock spurs slashed tuitions; schools hope for increase enrollment and improve image students view high tuition as a mark of educational quality even though they simultaneously seek significant discounts or financial aid.

The average sticker price for private colleges is about $48,500 for tuition, fees and room and board, according to the College Board, a nonprofit organization representing thousands of educational institutions. However, sticker prices above $60,000 a year have become commonplace, and a growing number top $70,000.

The most prestigious schools enroll large numbers of students willing and able to pay full price.

Federal data show the share of full-paying undergraduates in 2016-2017 — those who received no grants — was 42 percent at Princeton University, 50 percent at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and 57 percent at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. A similar pattern held at

numerous other colleges.

Revenue from such students, plus philanthropy and endowment payouts, helps schools recruit from a broad spectrum of economic backgrounds and award adequate aid to those in need.

But many schools have few full-pay students. The Washington Post found more than 310 colleges and universities in 20162017 where at least 95 percent of undergraduates received grants or scholarships. (For St. John’s, the share was 97 percent on its Annapolis campus, 99 percent in Santa Fe, N.M.) At such schools, sticker price may be more of an aspirational statement than a revenue generator.

Even so, sticker prices usually go up faster than inflation. Knowing this, students and bill-paying parents hope the increases remain manageable. Their bestcase scenario would be an occa-

Students eat lunch in Randall Hall on the campus of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. The school slashed tuition from $52,734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.

Panayiotis Kanelos, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., says, “Every time you raise the tuition, the screw gets tighter and tighter on families in the middle.”

sional price freeze.

Debate over tuition at public colleges and universities is perennial. Political pressure has grown in recent years to limit increases or even make public college free.

Now, price cuts among private colleges could be signaling a pivot point in that sector.

Sweet Briar College in Virginia, which nearly closed in 2015 amid financial difficulties, cut its price 32 percent for the current school year, to $34,000 for tuition, fees and room and board. The women’s college, which had 337 students in the fall, aims to boost enrollment and compete with public universities. “We are very serious about being excellent, relevant and affordable at the same time,” Sweet Briar President Meredith Woo said.

Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania will cut tuition 32 percent in the coming year, to $32,000 (not counting fees and room and board). The echo on 32 is not accidental. Carl J. Strikwerda, president of the 1,700-student college, said he wants to grab the attention of middle-class families.

“What we’ve found with them is, more and more, that higher tuition is just a turnoff.” Those families might know in theory that the sticker price is just a starting point, he said, but “they just can’t believe that colleges give enough financial aid to make it work.”

Colleges are required to post calculators online to enable families to get a quick estimate of potential financial aid. But it’s not clear how much help these “netprice calculators” provide to families with modest resources and little experience in college finance.

Price cuts are risky. If they are not deep enough, they won’t get noticed. If they are too deep, colleges could lose substantial revenue. “This is not for the faint of heart,” Strikwerda said. To succeed, he said, a college must convince prospective students of the quality of the education it offers regardless of price. n ©The Washington Post

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Inauguration leaves Congo in a daze B Y M AX B EARAK in Nairobi

C

ongolese opposition activists fought for years to get Joseph Kabila to do something uncommon among African authoritarians: obey term limits and step down.

When he begrudgingly agreed last August, they were thrilled.

Even though he had delayed elections again and again, extending his rule to 18 years, his exit created the possibility of Congo’s first democratic transfer of power.

“We thought: This is it. Things are going to change,” said Mvemba Dizolele, a Congolese professor, author and activist. “Now, it’s like: What just happened?”

Instead of a free and fair election, Congo’s people appear to have participated in a fait accompli. The election was marred by irregularities, and voting data from the election commission database, leaked to the Financial Times and other outlets, showed that another candidate, Martin Fayulu, won around 60 percent of the vote.

The announced winner was not Kabila’s chosen successor — who was deeply unpopular — but Felix Tshisekedi, an opposition leader.

Tshisekedi was inaugurated at Congo’s National Palace on Thursday.

“The genius of it is that they rigged it in favor of an opposition candidate who they could co-opt,” said Jason Stearns, who leads a Congo-focused think tank in New York. “This isn’t the worst that could have happened, but it’s a big blow to the idea of democracy in Congo.” Kabila’s government denied allegations of vote rigging.

The unexpectedness of Tshisekedi’s ascent has riven the country’s opposition into factions and left many Congolese in a disenchanted daze.

They have not come out on the street in violent backlash as some had feared but instead hunkered down, pleased Kabila is out of office yet unsure whether he is still in power. Kabila’s party, astonishingly for having lost the presidency, won three-quarters of the seats

HUGH KINSELLA CUNNINGHAM/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Hope for a democratic transfer of power melted into chaos, disbelief, and finally acceptance in Congo’s senate.

Full-fledged democracy in Congo has been a distant dream since the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, independent Congo’s first prime minister. He fell afoul of Cold War-era fears in the United States and Belgium, Congo’s colonizer, which both supported his killing just one year after Congo became free.

Tshisekedi, now 55, was born shortly after Lumumba’s assassination and grew up in relative comfort as the son of Etienne Tshisekedi, the founder of Congo’s longest-running opposition party who was alternately jailed and given official positions by the three leaders Congo has had over the past half-century.

Felix bears a striking resemblance to his adored father, earning him points among the party faithful. But he is a political novice and now enters office hamstrung

by Kabila’s control of the legislature.

Kabila will continue to play a major role in Congolese politics.

He retains the vague but official title of “moral authority” of his political party, which indicates he will “orchestrate most of Congo’s big decisions behind the scenes,” Stearns said. And he has not ruled out a return to power in the 2023 elections.

Fayulu, the opposition candidate who led the polls ahead of the vote, campaigned vociferously as the anti-Kabila candidate. While Tshisekedi stayed mostly silent as widespread irregularities and disenfranchisement hollowed out trust in the election, Fayulu lambasted them in front of crowds of tens of thousands.

To his supporters, Fayulu was the one who would hold Kabila accountable for the corruption that many allege enriched his fam-

Outgoing President Joseph Kabila, left, exits as Presidentelect Felix Tshisekedi, center, son of the country’s opposition leader, remains for the inauguration ceremony. The election raised concerns about voting irregularities.

ily while the most of the country remains extremely impoverished and mostly without electricity or clean water. Kabila has denied charges of corruption.

Before the election, Tshisekedi sounded a similar tone to Fayulu, often stressing his belief that Congo needed a “truth and reconciliation commission” similar to Rwanda’s or South Africa’s that would hold Kabila to account.

But as rumors swirled around Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, in the days after the election, Tshisekedi began to make previously unthinkable overtures to Kabila.

“It is clear that he will be able to live peacefully in his own country and carry out his business, he has nothing to fear,” Tshisekedi told Belgium’s Le Soir newspaper.

His first speech upon being named winner was even more conciliatory.

“Today we should no longer see [Kabila] as an adversary, but rather as a partner in the democratic change in our country,” he told supporters.

At Thursday’s inauguration ceremony, Tshisekedi stood beside Kabila, who looked years younger after having shaved his beard.

Tshisekedi’s running mate, formerly Kabila’s campaign manager, stood beside Kabila’s erstwhile presidential candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary. Representatives of Fayulu’s coalition were absent, as were leaders of Congo’s Catholic church, to which almost half the country belongs.

From afar, spokesmen for nations and organizations that had criticized aspects of the election offered acknowledgment of Tshisekedi’s presidency.

“We are committed to working with the new DRC government,” State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said in a statement, referring to the country by the acronym for its full name, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The African Union and European Union both issued statements that said they had “taken note” of the election’s final results but did not congratulate Tshisekedi. n ©The Washington Post

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Afghan interpreters remain in wait B Y A LEX H ORTON in Kabul

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e does not take unnecessary trips, but before he steps into his car, he contorts his body to inspect the chassis for magnetic bombs.

The man, 32, was an interpreter for U.S. troops in Afghanistan for seven years, much of that time with an ear pressed to a radio to intercept Taliban chatter that officers said provided vital intelligence. In 2013, following two militant attempts to kill or capture him, he applied for a special visa for Afghans endangered because of their work for the United States.

He spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his life.

His plans to settle in Texas have been set adrift amid the Trump administration’s heightened scrutiny for issuing visas. Last year, 1,649 such visas were approved for Afghans — a 60 percent drop from the previous year. This was, by far, the biggest decline in the program’s 10-year existence.

The challenge to secure such visas is not entirely new. The issuance of special visas dropped by 30 percent in 2015 — a result of changing security measures implemented by the Obama administration, interpreter advocates say.

However, there is a renewed sense of urgency to provide safe haven for Afghans who have been instrumental in helping U.S. forces, advocates say, now that the Taliban has been resurgent in the country amid uncertainty about a potential U.S. troop pullout.

Since the creation of the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009, nearly 16,000 principal Afghan applicants have been approved for visas, according to State Department data.

Congress has not allocated new visas for 2019, and advocates warn that continued delays will imperil the 19,000 applicants still waiting.

The delays are significant. Congress required the State Department to take no longer than nine months to complete visa claims in the 2014 defense spending bill, but the average wait time is 23

ANDREW QUILTY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Visas for those who aided U.S. troops drop sharply amid Trump administration’s heightened scrutiny months, according to the most recent data released last summer.

It is difficult to pinpoint how many interpreters have been targeted and killed, advocates say. In 2014, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) estimated that one interpreter was killed every 36 hours, but cautioned that the number might be outdated; a new estimate could not be done.

The State Department could not provide comment because of the partial government shutdown, a spokesman said.

The interpreter has been frustrated that his efforts to protect U.S. service members have not been reciprocated.

In one nighttime convoy in Helmand province in 2006, a militant leader radioed his men to prepare for an attack. The interpreter passed the message on to the U.S. commander.

Enemy gunfire erupted min-

utes later, as soldiers watched tracers streak in night-vision green. One U.S. soldier was killed in the ambush, but that kind of advance warning routinely “saved lives,” according to Joseph Cannon, who worked with the interpreter as an Army officer.

Why the United States cannot in turn protect him has perplexed the interpreter.

Seemingly trivial bureaucratic foul-ups have also put interpreters in potential danger. Naseri — a different interpreter — had the visa he needed to escape Afghanistan. Then, he didn’t.

He survived countless ambushes in the more than five years he spent interpreting for U.S. troops.

He carried an AK-47 assault rifle on patrols and fired at ghostlike insurgents attacking coalition troops in the Korengal, a valley that rips through the Hindu Kush like a viper in tall grass.

But a transfer to Bagram air

Naseri, who worked as an interpreter for U.S. forces, moved in with his wife’s family in Kabul because residents in his village frowned upon his work with the Americans. In 2017, he was granted a special U.S. visa but then was turned around in Dubai and put on a flight back to Afghanistan.

Today, he lives in hiding.

base led in 2010 to a fateful series of events. He was sent on patrol in his home village nearby. Rumors swirled. When a suspected militant was seized, neighbors accused Naseri of being a spy who outed him, and word got around.

“They hate interpreters more than Americans,” Naseri, 31, said of the Taliban. He asked The Post to use only part of his name for fear of militant retribution.

He applied for a visa five years ago and received generic denials twice, said his attorney, Amber Murray, though he successfully contested both decisions.

In June 2017, Naseri, his wife and three children were ecstatic: Their visas were issued.

Naseri flew to Dubai with his wife and three young daughters on a flight bound for Houston.

Then he was stopped in the airport. There was a problem with their visas, but no explanation.

Murray contacted the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which was unaware of the issue. “Unfortunately, this does happen from time to time,” an embassy staff member wrote in an Oct. 5 email obtained

by The Post.

Naseri was forced to return to Afghanistan days later. Soon after, according to an Oct. 31 email Murray sent to the embassy, “members of the Taliban approached Mr. Naseri’s house attempting to climb over the fence where they were fortunately deterred from entry by the barking of Mr. Naseri’s dog.

When Mr. Naseri’s father came to the door, the Taliban affiliates demanded to know Mr. Naseri’s whereabouts and threatened to physically harm his son saying they would ‘catch’ Mr. Naseri son.”

Naseri remains in hiding more than a year later.

Advocates and former interpreters worry that a perception of abandoning former interpreters will fray trust abroad and that enemies like the Taliban will score a propaganda victory.

“It sends a message the United States can’t be trusted to keep its word,” said Waltz, the Florida lawmaker. “That puts our forces in jeopardy.” n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

Trump’s style speaks to strongmen Critics say disregard for democracy abroad opens doors for imitators BY

G RIFF W ITTE

AND

C AROL M ORELLO in Budapest

They make a show of putting their own countries first, and breezily dismiss con­ cerns about international law or human rights. They seek to bend the rules to their will, excoriating “the deep state” for getting in their way. And when they are challenged by the press or other critics, they have a two­word rejoinder: fake news. ¶ In coun­ tries around the globe — from Brazil to the Philippines, and in many less prominent JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

xx

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COVER STORY places in between — a generation of leaders who resemble President Trump in both style and substance is rising, consolidating power and growing bolder in its willingness to flout democratic principles and norms.

The strongman style of leadership is not new, of course, and it is not always obvious who is inspiring whom. Trump himself climbed to power amid a surge of nativist and nationalist politics worldwide, and his chief campaign guru, Stephen K. Bannon, borrowed themes and phrases from European populists to rally the make-America-great-again faithful.

But in interviews on four continents, diplomats, rights activists and foreign officials said that after two years of Trump using the world’s most powerful megaphone to cheer authoritarians, bully democratic allies and denigrate traditional American values, the impact on how others govern is becoming clear.

“While the global decline in freedom didn’t begin with Donald Trump’s presidency, I do think he has been an accelerant,” said Uzra Zeya, a State Department veteran who resigned last spring following a 25-year career that culminated as the nation’s top Foreign Service officer in Paris.

Trump’s foreign policy approach — which has included praise for figures such as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, excuses for the killing of a Washington Post journalist at the hands of Saudi state assassins and a steady stream of vitriol toward elected leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel — has caused allies to recoil. Last month, it contributed to the resignation of Trump’s own defense secretary, Jim Mattis.

But despots — and would-be despots — have seen in Trump a model, as well as an alibi.

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s increasingly autocratic leader, said Trump represents “permission” from “the highest position in the world.”

To Jair Bolsonaro, the new president of Brazil, the U.S. president is a barrier-breaker — proof that incendiary comments about women or minorities and a history of trafficking in conspiracy theories don’t need to stand in the way of taking power.

When the Nigerian army

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lish — no less than a dozen times, according to people present.

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

CARLO GABUCO/BLOOMBERG

opened fire on rock-throwing demonstrators last fall, killing as many as 40 people, it defended itself by citing Trump’s threats to do the same at the Mexican border.

When the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia criticized ruler Hun Sen for cracking down on the opposition and the media, the authoritarian leader pointed out that Trump had his back — not the diplomats’.

TOP: People walk past a neighborhood once home to a migrant community in Budapest. ABOVE: A figure of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte burns.

LEFT: North Korean President Kim Jong Un and President Trump.

“Your policy has been changed, but the embassy in Phnom Penh has not changed it yet,” he said, appealing to Trump to rein his embassy in.

And when members of the U.N. Security Council visited Myanmar’s commander in chief in late April to demand explanations for the expulsion of more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims, he used the phrase “fake news” — the only words he spoke in Eng-

‘You’re on your own.’

The Trump administration has continued its predecessors’ practice of taking a tough line against abuses by long-standing U.S. adversaries such as Iran and Venezuela.

But in many other relationships, human rights and democracy have been downgraded — or taken off the table entirely.

“When we’re talking about our core values, they don’t change,” said James D. Melville Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to Estonia who resigned in protest of Trump’s policies last summer.

Over a 33-year Foreign Service career — highlighted early on by the chance to witness Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech in Berlin — Melville said he saw himself as a global salesman for the American commitment to democracy, freedom and the rule of law.

But under Trump, he said, “it’s a harder product to sell” because the president doesn’t appear to believe in it.

That is not to say the United States has always had such an enviable record, as Trump himself is fond of pointing out. Napalm attacks on Vietnamese villages, torture at Abu Ghraib prison and coddling of friendly dictators are just a few examples that highlight the gap between American rhetoric and reality.

“You think we’re so innocent?”

Trump asked when challenged on why he wasn’t being critical of abuses by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But policymakers and analysts say it is that willingness to relativize American ideals, and establish an equivalency with countries whose policies are fundamentally at odds with U.S. values, that sets Trump apart from his predecessors.

“We have for the first time in American history an administration that actually prefers authoritarians over democrats,” said Yascha Mounk, a Johns Hopkins University professor who focuses on the erosion of liberal democracy worldwide. “That provides cover for autocrats, because they don’t have to pay any price for what they do. And it encourages others to go in that direction.”

Mounk was speaking late last

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COVER STORY

year in a forum at Central European University, a Budapestbased graduate school with accreditation in both the U.S. and Hungary that has long been a critical bridge between West and East.

Days later, the university announced that it had been kicked out of the country. But rather than blame Orban, U.S. Ambassador David Cornstein — a close Trump friend — pinned responsibility on the school’s founder, financier George Soros.

That marked a break from what had been a bipartisan U.S. policy of defending the school on the principle of academic freedom.

Cornstein reflected another policy rupture when he insisted that, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he had seen no evidence the Hungarian government was infringing on its citizens’ rights and liberties.

His words came as a surprise to Marta Pardavi, a leading Hungarian rights activist who had spent an hour with Cornstein only weeks earlier painting a bleak portrait: the shrinking space for NGOs as the government cracks down, the monopolization of the media by Orban allies and the concentration of power in the hands of one man.

The message of the ambassador’s statement, which was gleefully repeated by Hungarian authorities and splashed across headlines in the state-controlled press, was unmistakable.

“You’re on your own,” said Pardavi, who leads the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a group established to push for liberties during the country’s communist era. “Is the U.S. still a beacon of democracy for Europe? Sadly, that light is shining a lot less clearly.”

Others in Central Europe who have long seen the United States as a champion of freedom and democracy are feeling similarly forsaken.

On the day last fall that Trump welcomed Polish President Andrzej Duda to the White House, Supreme Court Chief Justice Malgorzata Gersdorf was in her chambers waiting for Duda to force her out, as part of a campaign to consolidate the ruling party’s control over the judiciary.

But Gersdorf ’s cause — which was championed by rule-of-law

JOEDSON ALVES/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

advocates across Poland and the West — went unmentioned by Trump in both public and private.

Instead, the two presidents traded easy banter over the creation of a “Fort Trump” for U.S. troops in Poland.

Had there been a U.S. intervention in the Supreme Court takeover, “it would have been different,” Gersdorf said in an interview. “Poles love America. They listen to America.”

Gersdorf was ultimately reinstated after Europe’s top court took her side. But elsewhere, the power grab by strongman leaders continues, with the Trump administration appearing at times to cheer it on.

Authoritarians ‘unleashed’ Beyond Europe, Trump’s impact has been even more vivid.

In the Middle East, the United States has long allied itself with regimes characterized by troubling human rights records and scant tolerance for democratic expression. It paid lip service to

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at a naval change-ofcommand ceremony in Brasilia on Jan. 9.

“Is the U.S. still a beacon of democracy for Europe?

Sadly, that light is shining a lot less clearly.”

Marta Pardavi, Hungarian rights activist

the need for improvement, while tolerating abuses.

But recently, say experts in the region, behavior by governments in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain has deteriorated.

The killing of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was only the most blatant example, said one former top U.S. diplomat, of leaders feeling “unleashed” to act out their worst impulses because they know Trump won’t challenge them.

“Those impulses were clear and present,” said the former diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “But the new and brazen arrests, detentions, murders are something we did not see before in friends and partners. It is not a coincidence that it is happening when our own president embraces thugs and dictators while humiliating and weakening our democratic allies.”

In a major speech in Cairo this month, Secretary of State Mike

Pompeo mentioned democracy only in passing and did not say a word about human rights or the 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails, though Pompeo later said he raised human rights in private conversations. Publicly, he lavished praise on President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi for fighting terrorism.

“We know what that means,” said Philippe Nassif, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa advocacy director.

“It means a tacit approval of tens of thousands of people swept up under Sissi’s regime in Egypt under the pretext of terrorism charges.”

State Department officials reject the notion that authoritarian governments have been emboldened, saying the administration has sanctioned human rights abusers and denied them visas.

Human rights are in the National Security Strategy that Trump unveiled a year ago, and part of American identity.

“Diplomacy is about balancing

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COVER STORY priorities,” said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with department policy. “We will not shy away from raising human rights concerns with any country. Human rights may not always be the first or the only point we make in our diplomatic conversations, but neither will it be omitted. This is true now and it was true in the past.”

Trump’s priorities Others who have represented the United States abroad disagree, pointing to Central America as a region where leaders appear to have calculated that they can get away with suppressing domestic dissent if they support the United States on matters of more importance to Trump.

In Honduras, for instance, President Juan Orlando Hernández backed Washington in a vote at the United Nations over U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Then Hernández allegedly used fraud to steal an election, triggering mass protests. Rather than condemn the move, the United States offered its congratulations.

“It was the sort of thing that if Ortega had done it or Maduro or Castro, the U.S. would have come out hammer and tongs, repudiating the results,” said a former diplomat, referring to leftist leaders in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. “Our response was enormously muted.” The former diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss policies being carried out by former colleagues.

Guatemala provides another example. It also voted with the United States on Jerusalem and announced it would move its own embassy to the city.

Months later, in August, President Jimmy Morales declared he was abolishing the mandate of a U.N.-backed commission that had long been known as an effective watchdog in curbing corruption. Even as he spoke, a column of three dozen jeeps — some with roof-mounted machine guns — that had been supplied by the United States for anti-narcotics operations rolled through the city, pausing at the commission’s offices and at the homes of human rights activists.

“This is a terrible time,” the former diplomat said. “People

CALLA KESSLER/THE WASHINGTON POST

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/POOL/REUTERS

forming the administration have turned their back on traditional American values, and foreign leaders are taking advantage.”

In many of those places, the United States had once been among the few bulwarks against repression by governments that otherwise wield total control, with few domestic institutions or groups powerful enough to push back.

In the Philippines, local courts have proved incapable of mounting any serious challenge to the thousands of extrajudicial kill-

TOP: President Trump and first lady Melania Trump greet Polish President Andrzej Duda and first lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda at the White House in September.

ABOVE: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.

ings carried out as part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.

As a former American colony where respect and admiration for the United States still runs deep, the Philippines is particularly susceptible to Washington’s influence. Polls show that Filipinos trust the United States more than any other major country, and about 80 percent of the population believes America plays a positive role in the world.

But rather than rein Duterte in, Trump has seemed only to embolden him with his support.

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The Trump model Perhaps the best example of a leader directly modeling himself after Trump has come in Brazil, where Bolsonaro — a thrice-married champion of “traditional values” who delights in bypassing the mainstream press with provocative pronouncements on social media — was sworn in as president this month.

For years, Bolsonaro, a seventime congressman, had been relegated to Brazil’s fringe, viewed as the crazy uncle of Brazilian politics amid a litany of incendiary remarks. A dead son was better than a gay son. Some minorities were fat and lazy. A female political rival was too ugly to be raped.

But Trump’s election, analysts in Brazil said, gave Bolsonaro an opening. The two men were very different kinds of outsiders — one a former military man, the other a real estate tycoon. But they have many things in common.

Bolsonaro has always been hostile to the media. But his verbal assaults on journalists began to mirror Trump down to the specific words he used in his Twitter tirades.

In April 2017, Bolsonaro tweeted the words “fake news” for the first time — a name he used to smear established Brazilian outlets the way Trump had done in the 2016 race and after.

“What happens in the U.S. inevitably influences us,” said, Sergio Dávila, the executive editor of Folha de S.Paulo, a newspaper that has been a target of Bolsonaro’s ire. “When Trump says absurd things and nothing sticks to him, and he advances, and he is elected, it has a tremendous world impact.”

Bannon certainly hopes so.

The former Trump adviser and campaign manager said he had met with Bolsonaro strategists, including the candidate’s son, in August, after being contacted by them in July. He found like-minded souls.

Noting the rising number nationalists winning at the ballot box worldwide, he called Bolsonaro part of a new breed of leaders.

“Brazil is so big, so large, people will realize with Bolsonaro’s election that this populist, nationalist movement is not localized,” Bannon said. “This is going to be the defining characteristic of the 21st century.” n ©The Washington Post

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MOVIES CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

The Oscar goes to: People-pleasing BY

A NN H ORNADAY

“B

oRhap”? Really?

For an Oscar season many insiders have been describing as the weirdest in decades, the nominations announced on Tuesday were decidedly un-weird.

The 91st Academy Awards ceremony, which will be televised on Feb. 24, promises to be a something-for-everyone celebration, from edgy indies (“Vice,” “The Favourite”) to adamantly personal statements (“BlacKkKlansman,” “Roma”). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences even found room for the kind of middlebrow crowd-pleaser for which it has been roundly criticized for honoring in the past, not just with the warmhearted road picture “Green Book” but the wildly uneven but undeniably rousing Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

This year’s shortlists contained the usual complement of snubs and surprises: Even though “A Star Is Born” received eight nods, Bradley Cooper was overlooked for his directing in that movie. And “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” one of the most beloved films of 2018 didn’t make the cut for best feature documentary.

But for the most part, this year’s crop of nominees reflects a movie industry and gatekeeping culture that on the surface might be suffering from anxieties about disruptive distribution models, waning popularity with audiences, and criticisms about inclusion and representation, but feels just as comfortable sticking to familiar safe spaces as in embracing the inevitability — and invigoration — of change.

Observers might remember a brief period last year when the academy announced a plan to introduce a new Oscar category of “best popular film,” a notion that was quickly derided as a sop to accusations of elitism and sagging TV ratings. As the strong showing of the box office hits “Black Panther” and “A Star Is Born” attests, such pandering isn’t just offensive but supremely unnecessary at a

ALEX BAILEY/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Who needs a ‘best popular film’ category when ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ gets a best picture nod? time when entertaining, audience-friendly movies are proving just as well-executed and thematically complex as the toniest art house film. When voters see fit to lift up “Bohemian Rhapsody” — whose cringeworthy dialogue, dreary biopic structure and corny uplift couldn’t stop a showstopping performance from best-actor nominee Rami Malek — a separate category is superfluous, to say the least.

This was also supposed to be a year when the academy would deliver a verdict on Netflix, the streaming subscription service that has thoroughly upended the film industry by seeking to eradicate theatrical distribution, while throwing unheard-of amounts of money at established auteurs to earn cachet and, presumably, discerning eyeballs. When the Netflix film “Mudbound” received four nominations last year, that indicated that the Hollywood establishment wasn’t nearly as resis-

tant to the Netflix model as many assumed. This year, “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white, Spanish-language impressionistic memoir of his Mexico City childhood, earned 10 nominations, including for its lead and supporting actresses and best picture — effectively putting to rest the notion of a Netflix stigma.

There are plenty of old-school motion pictures in the hunt this year, including the remake of the remake of the remake of the classic showbiz melodrama “A Star Is Born,” and “Green Book,” a warmhearted buddy picture set in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s.

Even “The Favourite” and “Vice,” one a cheekily revisionist portrait of the court of Queen Anne, the other a cheekily revisionist portrait of former vice president Dick Cheney, check a number of Oscarfriendly boxes as pointedly period pieces addressing the vicissitudes of power, and as sharp-elbowed renegades from boutique studios.

From left, Gwilym Lee, Rami Malek and Joe Mazzello star in the Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” as, respectively, guitarist Brian May, lead singer Freddie Mercury and bass player John Deacon.

But multiple nominations for Cuarón and Pawlikowski, as well as for the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), suggest that the influx of new members in recent years has resulted in a vision of film that’s far more global, platform-agnostic and elastic than in the past.

It’s almost incomprehensible that Spike Lee, whose “BlacKkKlansman” received six nominations, is just now receiving the first best-director nod of his 36-year career, just as it’s unbelievable that, if best-picture front-runner “Roma” wins, it will be the first foreign-language film to earn that honor in the academy’s history.

Between them, “Black Panther,” “Roma” and “BlacKkKlansman” have made history as the first superhero spectacle, Netflix film and Spike Lee joint to earn a best-picture nomination, respectively.

If those milestones represent baby steps forward, the complete absence of female filmmakers — including Rachel Morrison’s spectacular cinematography in “Black Panther” — surely qualifies as two steps back in a fitful but unmistakable march toward the loosening up of canonical strictures regarding ethnicity, gender and genre.

And what to make of the infectiously joyful — and irresistibly nicknamed — “BoRhap”?

It’s no surprise, and it’s altogether fitting, that the film was honored for sound mixing and editing, and for Malek’s uncanny portrayal of Mercury. But the consideration of this flawed, if insistently enjoyable, exercise in “Behind the Music” cliches (and box office domination) as one of the finest movies of the year proves another rule: Academy voters aren’t the hidebound graybeards or tetchy aesthetic purists their organizational title suggests. Like the audiences they’re so desperate to please, the films they value most are those that simply make them feel good — whether about their art form, their industry or their most undemanding and commercially self-interested tastes. Times may be changing, but some fundamentals stay reliably the same. n ©The Washington Post

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Galapagos sharks are under threat A DAM P OPESCU in Galapagos Islands, Ecuador BY

T

he teeming waters that surround the famed Galapagos islands support more shark species than anywhere on Earth. Schools of wide-eyed scalloped hammerheads, 40,000-pound whale sharks, reef-patrolling whitetip sharks, more than 40 species in total, many endangered, are found only here.

Yet, these top marine predators, in an area thought of as the unspoiled wilderness that inspired Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, are being preyed upon by thousands of large and small fishing boats eager to sell shark fins to the Asian market where shark fin soup is a prized delicacy.

Just how many sharks are being killed here is unclear, experts say, because so many are caught illegally. But according to one study, about a half-million sharks were annually killed in Ecuadoran waters from 1979 to 2004. In the Galapagos, recent research indicates overfishing is causing shark numbers to crash, causing a ripple among marine animals.

Galapagos sharks are apex predators that regulate populations of everything from fish to sea lions, an essential presence in the ecosystem. Known to swim hundreds of miles to hunt and find mates, sharks are susceptible to fishermen trolling the expansive eastern Pacific.

“Sharks control the populations of medium-sized animals from taking over and eating everything that moves,” says Daniel Pauly, a University of British Columbia marine biologist and fisheries professor who has studied these islands since 2000. “Without sharks, there would be no Galapagos.”

While 97 percent of the land in the Galapagos National Park is off-limits to people, less than 1 percent of the 51,000 square miles surrounding the islands are blocked to fishing. This vast area is the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

Although the marine reserve is a

PABLO COZZAGLIO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The overfishing of the marine predators for their prized fins could damage the islands’ ecosystem protected area, local fishermen are allowed to work there. But there’s often no one monitoring what they take, or the major fishing ships that, despite laws against it, move in and out of the reserve catching fish, Pauly says.

Ecuadoran authorities are so strapped financially that they don’t have enough boats to patrol, according to current and former national park and Ecuadoran navy officials.

Declining numbers Beyond balancing the food chain, live sharks provide regular income for dive operators and attract tourists eager to experience pristine underwater ecosystems.

A 2015 study by National Geographic and the University of California calculated that the average lifetime value of a live Galapagos shark to tourism is $5.4 million.

One shark on average generates about $34,000 a year from singleday dive tours; the crown jewel for tourism is the hammerhead, whose lifetime value was calculated by the study at $12 million,

making it perhaps the most valuable predator on Earth.

Worldwide shark numbers, including hammerheads, have declined more than 90 percent, says Pauly, largely because of Asia’s appetite for fins — especially in shark fin soup. The appetite for the luxury soup has dropped recently in China, but it has gone up elsewhere in Asia.

Shark fin soup can run $100 a bowl in China and elsewhere. In Ecuador, shark meat is sold to the public for as little as 75 cents a pound in local fish markets. Fins often pass between middlemen before reaching buyers who pay higher prices throughout East Asia, by some reports going for as much as $1,000 a kilogram.

Large-scale finning began here in the 1950s. It became illegal to target sharks but permissible to export fins from “incidental” catches. Sharks are usually finned alive and then dumped overboard, unable to swim or survive.

In 2003, Ecuador prohibited shark fishing inside its marine

A baby hammerhead shark swims after being released by the Galapagos National Park research team in Ecuador. More than 40 shark species in total are found only in the Galapagos.

reserve, although it allowed incidental catches there, too. Experts say the incidental catch exception is a huge loophole that allows local fisherman to catch and sell sharks. Park Director Jorge Carrion admits this practice has “a negative impact,” but he says the program was developed “with the participation of the local fishermen” who rely on fishing for their living.

The main threat to sharks, however, is the 45,000 Ecuadoran vessels that fish in and around the reserve — and the international ships beyond that which manage to evade Ecuadoran detection.

In August 2017, for instance, a massive Chinese fishing ship, the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999, was discovered inside the reserve with 300 tons of endangered marine species, including more than 6,000 sharks killed for their fins. The ship was intercepted only because, unlike many large fishing ships, it had its tracking system on.

Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence whose research helped influence Ecuador’s 2016 creation of a second protected marine sanctuary around a pair of islands north of the main Galapagos archipelago, says the problem is not just Chinese and Ecuadoran ships. Many from Peru, Colombia and Panama also come into the archipelago, fish and leave without being seen or stopped.

He and others say they hope the government of Ecuador will soon wake up to how much the country could lose if it doesn’t do a better job of protecting the Galapagos.

The islands and waters face many threats: changing climate, invasive species, influxes of tourists and locals. But more than a dozen researchers and biologists interviewed say the biggest may be the loss of sharks.

If something isn’t done soon, Pauly says, these sharks will vanish. And when that happens, more marine species will also fall, irreparably changing the ecosystem of the Galapagos and the oceans beyond them. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

A reporter’s 544 days in an Iranian prison N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

J AMES M ANN

O PRISONER My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison — Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, HighStakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out

By Jason Rezaian.

Ecco/Anthony Bourdain.

320 pp. $29.99.

“There’s no way I’m going to be here more than tonight, and maybe tomorrow,” Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian recalled about his first hours in Iran’s Evin prison, above. He was there for 544 days.

ne day while Jason Rezaian was languishing in prison in Tehran, his jailers told him, “You must sing for us.” He finally agreed to do so, but only if they stood up.

They did. Rezaian crooned with deep emotion and passion, and the guards burst into applause.

Rezaian then told them he had been singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” — so that, by clapping, they had “paid the ultimate respect to the Great Satan.”

That anecdote provides a fitting introduction to the many little dramas and absurdities experienced by Rezaian, then The Washington Post’s correspondent in Tehran, during nearly a year and a half in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. “Prisoner,” Rezaian’s account of his time behind bars and his release, is full of stories like the one about his rendition of the national anthem — some of them funny, some of them outrageous.

Rezaian grew up in California, a son of an Iranian rug merchant.

He eventually established himself as one of the very few American newspaper correspondents in Iran. He and his wife, Yeganeh, were arrested at their Tehran apartment in the summer of 2014 just as they were about to leave on a trip to the United States. At the time, the Iranian regime was negotiating a deal with the Obama administration in which the United States would lift sanctions in exchange for Iran’s agreement to limit its nuclear weapons program.

Rezaian eventually concluded that he was a hostage, seized so that Iran could try to extract leverage in those negotiations. He sardonically brands the government that jailed him “the Hostage Taking Republic of Iran.” He observes that the “signature move” of the current Iranian regime after it came to power in 1979 was the seizure of more than 50 American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Rezaian wound up spending 544 days in captivity —

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

precisely 100 more than those earlier hostages. Sometimes, he theorizes, Iranian officials take hostages without even knowing at first what they will seek in return.

The specific charges against Rezaian became as absurd as everything else about his case. First, Iranian authorities accused him of espionage, seeking to claim that he was a CIA agent. But they couldn’t find evidence to substantiate this, because there was none.

The prosecutors were deadly serious in their efforts to develop a case, but they seemed sometimes like figures in a Kafka novel and sometimes those in a Marx brothers movie. When Iranian officials found that the inbox of Rezaian’s Gmail account was full to overflowing, they told him this was a sign he was a spy — that he was so disorganized, he must have been trained to be that way, perhaps to cover his tracks.

Eventually, the Iranian authorities abandoned the claims of espionage and charged him with a different offense. Through his neutral newspaper reporting, they said, Rezaian was trying to

soften American public opinion toward Iran, to make the negotiations succeed — and thus to open the way for a more liberal, open Iran. And that, they said, was criminal.

In other words, Rezaian was said to be trying to undermine the Iranian regime through a strategy of “peaceful evolution.” John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, first used that phrase to describe a strategy for liberalizing the Soviet Union without the use of force, and decades later, conservatives in China’s Communist Party drew on the wording to characterize American strategy in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

“My personal hope was that Iran would someday become an open society,” writes Rezaian.

“But to my captors, that was my biggest crime. And it didn’t matter that I wasn’t doing anything tangible toward that end. Just my being there to document what was happening was criminal enough.”

The Iranians gradually came under intense pressure from over-

seas to let Rezaian go. The appeals to release him extended from Rezaian’s family and his editors at The Post to, eventually, President Barack Obama and private Americans, including Muhammad Ali, Noam Chomsky and Edward Snowden. The end of Rezaian’s book includes a dramatic airport scene worthy of “Casablanca,” as the Iranians try to keep his wife in their grasp and a Swiss diplomat makes sure she gets out with him.

Not all of Rezaian’s book is as fast-reading as that final scene.

There is a slow-going chapter about the many relatives in his large Iranian American family, and in general, the narrative about the incremental progress of his court case inches along. It is Rezaian’s descriptions of the way the Iranian regime operates at the working level — its twisted logic and paranoia — that make the book so worthwhile. n Mann is the author of several books on American foreign policy, including “The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Dystopian honesty isn’t best policy

DNA reveals a life that isn’t kosher

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

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REVIEWED BY

J ON M ICHAUD

magine a country so traumatized by deception, lies and gaslighting that it opts to prioritize facts and truth-telling above all else. Here’s what your life would be like: Ubiquitous video cameras would capture your every word and action and feed them into a permanent record of all that is “Objectively So.” Like every other citizen, you would keep a detailed account of your life, gathering diary pages, receipts and annotated conversations, and sealing them in a Mylar bag each night. If there’s ever a question about what happened on a given day, this archive can be accessed to determine the truth. If you were found to have lied or fabricated any fact in the record, you could face imprisonment or even exile.

And in accordance with the national ethos, all fictional storytelling — whether on the page, the stage or the screen — is outlawed.

No novels, movies, plays or Internet. Would this be a paradise or a hell for you?

Ben H. Winters’s new novel “Golden State” unfolds in such a place, an alternate-future California. The novel’s narrator, Laszlo Ratesic, is a member of the state’s Speculative Service, the law-enforcement body charged with ferreting out lies and liars and with sorting “accidental infelicities” from “purposeful misrepresentations.” Like other members of the service, Laszlo has a sixth sense for mendacity. It produces a physical reaction in him, like an allergy.

He’s an amiable bear of a man, a 19-year veteran of the service, 54 years old, bearded, overweight and recently divorced. Laszlo lives and works in the shadow of his brother Charlie, a legendary serviceman who died mysteriously in the line of duty.

At the novel’s outset, Laszlo is asked to mentor a promising rookie named Aysa Paige. She’s his antithesis: slim, young, energetic and idealistic. This odd couple is dispatched to investigate a seemingly simple case, a roofer who has

fallen to his death while on the job.

But anomalies soon start piling up. The house belongs to a judge.

The roofer was there outside normal working hours. Video surveillance suggests he might have been spying. Laszlo and Aysa follow these leads deeper and deeper into the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of the Golden State until they run smack into the powerful elite who run the country. Their investigation forces Laszlo to confront his own complicity in the maintenance of this totalitarian system. It also reveals the truth behind his brother’s death.

Winters has a knack for creating appealing detective fictions that skew reality in thought-provoking ways, producing a hybrid of the familiar and the uncanny. At his best, his novels approach the mind-expanding counterfactuals and dystopias created by Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Michael Chabon.

For the first two-thirds of “Golden State,” Winters pulls it off again. The novel is in equal measure a gripping detective story and a disquieting work of speculative fiction. Winters brilliantly imagines the quotidian manifestations of a truth-obsessed culture. For entertainment, people watch televised streams of “Old Men Walking Dogs” or “Slipping on Sidewalk Cracks.” The only “novels” anyone reads in the Golden State are factual accounts of true events.

However, the last third of “Golden State” fails to deliver.

Winters paints himself into an imaginative corner. When Laszlo finally penetrates the corrupt reality behind the Golden State’s factbased facade, what he and the reader discover is a scenario distressingly familiar from dozens of other science fiction books and films. Instead of a cathartic redemption, Laszlo achieves only a meek escape. n Michaud is the author of the novel “When Tito Loved Clara.” This was written for The Washington Post.

D GOLDEN STATE

By Ben H. Winters Mullholland. 336 pp. $28.

INHERITANCE A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love

By Dani Shapiro Knopf. 247 pp. $24.95

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REVIEWED BY

N ORA K RUG

ani Shapiro was used to hearing it: “There’s no way you’re Jewish.” With her blond hair, blue eyes and delicate features, Shapiro has long been easy prey for cultural assumptions.

Shapiro must be your married name, she had heard more than once. A family friend (Jared Kushner’s grandmother, as it turns out) took things a step further: “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” Never mind that the 56-year-old author was raised as an Orthodox Jew and studied the Talmud.

Now, in her new book, “Inheritance,” Shapiro reveals the shocking result of an over-the-counter DNA test: Biologically speaking, she could play lead shiksa. In fact, her memoir — a modern-day mystery with a neurotic heart — could easily be the screenplay for a Woody Allen movie.

The tale begins innocently, in a casual moment at Shapiro’s Connecticut home. Her husband, curious about his own roots, has sent for one of those genetic kits that promises to tell “a more complete story of you.”

Shapiro, a self-professed “serial memoirist,” had, after pages and pages of introspection, become quite certain of who she was.

“I am no longer consumed by the question: What if?” she wrote fatefully in “Hourglass,” a book she had just completed before her OMG genetic test.

“Inheritance” is consumed by the question of what if? What if the man Shapiro thought was her father is not? What if she could find the man who is her biological father? What if he doesn’t want anything to do with her? What if he does? What if she is not who she thought she was? “All my life I had known there was a secret,” she writes. “What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.”

The first unknowns slip away easily: Comparing her DNA test with that of her half sister indi-

cates the father who raised Shapiro was not her biological father.

Identifying the man who is turns out to be almost as simple and quick, thanks to the Internet.

But solving the other mysteries proves more difficult. Shapiro wrestles with questions both mundane and profound: how to get in touch with her biological father without scaring him away; how to share the news with her teenage son; how to look at old family photographs and understand her connection to the people in them; how to reconstruct, as she puts it, “the narrative edifice” of her life.

Shapiro’s parents are long dead, as are their contemporaries and relatives who could have helped her understand why her biological roots were kept from her. Shapiro vaguely recalls her mother mentioning fertility problems, and it is this memory that leads her to the most interesting parts of the book — an examination of the shady world of fertility treatments in the early 1960s. Shapiro learns about the since-shuttered clinic in Philadelphia where she’d been conceived, using her mother’s egg and the sperm of a medical student who is now a retired doctor in Portland, Ore. Equally engaging is the complicated relationship she forms with her newfound family, who tiptoe toward embracing her.

“Inheritance” is fundamentally a tale of soul-searching. Much of the book consists of Shapiro processing and pondering each new bit of information. “What do we inherit, and how and why?” she asks. “What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood?”

As at-home genetic tests become more popular and stories like Shapiro’s become more common, “Inheritance” offers a thought-provoking look at the shifting landscape of identity. It will make you think twice before you casually spit into that vial. n Krug is a writer and editor at Washington Post Book World.

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OPINIONS

Maduro’s destructive grip on Venezuela nears its end FRANCISCO TORO is chief content officer of the Group of 50 and a contributing columnist for Post Global Opinions.

Thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets this past week to confront Nicolás Maduro and the Western Hemi­ sphere’s most wantonly destructive regime. A resurgent opposition — under the leadership of Juan Guaidó, the until­recently unknown 35­year­old leader of Congress and now the self­declared president of Venezuela — has mobilized its supporters to try to dislodge what’s now a dictatorship. ¶ On Wednesday afternoon, Guaidó claimed to be the legitimate leader of Venezuela, directly challeng­ ing Maduro’s authority. President Trump promptly recog­ nized Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.

“In its role as the only legitimate branch of government duly elected by the Venezuelan people, the National Assembly invoked the country’s constitution to declare Nicolas Maduro illegitimate, and the office of the presidency therefore vacant,” Trump said in a statement.

Opponents of the regime have launched demonstrations across Venezuela for the first time in months. Fear of repression and a mass exodus of young people amid severe food and medicine shortages had paralyzed the movement against Maduro as he made moves to consolidate power.

The mass migration of, by some counts, 3 million Venezuelans who have set off for neighboring countries is topheavy with the protest generation that led the insurrections of 2017, and 2014 before them. Rather than lobbing molotov cocktails at the security services, they are now waiting tables in Colombia, staffing call centers in Peru or working construction jobs in Ecuador. It’s the parents of the stonethrowing protesters of yesteryear who are on the front lines now.

Their fight, now, is to build a

country that their children might want to move back to.

This past week, though, the focus of protests shifted from the impoverished parents of bettereducated migrants to Venezuela’s now desperate working class.

After a small attempted rebellion by a couple of dozen of National Guard troops failed, nighttime pot-banging protests began to break out all over Caracas.

Venezuela has seen protests many times before, but these are different. For years, such protests were concentrated in middleclass enclaves in Caracas and other big cities. Working-class people stayed well away from them.

This past week, though, nighttime protests lit up working-class areas throughout Caracas’s most reliably progovernment areas — while middle-class protest hot spots were quiet. An unusual inversion of the city’s protest geography is underway — though, again, not so unusual when you consider how many of yesteryear’s middleclass protesters have simply given up and left the country.

The protests this time around are different. No one in Venezuela is under any illusions about the government any

SCHNEYDER MENDOZA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Marchers take part in a massive protest against the policies of President Nicolás Maduro in Cucuta, Venezuela, on Wednesday.

longer. Its ghastly record of violence against dissidents is now firmly established, its absolute lack of scruples about what it will do to stay in power clear in every mind.

The regime, which once peddled itself as an alternative model of development for working people worldwide, is virtually out of international supporters. After his artlessly rigged reelection last year, Maduro’s second inauguration this month was snubbed by almost everyone, except for a rogue’s gallery of authoritarian regimes who sent representatives: Cuba, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua, Bolivia and, tellingly, South Ossetia — a secessionist shard of Georgia recognized by no one outside Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence.

The Lima Group, a 14-country coalition of Western Hemisphere democracies headed by Peru and Canada, has led an aggressive diplomatic push against the regime. Venezuela’s two large neighbors — Colombia and Brazil — now both actively call out the Maduro regime as a dictatorship that must leave power. The United States, too, has become more assertive, with Vice President Pence and Sen.

Marco Rubio (R-Fla.,) driving an increasingly hard line against the Maduro regime.

All the regime has left on its side is violence — and fear: In 2017, repression left 136 dead, and thousands were tear-gassed, jailed or tortured. Its increasingly naked dependence on repression to hold its grip on power has become at once its last source of strength, and its most obvious vulnerability.

Venezuela has spent the past 20 years in an increasingly dramatic tailspin into dictatorship and societal collapse. Those of us who have called for its democratic renewal have had our hearts broken one time too many to really allow ourselves to believe in new dawns again. A traumatized nation, now fractured between those who have remained and those who fled, can hardly muster up the courage to hope again. Much could still go wrong.

The military could fracture — an out-and-out civil war is not entirely out of the cards.

Yet after five years of escalating authoritarianism layered over perhaps the worst economic disaster anywhere on Earth, the regime’s exhaustion is now plain for everyone to see.

And so, maybe this time. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Not how grown-ups should act MEGAN MCARDLE is a Washington Post columnist and the author of “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

As a young(ish) blogger, I learned, the hard way, that one should never go full-frontal jerk on the Internet. Partly because one should generally eschew jerkhood. And partly because of what happens if facts later prove your initial response was mistaken.

After you’ve been lobbing flaming insults from the moral high ground, any subsequent climbdown is humiliating. Frequently, people are tempted to cling to their increasingly untenable position, which only extends the period during which they look utter fools.

This brings me to Nick Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, who became the national stand-in for privileged white Trump supporters everywhere.

By now you’ve probably seen the video: a lone Native American beating a traditional drum, surrounded by a mob of shouting white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, fresh from this month’s March for Life in Washington. Sandmann is nearly face to face with the drummer, wearing a slight smile — or a smirk, as it was invariably described on Jan. 19 when the story burned through social media like a blowtorch on dry kindling. “Smirking” was probably the kindest thing that was said about Sandmann.

The Post soon located the drummer, activist Nathan Phillips, who had been on the

Mall for the Indigenous Peoples March. He said the March for Life participants had begun taunting the indigenous group as they dispersed, including shouting, “Build that wall.”

Phillips said he had tried to get away by climbing the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, until Sandmann blocked him as the other boys swarmed around.

Phillips and Sandmann were “at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

Denunciations were issued left and right, including from Covington Catholic and its diocese. Then a longer video emerged, which showed that none of this had, well, happened.

The incident didn’t start with white boys harassing Native Americans; it started with them being harassed with racist and homophobic epithets by a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites. Sandmann later said in a statement that the students chanted school cheers as an attempt to drown out the abuse.

In the longer video, it sounds like an impromptu pep rally, not a Trump event.

Phillips walked straight into their circle, past a clear pathway up the steps, and banged his drum near their faces. In context, the boys seem more confused than threatening — there are shouts of “Does anyone know what’s going on?” as they continue cheering and jumping.

Sandmann repeatedly bites his lip and looks down, as people do when they’re uncomfortable and unsure of what to do.

After the longer video emerged, Phillips told a very different story to the Detroit Free Press; he had, he said, sought to defuse the confrontation between the teens and the Black Hebrew Israelites. He didn’t explain why he thought banging a drum in someone’s face would have a calming effect.

Many people who saw the longer video quickly apologized; the Truthers held firm. Sure, you

couldn’t see any of the awful alleged behavior, but we could see what they are, a large group of white males wearing those hats. At Deadspin, Laura Wagner wrote a piece called “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” harping on how the boys were “draped in racist, misogynist paraphernalia,” rather than what they weren’t doing: threatening Phillips.

Certainly, the boys could have moved, or ignored the abuse, rather than childishly outshouting their harassers. And at least one boy seems to make a tomahawk chop, which is horribly culturally insensitive.

But then, they are children.

The charges against them are now downgraded to “not knowing the proper response when a Native American activist bangs a drum in your face.” And how many teenagers can be expected to have mastered that particular point of etiquette?

Adults, however, can be expected not to yell anti-gay slurs, or bang a drum in a stranger’s face. Which means that other adults can be expected not to single out the teenagers in this episode for failing to behave like grown-ups. And they can also be expected to apologize when they’ve wronged an apparently innocent child. n

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OPINIONS

BY MARGULIES

The ethics of artificial intelligence STEPHEN A. SCHWARZMAN is chairman, CEO and cofounder of Blackstone, an investment firm. This was written for The Washington Post.

I am not an engineer. Or a coder. Or a scientist.

But I am someone who has spent years looking at companies and industries to see which are poised for growth and which are on the decline. And one thing I see every day is that most companies and industries are about to be transformed, if they haven’t been already, by artificial intelligence.

AI will reshape the world in ways we can’t imagine, much as the printing press and the Internet did at their inceptions.

That means the United States must remain the lead player in AI if we are to guarantee our future in a competitive global economy.

Already, many countries are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, and the United States, too, has made great progress. But this is a moment that calls for America’s unique capacity for leadership, not just in advancing the technology, but in preparing for the ethical questions and disruptions AI will create.

Too often, we think only about increasing our competitiveness in terms of advancing the technology. But the effort can’t just be about making AI more powerful. It must also be about making sure AI has the right

impact. AI’s greatest advocates describe the Utopian promise of a technology that will save lives, improve health and predict events we previously couldn’t anticipate. AI’s detractors warn of a dystopian nightmare in which AI rapidly replaces human beings at many jobs and tasks. If we want to realize AI’s incredible potential, we must also advance AI in a way that increases the public’s confidence that AI benefits society. We must have a framework for addressing the impacts and the ethics.

It means asking not only whether AI be can used in certain circumstances, but should it?

Companies must take the lead in addressing key ethical questions surrounding AI. This includes exploring how to avoid biases in AI algorithms that can prejudice the way machines and platforms learn and behave and

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

when to disclose the use of AI to consumers, how to address concerns about AI’s effect on privacy and responding to employee fears about AI’s impact on jobs.

As Thomas H. Davenport and Vivek Katyal argue in the MIT Sloan Management Review, we must also recognize that AI often works best with humans instead of by itself. That’s especially true in cases in which human judgments are necessary to identify content that is “inappropriate,” or areas such as marketing where companies must ensure AI doesn’t inadvertently apply biases. These situations benefit from people who are “bilingual,” marrying AI fluency with expertise in fields as varied as history and crosscultural communication.

And then, of course, there’s the question of workforce disruption.

Trucking and ride-sharing companies, for example, will be among the first to take advantage of self-driving vehicles. What, then, about the drivers, owners and operators (who number at least 3.5 million in trucking alone)? An ethics-driven approach would seek to understand and develop new opportunities as the demand for drivers declines.

An ethical approach to AI

requires coming up with a longterm understanding of the values we want to see reflected in this technology — and shaping rules that create confidence that AI’s applications will reflect those values. Those values and rules will be found at the intersection of ethics, law and international relations; they won’t come from Silicon Valley alone.

But universities — full of critical thinkers, insulated from short-term market pressures and focused on big ideas — are the proper place for advancing the technology and the implications they bring. The federal government will need to provide significant increases in funding for AI to help the United States maintain its technical edge and step up its coordinating role in the ethics and workplace arenas.

We’ve seen this collaborative model work very well before, from the Human Genome Project to the early days of the Internet.

The sooner we come to an understanding of AI that ensures its powerful capabilities are a net positive for people and workers, the more wisely we can develop and deploy it. And the more talented young people from all disciplines we train to think critically about AI, the more we can guarantee our leadership in this vital area for the long term. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS BY

R OB B ROTHERTON

Conspiracy theories have always been around, but lately, they’ve been getting more attention. As the prevalence of conspiracy thinking among the electorate and even within the highest offices of government has become clear, conspiracism has inspired popular think­ pieces and attracted scholars. Along the way, conspiracy theories have also inspired plenty of myths. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 Conspiracy theories are for the lunatic fringe.

Presenting fringe theories as the essence of conspiracism gives the impression that conspiracy theorists are a handful of kooks who will believe even the most ludicrous ideas. But conspiracy thinking — the inclination to entertain conspiracy theories in general — is much more widespread than belief in any particular theory.

More than half of Americans said they believed at least one of the conspiracy theories they were asked about in surveys between 2006 and 2011, blaming the Iraq War on oil companies or the 9/11 attacks on U.S. government insiders, for example. A recent survey found the same proportion of conspiracy theorists among the British public.

MYTH NO. 2 Conspiracy theories are more common than ever.

“Are we entering a golden age of the conspiracy theory?” asked a 2017 headline in the Guardian.

The Internet — and social media in particular — is often blamed for fueling the fashion for conspiracism.

But there’s no good evidence that conspiracy theories are more popular than they used to be.

In the most thorough study to date, researchers combed through more than 100,000 letters to the editor published in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010. They found a stable background hum of conspiracy theorizing, not an everincreasing cacophony.

This fits with the historical record: Conspiracy theories didn’t suddenly flourish in the 21st century, or even the 20th.

They’ve always been with us, and people have spread them through whatever technology was available.

Conspiracy theories NASA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

An Apollo 11 astronaut left a footprint on the moon in 1969. Most people don’t believe the conspiracy theory that the moon landing was faked by the U.S. government — but polls show that more than half of Americans believe other dubious theories.

MYTH NO. 3 Conspiracy theories are all in people’s minds.

In 2018, the Independent ran the headline “Scientists discover the reason people believe in conspiracy theories.” The answer, the article reported, is that it’s all in people’s heads.

Psychological findings do help explain why people believe or dismiss conspiracy theories. But focusing exclusively on unconscious biases and cognitive mistakes overlooks the fact that there is often a kernel of believability at the heart of these theories. Governments and organizations do things in secret.

Intelligence agencies plan assassinations and coups, spy on people, try to manipulate public opinion.

Even if you’re pretty sure the

government didn’t develop HIV as a bioweapon to be deployed against unsuspecting citizens, for example, to suggest that government researchers might conduct secretive, unethical experiments involving the health and autonomy of marginalized people isn’t crazy; it’s history.

Which is not to say that all conspiracy theories should be embraced. But neither should conspiracy thinking be written off as a mere psychological flaw.

MYTH NO. 4 Conspiracy theories are an existential threat to society.

In the first few days of August 2018, mainstream news headlines described an emerging conspiracy theory as “bizarre,” “dangerous,” “terrifying” and a “deranged conspiracy cult.”

Those articles were about QAnon, a loose collection of cryptic nonsense that started online and manifested as a handful of people showing up at President Trump’s rallies with homemade signs and shirts.

Though the articles implied a substantial number of believers, none reported any data.

Subsequent polling showed that many people — 4 in 10 — hadn’t heard of QAnon or didn’t know enough to have an opinion.

Among those who knew about it, it was viewed overwhelmingly unfavorably. An analysis of the QAnon subreddit showed that a tiny but vocal contingent of boosters was making almost all the noise about it on the forum.

Most people who engage with ideas like this just sit back and watch, probably treating the theories as a curiosity or entertainment.

MYTH NO. 5 Facts don’t change people’s minds about conspiracy theories.

In a 2010 study, people first read misleading claims and were then given corrections to those claims. Reading the corrections appeared to be largely ineffective and actually increased mistaken beliefs among the people who had believed the incorrect claims most strongly to begin with, in a bias called the “backfire effect.”

Recently, however, research has called the backfire effect into question. In 2017, researchers ran studies in which more than 10,000 participants encountered 52 different claims and corrections. That work found no backfire effect, concluding that by and large, “citizens heed factual information” — even when it goes against what they are inclined to believe. n Brotherton is an academic psychologist at Barnard College and author of “Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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