The Washington Post National Weekly - April 16, 2017

SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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CALIFORNIA IN THE TIME OF TRUMP PAGE 12

Politics A renewed war on drugs 4

World Pope’s pro-migrant drive 10

5 Myths World War I 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Is Trump in the midst of a shift?

BY

A ARON B LAKE

T

wo big things have happened in the White House over the past week: President Trump issued a seemingly clear rebuke and verbal demotion of his controversial chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and Trump flip-flopped on a number of key issues toward a more moderate position.

Connecting those two developments is really tempting. We should be careful.

It’s true that Bannon’s marginalization or ouster from the White House would surely usher in a new era. If there is one guy who epitomizes the take-no-prisoners, nationalistic approach that Trump seized upon on the campaign trail, it’s Bannon. He’s the wild card adviser sitting next to the wild card president, with the two of them often sitting in a room full of more cautious, establishment types. And if the White House is indeed split between these wild cards/ “Bannonites” and the “Goldman” team, the wild cards are now in serious danger of being outgunned.

The Goldman team sure seemed to have a good day Tuesday. Trump summarily ditched his previous positions that NATO was obsolete, that China was a currency manipulator, that Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen was a liability, and that the Export-Import Bank was a bad thing. Trump’s decision to strike Syria earlier this month also ran afoul of the Bannon/ anti-globalist crew that has pushed him in a more “America first” direction.

“It would appear that it’s not (or not just) Stephen K. Bannon’s personality that has worn thin for Trump,” remarked ABC News’s morning newsletter, the Note.

But taking a step back, it’s less clear that all these things are part of some broader,

KLMNO WEEKLY

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump issued a seemingly clear rebuke of White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

orchestrated shift. As The Fix’s Amber Phillips aptly pointed out, a couple of these changes — the NATO one and the China one — came after Trump met with the leaders of each. Those meetings undoubtedly made Trump’s controversial positions more difficult to maintain. As for the Export-Import Bank, the writing has been on the wall for a couple of months that Trump may pull a 180 on it.

But mostly, we should remember that nationalism far preceded Bannon joining Trump’s campaign in August. Trump’s shootfrom-the-hip style had already aided him in winning the GOP primary, he had already proposed a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants and refugees, and he had already proposed a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

Bannon is the guy who was supposed to have the grand vision. And he certainly supplied that, at least rhetorically.

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “It’s everything related to

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 27

jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy.

I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Bannon took Trump and tried to morph him into a would-be Andrew Jackson, implementing a modern-day New Deal and Reagan Revolution all rolled in one. But these were already Trump’s ideas; Bannon just assembled them and melded them into a more coherent package. He’s the guy who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that Trump is confronting plenty of realities as president and hasn’t met with much success on his current path. He has remarked on a couple of occasions (health care, North Korea) that things are more complicated than he realized.

The easiest solution to all of it is to tack to the middle. And if Bannon is sidelined — either officially or just has less power — the voices pushing Trump toward the middle could certainly be more successful in getting him there. Trump’s policies are certainly malleable.

But we’ve been down this road before. Every time we think Trump may see the writing on the wall that it’s in his best interest to “pivot,” it’s proved a short-lived fantasy perpetrated by the people who tend to see moderation as the best and only logical path.

Trump, always a base politician, simply may not see it that way. n

©The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A California surfer heads out at dawn in Hermosa Beach. (Photo by LUCY NICHOLSON/Reuters)

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POLITICS

Return of the war on drugs CHARLIE LITCHFIELD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sessions looks to revive policies that call for mandatory minimum sentences BY

S ARI H ORWITZ

W

hen the Obama administration launched a sweeping policy to reduce harsh prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, rave reviews came from across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and the conservatve Koch brothers praised Barack Obama for his efforts, saying he was making the criminal justice system more humane.

But there was one person who watched these developments with some horror. Steven H. Cook, a former street cop who became a federal prosecutor based in Knoxville, Tenn., saw nothing wrong with how the system worked — not life sentences for drug charges, not the huge growth of the prison population.

And he went everywhere — Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, congressional hearings, public panels — to spread a different gospel.

“The federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it’s working exactly as designed,” Cook said at a criminal justice panel at The Washington Post last year.

The Obama administration largely ignored Cook, who was then president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. But he won’t be overlooked anymore.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into his inner circle at the Justice Department, as one of his top lieutenants, to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. As Sessions has traveled to different cities to preach his tough-on-crime philosophy, Cook has been at his side.

Sessions has yet to announce specific policy changes, but Cook’s new perch speaks volumes about where the department is headed.

Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute

Inmates walk down a path at the Idaho State Correctional Institution outside Boise. Nonviolent offenders have had sentences reduced under the Obama adminsitration. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering ending that policy.

more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.

Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a “dangerous new trend” in America that requires a tough response.

“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad,” Sessions said to law enforcement officials in a speech in Richmond last month. “It will destroy your life.”

Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that Sessions and Cook are going in the wrong direction — back to a strategy that tore apart families and sent low-level drug offenders, disproportionately minority citizens, to pris-

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POLITICS on for long sentences.

“They are throwing decades of improved techniques and technologies out the window in favor of a failed approach,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).

But Cook, whose views are supported by other federal prosecutors, sees himself as a dedicated assistant U.S. attorney who for years has tried to protect neighborhoods ravaged by crime. He has called FAMM and organizations like it “anti-law enforcement groups.”

The records of Cook and Sessions show that while others have grown eager in recent years to rework the criminal justice system, they have repeatedly fought to keep its toughest edges, including winning a battle in Congress last year to defeat a reform bill.

“If hard-line means that my focus is on protecting communities from violent felons and drug traffickers, then I’m guilty,” Cook said. “I don’t think that’s hard-line. I think that’s exactly what the American people expect of their Department of Justice.”

Tough on crime When asked for a case that he was proud to work on during his three-decade career as a prosecutor, Cook points to when his office went after a crack ring operating in Chattanooga housing projects between 1989 and 1991.

This was during the height of the crack epidemic and the drug war. After the cocaine overdose of black basketball star Len Bias in 1986, Congress began passing “tough on crime” laws, including mandatory minimum sentences on certain drug and gun offenses. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed one of the toughest-ever crime bills, which included a “three strikes” provision that gave mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders.

Federal prosecutors such as Cook applauded their “new tools” to get criminals off the street.

Cook said last year: “What we did, beginning in 1985, is put these laws to work. We started filling federal prisons with the worst of the worst. And what happened next is exactly what Congress said they wanted to happen — and that is violent crime began in 1991 to turn around. By 2014, we had cut it in half.”

To bring down the Chattanooga drug ring’s leader, Victor Novene, undercover federal agents purchased crack from Novene’s underlings. Prosecutors then threatened them with long prison sentences to “flip” them to give up information about their superiors.

Cook said in March: “We made buys from individuals who were lower in the organization. We used the mandatory minimums to pressure them to cooperate.”

Cook’s office also added gun charges to make sentences even longer, another popular tool among prosecutors seeking the longest possible punishments.

With the mandatory minimum sentences and firearms “enhancements,” Novene received six life sentences. Many of his lieutenants were sentenced to between 16 and 33 years in federal prison.

TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL

But sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country — jailing 25 percent of the world’s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation’s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences — 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.

Obama, the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, launched an ambitious clemency initiative to release certain drug offenders from prison early. And Holder told his prosecutors, in an effort to make punishments more fairly fit the crime, to stop charging low-level nonviolent drug offenders with offenses that imposed severe mandatory sentences. He called his strategy, outlined in an August 2013 report, “Smart on Crime.”

Cook has called it “Soft on Crime” and said the Chattanooga case would have been much more difficult to make, “if possible at all,” in recent years.

Winning on the Hill Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.

The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing and made retroactive the law that reduced the large disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) supported it, as well.

But then people such as Sessions and Cook spoke up. The longtime Republican senator from Alabama became a leading opponent, citing the spike in crime in several cities.

“Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in

LEFT: Steven H. Cook, a key figure at the Justice Department, is expected to undo criminal justice policies started under the Obama administration.

RIGHT: Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have showed his hand on policy for criminal justice by welcoming Cook into his inner circle.

KLMNO WEEKLY

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing,” said Sessions, one of five members of the Judiciary Committee who voted against the legislation.

After GOP lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

As attorney general, Sessions quickly appointed Cook to be a senior official on the attorney general’s task force on crime reduction and public safety, which was created following a Trump executive order to address what the president has called “American carnage.”

“If there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook’s appointment was a fire hose,” said Ring, of FAMM. “There simply aren’t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook’s vision for America.”

Sessions is also expected to take a harder line on the punishment for using and distributing marijuana, a drug he has long abhorred. His crime task force will review existing marijuana policy, according to a memo he wrote prosecutors. Using or distributing marijuana is illegal under federal law, which classifies it as a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin.

In his effort to resurrect the practices of the drug war, it is still unclear what Sessions will do about the wave of states that have legalized marijuana in recent years. Eight states now permit the recreational use of marijuana, and 28 have legalized medical marijuana.

Sessions’s aides stress that the attorney general does not want to completely upend every aspect of criminal justice policy.

“We are not just sweeping away everything that has come before us.” said Robyn Thiemann, the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, who is working with Cook and has been at the Justice Department for nearly 20 years. “The attorney general recognizes that there is good work out there.”

Still, Sessions’s remarks on the road reveal his continued fascination with an earlier era of crime fighting.

In the speech in Richmond, he said, “Psychologically, politically, morally, we need to say — as Nancy Reagan said — ‘Just say no.’ ” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A nation ill-prepared for a pandemic BY

L ENA H . S UN

T

he Trump administration has failed to fill crucial public health positions across the government, leaving the nation ill-prepared to face one of its greatest potential threats: a pandemic outbreak of a deadly infectious disease, according to experts in health and national security.

No one knows where or when an outbreak will occur, but health security experts say it is inevitable.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has faced threats from infectious diseases, and the number of outbreaks is on the rise.

Over the past three years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has monitored more than 300 outbreaks in 160 countries, tracking 37 dangerous pathogens in 2016 alone. Infectious diseases cause about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide.

But after 12 weeks in office, the Trump administration has filled few of the senior positions critical to responding to an outbreak.

There is no permanent director at the CDC or at the U.S. Agency for International Development. At the Department of Health and Human Services, no one has been named to fill sub-Cabinet posts for health, global affairs, or preparedness and response. It’s also unclear whether the National Security Council will assume the same leadership on the issue as it did under President Barack Obama, according to public health experts.

“We need people in position to help steer the ship,” said Steve Davis, the chief executive of PATH, a Seattle-based international health technology nonprofit working with countries to improve the ability to detect disease.

“We are actually very concerned.”

In addition, the White House has made few public statements about the importance of preparing for outbreaks, and it has yet to build the international relationships that are crucial for responding to global health crises. Trump also has proposed sharp cuts to agencies working to stop deadly

PETE MULLER/PRIME FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

High-level vacancies, budget cuts may leave U.S. more susceptible to threat of infectious disease outbreaks at their source.

The slow progress on seniorlevel appointments — even those, such as the CDC director, that do not require Senate confirmation — is hobbling Cabinet secretaries at agencies across the government. Temporary “beachhead” teams the White House installed are hitting the end of their appointments. The remaining civil servants have little authority to make major decisions.

An HHS spokeswoman declined to comment on personnel decisions. An NSC official said the administration recognizes that global health security is a national security issue and that America’s health depends on the world’s ability to detect threats.

Trump’s NSC does not have a point person for global health security as Obama’s did, but global health security is part of the overall portfolio of Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, another NSC official said.

Global health experts warn that a pandemic threat could be as deadly as a nuclear attack — and is

much more probable.

A global health crisis “will go from being on no one’s to-do list to being the only thing on their list,” said Bill Steiger, who headed the HHS office of global health affairs for George W. Bush. He is part of Trump’s beachhead team at the State Department.

Next month, the G-20 governments, which traditionally focus on finance and economics, will convene health ministers for the first time, in part to test coordination and preparedness for a pandemic, according to German officials, who are hosting the summit in Berlin. It’s not clear who will represent the United States.

In a speech to a security conference in Munich, billionaire Bill Gates said a pandemic threat needs to be taken as seriously as other national security issues.

“Imagine if I told you that somewhere in this world, there’s a weapon that exists — or that could emerge — capable of killing tens of thousands, or millions of people, bringing economies to a standstill and throwing nations into chaos,”

Residents of Kailahun, Sierra Leone, gather near a river at dusk in August 2014. The town was ravaged by that year’s Ebola outbreak. Experts fear the United States is insufficiently prepared for such a pandemic.

said Gates, who has spent billions to improve health worldwide.

“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year.”

The projected annual cost of a pandemic could reach as high as $570 billion.

The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa eventually infected more than 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000. MERS has killed nearly 2,000 people in 27 countries. Health officials around the world are monitoring a strain of deadly bird flu, H7N9, that is causing China’s largest outbreak on record, killing 40 percent of people with confirmed infections.

If approved by Congress, Trump’s request for the current fiscal year would slash the entire $72 million budget for global health security at USAID. And his request for fiscal 2018 calls for a nearly 18 percent cut at HHS, which includes the CDC. The request does propose a new emergency fund intended to allow HHS to respond to emerging public health outbreaks. But administration officials have provided few details. Many Republican lawmakers have criticized the requests, saying Congress is unlikely to approve such deep cuts.

“You can have the best people in the world, but if you’re slashing the NIH budget by 20 percent, and presumably the same thing to CDC, then I don’t care how good your people are, they’re not going to be nearly as effective as they need to be,” said Rep. Tom Cole, (ROkla.), who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies.

The health agencies are “the front lines of defense for the American people for some pretty awful things,” Cole said. “If the idea of a government is to protect the United States and its people, then these people contribute as much as another wing on an F-35 [fighter jet], and actually do more to save tens of thousands of lives.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

The first lady is retro, not a rebel BY

K RISSAH T HOMPSON

M

elania Trump’s first act as first lady suggested she might play the rebel.

When she announced that she would not move to the White House right away — and instead remained in her New York penthouse with her young son while her husband began rolling out controversial executive orders in Washington — she flouted the most basic of all first lady traditions.

Now, after weeks of avoiding the spotlight, Trump has begun to emerge from her cocoon, taking tentative steps to establish herself in her new role. In her first public events and statements, Trump has hewed surprisingly close to the historical expectations of first ladies.

Rather than rebellious, she is shaping up to be retro.

“As people get to know her, [they will see] she has been so focused on tradition and family and children,” said Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswoman.

Earlier this month, Trump released her official portrait, a signal that she would be ramping up her official duties. The portrait echoed in style and aesthetic the official photographs of two of her Republican predecessors. She stood in front of an ornate window in the White House, as did Nancy Reagan, and wore a black blazer and folded her arms, as did Laura Bush.

Two days later, Trump hosted Jordan’s Queen Rania for the most conventional of first lady activities — a tour of an all-girls public charter school that included a stop in a visual arts class.

“Beautiful,” Trump said softly, while looking at a painting by one of the students.

Her conventional approach is in line with her personality and style, said an associate who has known the family for years but was not authorized by the Trumps to speak with the media.

“She is steeped in Eastern European history,” the associate said.

“You can’t grow up in her region

without being that way, and Mrs. Trump has a high appreciation for the thread of history and its passing from generation to generation, administration to administration and empire to empire.”

Trump’s ceremonial role as the nation’s hostess will take center stage Monday when she hosts her largest event yet at the White House. The annual Easter Egg Roll, which had grown into a carnival-like celebration of healthy eating and exercise under Michelle Obama, will shrink in the Trump era.

“This year being our first, we’ve chosen to focus on the historic aspect of the Easter Egg Roll,” Grisham said. She said the first lady was concerned that the event had grown too large — 35,000 attendees last year — creating long waits for some activities.

The scaled-back event — the White House won’t say how many are expected, but only 18,000 souvenir eggs have been ordered — will recall an era when the biggest star in attendance was the Easter Bunny, who first appeared in 1969 when a member of Pat Nixon’s staff wore the furry costume. During the Obama years, the Easter Egg Roll drew performances by Justin Bieber and Idina Menzel, clinics by sports pros and presentations by celebrity chefs. This year the only announced performers are little-known bands Bro4 and Martin Family Circus.

This pivot away from pop culture is a safe tack for the new first lady, who has been acquainting herself with the way things have historically been done at the White House. Although she has spent relatively little time in Washington, she has borrowed books from the White House Historical Association’s archives, which describe the antiques and traditions of the executive mansion, said Anita McBride, who served as chief of staff to Laura Bush and sits on the association’s board.

“She is very interested in past practice and in precedent, and that gives you context for where you can do things your way and you make your mark,” McBride said.

WHITE HOUSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Melania Trump is slowly moving into her new role Even still, Trump’s moves to follow her predecessors have all been tentative and excruciatingly slow to some onlookers.

“She is embracing the ceremonial aspects of the role but we have not seen any advocacy,” said Myra Gutin, a professor of communication at Rider University and author who has studied first ladies.

Trump said during the campaign that she would like to lead an initiative to combat cyberbullying, but has not yet taken any public steps in that direction.

She has a small staff in place at the White House, and associates say she is building a rapport with them while moving cautiously to

First lady Melania Trump poses for her official portrait in her residence at the White House.

establish herself.

“She is going to try to take time to do things right,” Grisham said, explaining the pace of the first lady’s activity. “The fact that it takes time to do it right doesn’t faze her at all.”

Initially, the first lady relied heavily on her friend and senior adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a fashion industry event planner who helped organize President Trump’s inauguration but had no experience in the White House or in politics. Trump has since added several experienced Republicans to her team, including a chief of staff, social secretary and director of the White House visitor’s office — all key to planning events at the executive mansion.

As the first lady’s team works to put the Easter Egg Roll together, they are getting to know Trump, who has popped into Washington to host a luncheon celebrating Women’s History Month and helped hand out awards celebrating women at the State Department.

The public glare still seems challenging for the first lady, who is said to cherish her privacy. At the awards ceremony, Trump read from a teleprompter and seemed uncomfortable behind the microphone, but warmly embraced the awardees, looking visibly relaxed when her speech was over.

Trump also seemed especially at ease during the visit with Queen Rania, a woman who also had to adjust to life as a high-profile spouse. The Jordanian queen, now 46, once described in an interview with Oprah Winfrey the steep learning curve she faced upon her coronation. “You grow into the role,” she said. “You take it by your stride.”

During their visit to the Excel Academy Charter School in Southeast D.C., the two women had a roundtable with school officials, parents and students. As cameras broadcast their meeting to the world, Queen Rania asked question after question. Trump sat silently at the center of the table, watching her. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Florida and the path to school choice BY

E MMA B ROWN

F

lorida has channeled billions of taxpayer dollars into scholarships for poor children to attend private schools over the past 15 years, using tax credits to build a laboratory for school choice that the Trump administration holds up as a model for the nation.

The voucherlike program, the largest of its kind in the country, helps pay tuition for nearly 100,000 students from low-income families.

But there is scant evidence that these students fare better academically than their peers in public schools. And there is a perennial debate about whether the state should support private schools that are mostly religious, do not require teachers to hold credentials and are not required to meet minimal performance standards.

Florida private schools must administer one of several standardized tests to scholarship recipients, but there are no consequences for consistently poor results.

“After the students leave us, the public loses any sense of accountability or scrutiny of the outcomes,” said Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County public schools. He wonders what happens to the 25,000 students from the county who receive the scholarships. “It’s very difficult to gauge whether they’re hitting the mark.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a longtime advocate for school choice, does not seem to be bothered by that complaint.

She is driven instead by the faith that children need and deserve alternatives to traditional public schools. At a recent public forum, DeVos said her record in office should be graded on expansion of choice-friendly policies.

She did not embrace a suggestion that she be judged on academic outcomes. “I’m not a numbers person,” she said.

In a nutshell, that explains how the Trump administration wants to change the terms of the debate over education policy in the United States.

JOE BURBANK/ORLANDO SENTINEL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump and DeVos tout the tax-credit scholarships despite little evidence of their benefits In the past quarter-century, Republican and Democratic administrations focused on holding schools and educators accountable for student performance.

Now, President Trump and DeVos seem concerned less with measuring whether schools help students learn and more with whether parents have an opportunity to pick a school for their children. They have pledged billions of dollars to that end. And they have visited private schools in Florida to underline their support for funding private-school tuition through tax credits.

In February, Trump plugged the Florida program during a speech to a joint session of Congress. In March, the president went to Orlando to tour St. Andrew Catholic School, where students rely on the scholarships. Earlier this month, DeVos visited another Florida private school to highlight the program. She said that the administration is working on how to expand choice nationally and that there is a “possibility” its efforts might be patterned on Florida’s

tax-credit program, according to Politico.

Florida’s program, created in 2001 with the full-throated support of then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), was one of the first to harness corporate tax credits to help low-income families pay private school tuition.

Using tax credits to fund the scholarships, instead of direct payments from public treasuries, enabled lawmakers to work around state bans on the use of public funds to support religious institutions. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that tax-credit programs are constitutional.

Taking the idea to the federal level is one of the clearest ways Trump could make good on his promise to supercharge privateschool choice across the country. If embedded in a larger tax bill that the GOP-held Congress passes via the budget reconciliation process, it would be protected from a Senate filibuster and therefore would require only 51 votes instead of the 60 usually required to pass legislation.

In Florida’s tax-credit program,

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, senior adviser Jared Kushner and assistant to the president Ivanka Trump watch as President Trump thanks fourthgraders Janayah Chatelier and Landon Fritz for the homemade greeting cards they presented during his visit to St. Andrew Catholic School, where students rely on the scholarships, in Orlando on March 3.

businesses receive a dollar-fordollar credit when they donate to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations. A corporation that owes $50,000 in Florida taxes, for example, could donate $50,000 and pay nothing to the state. The nonprofit then dispenses money to students for tuition at participating private schools, although in some cases, the payment from the state does not cover the full cost of a private education.

Private schools do not need to be accredited to participate. They must show only that they’ve been in business for three years; that they comply with anti-discrimination and health and safety laws; and that they employ teachers who have gone through a background check and hold a bachelor’s degree, three years’ experience or “special skills.”

The program is projected to receive more than half a billion dollars this year that otherwise would have gone to Florida’s treasury.

But a 2010 analysis found it saves Florida money because each scholarship costs less than the state would spend to educate the same child in public school. The scholarship is now worth $5,886 per year. In contrast, a federal tax credit would not save money for the federal government.

For more than 15 years, Florida has been out front in the movement to hold public schools accountable for academic results.

But Florida exempts private schools from that accountability regime, even if they participate in the scholarship program.

The stakes for parents are high: Although a disproportionate number of the state’s best schools are private, so are a disproportionate share of its worst, according to Northwestern University economist David Figlio, who has studied Florida’s tax-credit scholarships and produced the annual program report for six years.

“There are some schools that, year in and year out, seemed to be adding considerable value, and other schools year in and year out that seemed to be leaving kids to fall further behind,” Figlio said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Clearing highways, but salting lakes BY

B EN G UARINO

I

n the 1940s, Americans found a new way to love salt. Not simply for sprinkling on food — we’d acquired a taste for the mineral long before that — but for spreading on roads and sidewalks.

Salt became a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.

During the past half-century, annual U.S. sales of road salt grew from 160,000 tons to about 20 million tons, as a group of environmental scientists pointed out in a study published last week in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of the Sciences. NaCl kept roads free from slippery ice, but it also changed the nature of North America’s freshwater lakes.

Of 371 lakes reviewed in the new study, 44 percent showed signs of long-term salinization.

Extrapolating that finding for all of North America, at least 7,770 lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels — a likely underestimate, the researchers said.

Theirs is the first study of freshwater lakes on a continental scope.

“No one has tried to understand the scale of this problem across the continent in the Northeast and Midwest, where people apply road salt,” said study co-author Hilary Dugan, a University of WisconsinMadison freshwater expert.

No federal body tracks how much salt gets spread on our roadways or makes its way into our lakes. So the researchers hoovered up a vast number of different data sets, produced by states, municipalities and universities. The study was the product of several “big, nasty, hairy heterogeneous databases,” as co-author Kathleen Weathers, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, described it.

Each lake in the report had chloride measurements going back 10 years or more, was at least four hectares in size (about nine football fields or larger) and was in a state that regularly salted its roads during winter. The study authors also analyzed what percentage of the lake was surrounded by an impervious surface. This could be any combination of road-

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

Decades of de-icing roads have led to salinization of water and raised fears for animal and plant life ways, sidewalk pavement, boat launches or other hard surfaces.

Impervious surfaces, critically, allow dissolved salt to slide into lakes rather than soaking into soil. If at least 1 percent of the surface circling a lake was impervious, the lake was at risk of high chloride concentrations, the environmental scientists found.

Across all lakes, chloride concentrations ranged from 0.18 to 240 milligrams per liter, with a median of 6 milligrams per liter.

(Seawater, by contrast, is much saltier — an average of about 35 grams per liter.) The Environmental Protection Agency recommends that salt in drinking water exceed no more than 250 milligrams per liter.

The scientists could not directly measure how much of the chloride came from road salt. But previous research indicated that agriculture, water softeners and other sources played only minimal roles.

“Road salt is the major driver for chloride loading,” Dugan said.

Environmental scientists had previously observed rising salt lev-

els in the nation’s rivers and streams. “These trends have been going on for decades,” said Sujay Kaushal, an ecologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the new study. Kaushal has assessed freshwater streams that have wintertime salt concentrations up to 40 percent that of seawater. Saltwater plants now grow in some of these streams.

Lakes are generally less susceptible than streams to changes like salinization. They may also serve as sources of drinking water.

James P. Gibbs, a biologist at the State University of New York who was not affiliated with the new research, said that combining the lake data sets must have amounted to a “herculean effort.”

Gibbs has studied roadside pools and springs where amphibians lay their eggs and observed a “pretty high reduction in survival rates” of eggs and young in pools contaminated with road salt. Few amphibians live in large lakes, he noted. (“Lakes mean fish, and fish are bad news for amphibians.”)

But he and other environmental-

Crews load road salt into trucks in Chelsea, Mass. Salt has become a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.

44 percent of the lakes reviewed showed signs of long-term salinization. That suggests that at least 7,770 North American lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels, a condition that will affect animal and plant life. Ultimately, it will become a health issue.

ists are concerned that exotic species, better suited for brackish water or tolerating chloride, will move into saltier lakes.

If current trends continue through 2050, 14 of the lakes studied would exceed the EPA’s “aquatic life criterion concentration” of 230 milligrams per liter, the study authors predict. Another 47 would have a chloride concentration above 100 milligrams per liter.

Increased salt in drinking water poses health problems to humans who have kidney trouble, use dialysis or have hypertension.

Kaushal has personal concerns about the matter, too — for his young child’s health. He lives in an area where high salt levels were probably responsible for turning Montgomery County’s drinking water brown in 2015, when, the theory goes, road salt stripped manganese from old pipes.

“I think it should be listed as a primary contaminant,” just like potential pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorous, he said.

Changing our salty ways, though, may not be simple. “About 10 years ago, I was asked by a state senator in Maryland to testify on a road salt bill,” he said. “And when he presented that, all of the other senators laughed at him.”

Some municipalities have improved how they manage salt by tweaking the rate at which trucks dump salt on roads, for example. But signs point to an increased reliance on salt. In winter 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that road salt prices surged by 20 percent because of a huge demand.

For those caught between the need to keep their pavement safe and a desire to be environmentally conscious, Kaushal advised a more judicious approach. “People tend to think more is better, so they just dump or cake it on,” he said. He recommends salting before a snow event. “That’s going to be more effective.”

And some states are exploring different de-icers — like beet juice or, in Wisconsin, liquid cheese brine. At low temperatures, the latter is more efficient than just salt. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

Pope emerges as force for migrants

BY A NTHONY F AIOLA AND S ARAH P ULLIAM

Vatican City

B AILEY

A

s politicians around the world take an increasingly hard line on immigration, a powerful force is rallying to the side of migrants: the Roman Catholic Church led

by Pope Francis.

Catholic cardinals, bishops and priests are emerging as some of the most influential opponents of immigration crackdowns backed by right-wing populists in the United States and Europe. The moves come as Francis, who has put migrants at the top of his agenda, appears to be leading by example, emphasizing his support for their rights in sermons, speeches and deeds.

The pro-migrant drive risks dividing Catholics — many of whom in the United States voted for President Trump. Some observers say it is also inserting the church into politics in a manner recalling the heady days of Pope John Paul II, who stared down communism and declared his opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the United States, individual bishops, especially those appointed by Francis, have sharply criticized Trump’s migrant policies since his election. They include Newark Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, who last month co-led a rally in support of a Mexican man fighting deportation. Tobin has decried Trump’s executive orders on immigration, calling them the “opposite of what it means to be an American.”

In Los Angeles, Archbishop José H. Gomez, the first Mexican American vice president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which leads the U.S. church, described migrant rights as the bishops’ most important issue. He has delivered blistering critiques of Trump’s policies, and instructed his clerics to distribute cards in English, Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese informing migrants of their rights in 300 parishes.

Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, one of Francis’s closest allies in the U.S. church, has issued

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Many Catholic clerics oppose Trump’s policies and the hard line taken by right-wing populists orders that if federal immigration authorities should attempt to enter churches without a warrant in search of migrants, priests should turn them away and call the archdiocese’s lawyers. Catholic school principals were given the same instructions by the archdiocese.

“The pope makes it a lot easier for me to be a bishop because he’s very clear in his teaching, and [on] this one in particular, he’s trying to awaken the conscience of the citizens of the world,” Cupich said.

Francis has long been an advocate of migrants — kicking off his papacy in 2013 with a trip to an Italian island used as a waypoint for migrants desperate to enter Europe. In a highly public spat early last year, Francis and Trump exchanged barbs — with Francis declaring that anyone who wants to build walls “is not Christian.”

Speculation is building that Trump and Francis may meet during the U.S. president’s trip to Italy for a Group of Seven meeting in May. Since the November election,

Francis has sidestepped direct criticism of Trump and other populist leaders like French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen — while at the same time forcefully condemning the dangers of populism.

“I appeal not to create walls but to build bridges,” Francis said in February on an international day of prayer against human trafficking. “To not respond to evil with evil. To defeat evil with good. . . . A Christian would never say, ‘You will pay for that.’ Never.”

Cardinal Peter Turkson, one of the Vatican’s most senior voices, said last month that it was wrong to portray the Holy See as “against” Trump. But a day earlier, he said that the Vatican was counting on the U.S. Catholic Church — as well as checks and balances — to stop Trump’s policies.

“Luckily there are dissenting voices, contrary voices, in the U.S., in explicit disagreement with Trump’s positions,” Turkson said at a Vatican news conference, according to Italy’s ANSA news service. “His immigration ban

Pope Francis waves at the end of Palm Sunday Mass as he rides through Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City. “I appeal not to create walls but to build bridges,” Francis said in February on an international day of prayer against human trafficking.

“To not respond to evil with evil. To defeat evil with good.”

was blocked by a lawyer in Hawaii. That is a sign that there can be another voice, and hopefully, via political means, gradually Trump himself will start rethinking some of his decisions.”

Those who have the pope’s ear say Francis is seeking to counter anti-migrant policies by appealing directly to voters.

“I don’t think the pope is challenging [the politicians]. I think he is challenging their supporters, both those who actively support them and those who passively allow their policies to happen,” said the Rev. Michael Czerny, undersecretary of the Vatican’s new Section for Refugees and Migrants, which opened in January, just before Trump took office.

Czerny reports directly to the pope — a sign of the importance of the new office.

Not all Catholic leaders have echoed the pope’s concerns. A small number of prominent clerics led by Cardinal Raymond Burke — a longtime Vatican insider — have issued critiques of the pope’s more open stance on divorced Catholics and gays and lesbians. The pope’s pro-migrant stance may be feeding the concerns of those who see him as overly liberal.

Roberto de Mattei, a critic of Francis and president of the conservative Lepanto Foundation in Rome, said that the church should play a “balancing role” in the migrant issue. “But if under Pope [Francis] the church sides with unchecked immigration, what then? [Right-wing] movements will accuse the church of colluding with Islam and pro-immigration movements.”

Baltimore’s archbishop, William E. Lori, said that previous popes have taken similar positions as Francis on immigration. But, Lori added, Francis is “perhaps more dramatic.” His trips, such as his 2016 visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, also connected his stance on migrants to politics.

“The poor is the hallmark of his papacy,” Lori said. “It will affect our priorities and it should.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Russia’s return to Central America Russian involvement abroad

J OSHUA P ARTLOW Managua, Nicaragua BY

O

n the rim of a volcano with a clear view of the U.S. Embassy, landscapers are applying the final touches to a mysterious new Russian compound.

Behind the concrete walls and barbed wire, a visitor can see redand-blue buildings, manicured lawns, antennas and globe-shaped devices. The Nicaraguan government says it’s simply a tracking site of the Russian version of a GPS satellite system. But is it also an intelligence base intended to surveil the Americans?

“I have no idea,” said a woman who works for the Nicaraguan telecom agency stationed at the site. “They are Russian, and they speak Russian, and they carry around Russian apparatuses.”

Three decades after this tiny Central American nation became the prize in a Cold War battle with Washington, Russia is once again planting its flag in Nicaragua.

Over the past two years, the Russian government has added muscle to its security partnership here, selling tanks and weapons, sending troops, and building facilities intended to train Central American forces to fight drug trafficking.

The Russian surge appears to be part of the Kremlin’s expansionist foreign policy. In other parts of the world, President Vladimir Putin’s administration has deployed fighter planes to help Syria’s warbattered government and stepped up peace efforts in Afghanistan, in addition to annexing the Crimean Peninsula and supporting separatists in Ukraine.

“Clearly there’s been a lot of activity, and it’s on the uptick now,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with Central American affairs, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation.

As the Beltway world untangles the Trump camp’s links to Moscow, American officials are also puzzling over Russian intentions in its obscure former stomping ground. Current and former U.S. officials suspect that the new Rus-

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In recent years, the country has taken a more active role internationally.

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sian facilities could have “dual use” capabilities, particularly for electronic espionage aimed at the United States. Security analysts see the military moves in Central America as a possible rebuttal to the increased U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe, showing that Russia can also strut in the United States’ back yard.

American officials say they are not yet alarmed by the growing Russia presence. But they are vigilant. The State Department named a staffer from its Russia desk to become the desk officer in charge of Nicaragua, in part because of her prior experience.

Some American diplomats dispatched to Nicaragua have Russian-language skills and experience in Moscow.

Nicaragua’s president’s office, the foreign and defense ministries, and the police all refused to address questions for this report. The Russian Embassy in Managua also failed to respond to several queries.

Spy games and WashingtonMoscow power struggles are old hat for Nicaragua, a country the size of Alabama with a rich Cold War history. The Soviet Union and Cuba provided soldiers and funding to help the government of Daniel Ortega and his leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front after they overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Anastazio Somoza in 1979. The CIA jumped in to back rebels known as the “contras” fighting the Sandinistas in a war that killed tens of thousands.

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Russia has played a major role in the Syrian civil war, sending warplanes to support President Bashar al-Assad in his bid to stamp out armed opposition.

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Russia has developed closer ties with Israel and talked about restarting the Israel-Palestine peace process.

Russia siezed Crimea, a territory on the Black Sea, from Ukraine in 2014 and also supports separatists in eastern Ukraine.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to such Cold War conflicts. But in the past decade, and particularly under Putin’s rule, Russia has sought a bigger world footprint. In Latin America, Russia has sold billions of dollars in weapons to Venezuela. Russian helicopters are used by militaries in Peru, Argentina and Ecuador.

While U.S. and Chinese trade in Latin America is far larger, Russia has intensified economic ties with several countries, including Mexico and Brazil.

When Ortega was reelected in 2006, after 16 years out of power, Nicaragua once again became a Russian friend in the region. The

The United States is puzzling over Putin’s actions in Nicaragua

new relationship initially had a civilian focus, with Russia donating wheat and sorghum to Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

“The economic cooperation was a facade,” said Roberto Orozco, executive director of the Center for Investigation and Strategic Analysis, a think tank in Managua.

“What the Russians really wanted is an active military presence.”

In the past few years, the partnership has been militarized. In 2015, Nicaragua’s parliament, dominated by the Sandinistas, passed a resolution allowing Russian warships to dock in Nicaraguan ports, following earlier agreements to permit patrolling in coastal waters.

Current and former U.S. officials have a variety of theories about Putin’s intentions in Latin America. Some consider Russia’s military actions a response to the Obama administration sending more U.S. troops and weapons to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Others worry that Russia could be pursuing ambitious spy goals, such as intercepting Internet traffic in the ARCOS 1 fiber-optic cable that runs from Miami down the Caribbean coast of Central America. Speculation is rife that the new Russian satellite site on the lip of the Laguna de Nejapa crater will be a spy facility, even though Nicaraguan officials have said it will be used for GLONASS, Russia’s equivalent of GPS. “The United States and countries of the region should be concerned,” said Juan Gonzalez, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs during the Obama administration.

The Russian buildup in Nicaragua has coincided with deteriorating relations between Washington and Managua. Last summer, Nicaragua’s supreme court and electoral council blocked the leading opposition candidate from participating in the November presidential election. Ortega cruised to victory in an election the State Department described as flawed and undemocratic. n ©The Washington Post

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13

COVER STORY

In a state born of ambition and adventure, the latest frontier is resistance

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BY

D AN Z AK in Los Angeles

alifornians wake up every day delighted to be in California, and then they remember that they are also in the United States. The bougainvillea catches the rising sun in San Clemente, the sapphire tide heaves into Big Sur — and three time zones to the east, President Trump has been up and tweeting for hours.

“I don’t want to look at my phone in the morning,” said Cynthia Blatt.

She was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood recently, a first-time candidate running for city council. The city is “traumatized” by Trump’s newborn administration, said Blatt’s fellow candidate Steve Martin (not that Steve Martin). “Some people are in shock. Some are angry. They don’t know quite what to do.”

Martin and Blatt can’t defend America from Trump anymore, but they can defend West Hollywood from Trump-like developers. The Resistance has taken many forms, and one form is California-shaped. At a nearby Starbucks, wannabe Instagram stars are fretting over martial law. At an A-list rally outside a Beverly Hills talent agency, Jodie Foster proclaims: “This is our time to resist.” Up in Sacramento, the Democrat-controlled continues on next page

JOSH COCHRAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2017

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COVER STORY from previous page

state Senate is trying to sandbag the White House’s aggressive immigration policies.

“California, in many ways, is out of control,” Trump declared in February, and Californians fired back with data points. The state is the world’s sixth-largest economy, ahead of France!

The state has the most manufacturing jobs in the nation, and the most venture-capital funding per capita! It is a national generator of utopia (Silicon Valley) and nostalgia (Disneyland)! The state produces 99.99 percent of the country’s artichokes!

In 2015, the U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.4 percent. California’s grew 4.1 percent.

The state is destiny made manifest, and the rest of the country is always trying to catch up.

“If this is what Donald Trump thinks is ‘out of control,’ ” tweeted state Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, “I’d suggest other states should be more like us.”

It is a Tomorrowland state, and Donald Trump is a Coney Island president. This is the California problem in 2017.

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he Golden State has had other problems over the years. Intent on becoming Californians, the pioneers of the Donner party ran into some difficulty in the Sierra Nevada. Sawmill operators found gold on the American River in 1848, and the U.S. government quickly claimed it. Native tribes were extinguished, blacks were nearly banished by the state’s founding constitution, in 1871 there was a mass lynching of Chinese men in Los Angeles, and in 1943 vigilante bands of white sailors attacked young Mexicans, triggering race riots and more soul-searching about whom America belonged to. In 1906, one tectonic plate popped over another, and 3,000 people died in San Francisco. By 1942, more than 100,000 Japanese people were confined to a series of camps, from Santa Anita to Tulelake.

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; Gerald Ford was nearly shot in Sacramento and in San Francisco.

The Zodiac Killer was never caught. O.J. Simpson was. Scientology is still a thing. So is Skid Row. Palm Springs is getting too noisy.

There was recently a goof at the Academy Awards, and suddenly one man’s gold became another’s, and there’s nothing more Californian than that, is there?

Erase California, and Trump won the popular vote by 1.4 million.

“Things cycle.”

So said a restaurant owner, standing under a lemon tree in the Hollywood Hills, as a crew removed rocky debris from the front of his property. A few days prior, 1,000 cubic yards of waterlogged cliffside fell onto the street and crushed his white Mercedes-Benz, moments after he finished washing it. The restaurateur didn’t vote in November and wouldn’t give his name because he lives next to a pop star, but he calls himself “the most conservative liberal you’ll ever meet.” He can’t understand why his neighbors are “so hurt in the heart” by the election, like they’re grieving a death.

ROBYN BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

“It’s like the weather,” he said of politics, of California. “When we had the drought, it’s ‘We’re gonna have to start taking showers with the neighbors.’ And now it’s ‘Oh my God, there’s dams breaking.’ Things cycle.”

California is, in some ways, an ongoing natural disaster. Its epic drought dried up whole stretches of river; fish cannot reach the ocean. Early last summer a pickup truck veered off Highway 39 east of Pasadena, burst into flames and started a blaze that scorched 1,000 acres of forest. After fierce rainstorms in January, the quiverings of the Oroville Dam forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people from Yuba and Butte counties, which voted Trump.

Gov. Jerry Brown, a liberal foe of the White House, had to ask for disaster-management money from Trump, who has threatened to withhold federal dollars from California’s sanctuary cities.

“When Trump says California is out of control, we certainly hope we’re out of his control,” Barbara Boxer, the former Democratic U.S. senator, said by phone. “We think we’ve got it right.

We have a balanced budget. Every branch of government here is run by Democrats.”

And the federal government is run by Republicans. Every state is stuck in a fraught marriage with Washington, and California’s may now be the fraughtest.

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alifornia has always been trying to get out, either from the country or from itself.

Northern Californians, sick of being ruled by urbanites, tried to form a separate state called Shasta in the 19th century; 160 years later, Shasta County, which includes Redding, went 64

The state is destiny made manifest, and the rest of the country is always trying to catch up.

The orange, yellow and purple wildflowers of a super bloom, brought on by years of drought, paint the hills of the Temblor Range at Carrizo Plain National Monument near Taft, Calif.

percent for Trump. In the past three years, five northern counties have tried to withdraw from California because they don’t feel represented in the legislature. And now Trump’s election has goosed wholesale secessionists, who favor nationhood for the state.

“California is different from America,” Marcus Ruiz Evans, co-founder of the pro-nationhood group Yes California, told The Washington Post recently. “California is hated. It’s not liked. It’s seen as weird.”

California is not weird, because it is too many things to be just one thing. California has the country’s best cabernet and maybe its worst public schools. It is the America of the near future, which means it has always been a bit dystopian — in a way that taking a luxury Facebook shuttle through the Tenderloin to Palo Alto is a bit dystopian.

The 20th century had the Joads, who saw California as a last resort in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The 21st has the Pfeffermans, who on the TV show “Transparent” inherited California as a trust fund. Now, the only frontier is the next psychosis.

In Trump’s America, “every day brings a new horror,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D) said in February at a rambunctious public forum at Glendale Community College. “It’s the first time we’ve had a real sense of how fragile democracy is.”

Schiff, who has positioned himself as chief interrogator of Trump’s Russia connections, was greeted in Glendale as both savior and rock star. The 1,200 constituents who showed up for his forum — residents of Hollywood, Burbank, Silver Lake — are terrified of what’s been wrought by the faraway shires of Oshkosh,

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DAVID MCNEW/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Grand Rapids, Erie and Dayton.

Perhaps “men do not trust themselves any more,” Steinbeck wrote in “East of Eden,” “and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”

California was actually Trump’s biggest state, in raw numbers. He got 4 million more votes here, where he lost to Clinton by 30 percentage points, than he got in West Virginia, which he won by 42 percentage points.

Trump Country is the Far North and the agricultural inland, regions that provide food and water for the rest of the state. Northern California is a microcosm of the country, said Dennis Revell, a Trump elector and vice chair of the northern region of the California Republican Party. The people are hoarse from trying to be heard, he said, and Trump and Bernie Sanders cured their laryngitis.

“You can’t sit back and try to blame everybody else for why you have an Oroville Dam situation when you’re focusing on such absurd political and legislative priorities,” Revell said, like “trying to be the political fencing partner for the president rather than tending to the needs of the people.”

Meanwhile, in the Central Valley and elsewhere, undocumented workers harvest the majority of America’s fruits and nuts, and farmers wonder whether their labor force is about to be rounded up by immigration agents.

The wall is already partially built on California’s southern border, near Tijuana and Jacumba, thanks to Bill Clinton. The two counties adjacent to Mexico gave his wife double-digit

The wall is already partially built on California’s southern border, near Tijuana and Jacumba, thanks to Bill Clinton.

A border patrol agent drives along the U.S.- Mexico border in San Ysidro, Calif. The two counties adjacent to Mexico, one of which includes San Ysidro, gave Hillary Clinton double-digit victories in the 2016 election.

victories. The three counties bordering Oregon gave the same to Trump. Maybe the wall should begin up among the redwoods, run down the South Fork Trinity River to Bell Springs, jog east into the central wilderness, hug Sacramento, run parallel to Route 99 down past Fresno to Bakersfield, and then break hard toward the tailbone of Nevada. Then Clinton’s Coastal California will be separated from Trump’s Cowboy California. People might be happier, until one side goes bankrupt and the other dies of dehydration.

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outh of Los Angeles, there’s another wall, an invisible one, and it appears to be coming down. Orange County, which hadn’t voted for a Democrat for president since FDR, broke for Clinton in November. Obama lost the county in 2012 by 84,000 votes; she won by 100,000, buoyed by stand-up paddleboardists in Laguna Beach, by Disneyland’s indentured princesses, by retired hedge-fund managers who’d found their conscience somewhere near that shanked drive on the ninth hole.

“We feel safer here,” said Susan Wong, 64, a nurse, standing outside the office building of Rep. Mimi Walters (R) in Irvine. Like scores of Americans before them, her family moved to California from the East Coast for deliberate, if cosmic, reasons. They saw opportunity. She wanted her mixed-race children to grow up in a pluralistic Eden.

Trump is a snake in the O.C.’s garden, and he propelled a few hundred citizens to Walters’s doorstep to chant “Do your job!” Ten protesters at a time were escorted to Walters’s office door, where they taped notes asking her to hold a

town hall and listen to their frightened rancor about Russia, about health care, about the treachery they see in Congress.

“In some ways, being in California we feel isolated and lucky,” said Janine Nicoll, 48, an Irvine therapist who has taken to calling Walters’s office daily. “I can’t imagine what it must be like living in Michigan. Or Arizona.”

“I’m heartened to see people coming out because we have to stand up for everyone,” Nicoll said.

“And we’re not coastal elites. We work,” said executive assistant Debi Lopez, 62, who built cars for General Motors in South Gate until the plants closed in 1981, after which the state provided retraining grantsto get the jobless back into the workforce. “Glad I was born in a forward-thinking state,” she added.

There was only one visible counterprotester at Walters’s office, a libertarian salesman from the hills of Silverado. Mark Balce, whose signage included a Gadsden flag inked with “MAGA,” voted for Gary Johnson and says both California and sharia law are coming for his guns, his freedoms, his very frontier.

“People describe America as a pendulum,” Balce said, as he was heckled, “and it’s swung very far left for the past 12 years . . .”

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hings cycle.

In 1941, the Hollywood Bowl hosted an “America First” rally for 30,000 people, and within a year the United States was sending its men to far-off shores to defeat fascism.

“From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” Trump said at his inauguration, and the next day armies of women took to the streets of California, to “defeat fascism.”

California’s 34th Congressional District, in Los Angeles, is 64 percent Hispanic or Latino and 20 percent Asian. Seventeen candidates were initially running to fill its vacant seat. On a Saturday in February, they introduced themselves to a crowd of voters at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, in the Westlake neighborhood. To be a Californian in 2017, they implied, is to be caught in an abusive relationship on the cusp of a nasty divorce.

“We are under attack,” said a former teacher named Sara Hernandez.

“Our values, our communities are under attack,” said L.A. planning commissioner Robert Lee Ahn, the son of South Korean immigrants.

“We need to combat Trump’s agenda to make sure he can’t divide our families,” said Jimmy Gomez, a state assemblyman.

The coalition’s voter-turnout rate in November was 83 percent, eight percentage points above California’s. By midcentury, the United States will be majority minority.

California, of course, is way ahead. As of 2014, Latinos began to outnumber whites in the state. The walls may come, but the pioneers have already arrived. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TELEVISION

4 things to learn from ‘Sesame Street’s’ autistic Muppet BY

M ARI- J ANE W ILLIAMS

J

ulia, the Muppet who debuted last week on “Sesame Street,” has a bright red mop of hair, a sunny yellow face and big green eyes. She is adorable and we are smitten by her laugh, her love of singing and her inventive game of Boing-Boing tag.

She also has autism, and the longrunning show’s portrayal of the condition that affects 1 in 68 kids is sensitive and nuanced, a hint at the years of research that went into carefully crafting this lovely 4-year-old friend for Elmo, Abby Cadabby and the rest of the crew.

A child watching might not notice the subtleties, such as how the other characters don’t ask Julia a lot of open-ended questions, but rather offer her choices or say things to elicit a reaction. Or that Julia sometimes repeats a question before answering. But as a parent of a child with autism, that quiet distinction stuck with me. It’s exactly what I’ve found works best in communicating with my son.

It’s no surprise that Sesame Workshop, which manages the show, gets so much right with Julia, given how long the show worked on her — they began looking into creating a character about five years ago, according to Sherrie Westin, executive vice president for global impact and philanthropy at Sesame Workshop. They consulted at least 14 organizations, including people with autism and those who work with them or have family members with autism, because they wanted to get as much input as possible.

“There are a lot of different opinions in the autism community and they’re not all aligned,” Westin said. “But this was not about a

cause or a cure or any of the divisive issues. Everyone was willing to come together around the goals and objectives because it was about destigmatizing autism, and helping children feel like they’re not alone.”

And as cool as it is for children with autism to see themselves reflected in a Muppet, Julia has a lot to offer typically developing kids as well. When I told my kids (both of whom aged out of “Sesame Street” many years ago) about the new character, they were excited.

But it was my daughter who had the strongest reaction. Essentially, she said, maybe now kids will finally get it, and how great would that be?

That was part of the goal, Westin said.

“We came away feeling like there were two objectives here,” Westin said. “One was to create a resource for families with autism, to make their day easier. The other was to destigmatize autism and address the community at large.

We wanted to create greater understanding and awareness of what autism looks like — more understanding, more empathy and, ultimately, more inclusion.”

With that in mind, here are four things typical kids (and adults) can learn from watching Julia.

1. How to interpret flapping and sensory issues. The short answer: Matter-of-factly. Julia’s Muppet friends acknowledge that she flaps her arms when she’s excited, that she prefers painting with a brush to using her fingers, and that she is particularly sensitive to loud noises such as sirens. Even though these gestures and sensitivities make Julia a bit different from her pals, they don’t set her apart in any meaningful way.

The characters explain to Big Bird that even though a siren might not seem loud to him, it can

be a painful sound for someone with heightened sensitivity to noises. They incorporate Julia’s bouncing into a game of tag, making it more fun for everyone. By treating these things as simply another part of who Julia is (and emphasizing that we’re all different in our own way), the Muppets teach kids to take it in stride.

2. Kids with autism like (or dislike) a lot of the same things you do. Tag? Check. “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”? Check.

Stuffed animals? That too. Elmo and friends find that Julia shares their interests, even if she sees the world through a different lens.

The characterization helps kids find common ground with people with autism, while respectfully teaching about differences and how to honor them.

3. People with autism don’t need to be fixed. Instead of trying to make Julia more like a typical person, or setting out to “fix” her, the Muppets meet her where she is and engage with her through play, the same way they would engage with any of their friends. There’s nothing wrong with her, after all, as Abby Cadabby says, “She does things just a little differently, in a Julia sort of way.”

4. Just because she doesn’t respond in the way you expect, doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. Little kids are funny creatures, but they’re also perceptive and can be incredibly accepting of differences, once they understand them. Julia doesn’t look at Big Bird or Abby when they are talking to her, and she doesn’t always answer them right away. But the show is

ZACK HYMAN/HBO

My kids were excited about Julia, but my daughter had the strongest reaction: Maybe now kids will finally get it, and how great would that be?

Abby Cadabby, Julia and Elmo from “Sesame Street.”

Julia, a character that has been in development for five years, is a Muppet with autism.

careful to point out that kids shouldn’t assume that she is rude or unfriendly or that she doesn’t like playing. In doing so, they debunk the stereotype that people with autism don’t need or want friends.

Julia is a joyful character who clearly enjoys her friends and their activities, and the Muppets model for kids how to reach out to people who don’t always respond in expected ways.

“Sometimes people with autism may do things that might seem confusing to you,” Alan tells Big Bird. “But you know what? Julia also does some things that you might want to try.”

The takeaway for kids (and adults): If you stop for a minute and listen, you might learn a new way of doing things, and make a friend. n ©The Washington Post

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CRUNCHED

Your ethical chocolate might be only 20 percent ‘ethical’

E

ver wonder what that “Fair trade” or other symbol on your chocolate bunny means? It doesn’t mean as much as you might think. Kerstin Lindgren at Fair World Project, an organization that monitors fair-trade organizations, helped us decipher the requirements behind four seals commonly found on chocolate in the United States. We also asked spokespersons from each organization to describe what the seals mean. We focused on four ingredients often found in chocolate that we know can be certified: cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar and vanilla. — Elizabeth Chang n FAIR TRADE USA

FAIRTRADE INTERNATIONAL/AMERICA

20%

20%

of total ingredients must be made up of certified ingredients; only chocolate must be certified (though vanilla and sugar may be certified).

of total ingredients must be made up of certified products; all four ingredients must be certified.

“Fairtrade is a simple way to support the people growing the products we love as they build a better future for themselves, their families and their communities. Products carrying the Fairtrade mark meet the rigorous social, economic and environmental fair trade standards.”

“The Fair Trade Certified seal indicates that your goods were produced according to rigorous social and environmental standards, and that farmers earned additional money for community development with every sale.”

RAINFOREST ALLIANCE*

FAIR FOR LIFE

30%

50%

of total cocoa (not total ingredients) must be certified; for example, if 60 percent of the bar is cocoa; 30 percent of that must be certified.

of total ingredients must be made up of certified products; all four ingredients must be certified.

“Fair for Life promotes an approach of fair trade that allows producers and workers who are at a particular disadvantage — no matter the country where they work — to access a wider range of social and economic benefits.”

“The Rainforest Alliance green frog certification seal indicates that a cocoa farm has been audited to meet strict standards that require environmental, social and economic sustainability.” n

©The Washington Post

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST

*Not considered a fair-trade certification

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BOOKS

Two smart alecks who made baseball fun N ONFICTION

I LEO DUROCHER Baseball’s Prodigal Son

By Paul Dickson Bloomsbury.

357 pp. $28.

CASEY STENGEL Baseball’s Greatest Character

By Marty Appel Doubleday.

410 pp. $27.95.

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REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN V . R OBERTS

n 1925, Casey Stengel was a player-manager for the minor league Worchester Panthers, while Leo Durocher was a rookie shortstop for the Hartford Senators. The two men became “early and easy adversaries,” writes Durocher biographer Paul Dickson, and before a game between their teams, Stengel went out to the shortstop position and scratched Durocher’s batting average in the dirt — a paltry .208. As Stengel later recalled: “You ought to have seen his face when he came out and saw that. Of course, he knew then that I was a big smart aleck, the same as himself.”

Big smart alecks they certainly were, and their paths crossed many times as they each carved an enduring place in the history of mid-century baseball. In 1936 they actually got into a fistfight when Casey was managing the Brooklyn Dodgers and Leo was playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1951, they faced each other in the World Series, with Stengel’s New York Yankees besting Durocher’s New York Giants in six games.

Today both men are in the Hall of Fame, two of only 23 managers accorded that honor. Both are subjects of new biographies, and both are certainly worth the attention.

Dickson’s treatment of Durocher is more readable than Marty Appel’s Stengel book — better pacing, tighter writing and a stronger sense of his subject’s place in the larger American culture.

“Baseball was more than a game to Durocher — it was theater,” Dickson writes, and the same could be said of Stengel. They each played a carefully crafted character and understood that colorful figures could broaden the appeal of the game and bring in new fans, including women. “You can’t hold yourself aloof from the customers,” Stengel once said.

“The fans make baseball possible.

Don’t ever forget that.”

Both men craved adulation.

Stengel closed a lot of bars over the years, but as sportswriter Tom

BLOOMSBURY USA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Manager Leo Durocher, right, of the New York Giants and his managerial rival, Casey Stengel of the New York Yankees, before the opening game of the 1951 World Series at Yankee Stadium.

Meany shrewdly observed, “His thirst is not for alcohol, but for an audience.” Dick Young of the New York Daily News wrote of Durocher: “He sucks up attention. His ego must be fed more than his stomach or he will perish.”

For much of their careers, Stengel and Durocher starred on the biggest stage of all, the Big Apple. Stengel played on two New York teams (Dodgers, Giants) and managed three (Dodgers, Yankees, Mets). Durocher did two New York tours as a player (Yankees, Dodgers) and two as a manager.

Stengel was the better hitter, but Durocher was described by Damon Runyon as “one of the greatest fielding shortstops of all time.” As a manager, Durocher won more games (2,008 to Stengel’s 1,905), but Stengel was far superior in the postseason, winning 10 pennants and seven World Series titles.

If Stengel and Durocher were both big smart alecks, they carried themselves in very different ways.

Stengel was the good guy, Durocher the bad boy; Stengel buttered

people up, Durocher cut them down. Stengel charmed sportswriters with “Stengelese,” his own garbled but insightful syntax replete with sayings like, “Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice versa.” Durocher was often at war with reporters, banning most of them from the clubhouse at one point, and they “hated him” in return. Stengel’s affectionate nickname was “the Ol’ Perfessor,” while Durocher was known as “the Lip.” In 1919, while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Stengel noticed that a small sparrow had knocked itself senseless banging into the bullpen wall. He put it under his hat when he came to bat and, Appel says, “Casey proceeded to face the fans and, in one motion, took a deep bow and removed his cap, permitting the now recovered sparrow to fly off triumphantly.”

Durocher was notorious for stealing a watch from Babe Ruth when they both played for the Yankees. Years later their long-standing feud broke into a shoving match, and Durocher “began slapping [the] face” of the

most beloved figure in major league history.

Stengel married once, to Edna Lawson, and they stayed married for 51 years, until his death in 1975. He gave her his paychecks and became wealthy investing in oil wells. Durocher married and divorced four times, but his most famous wife was No. 3, actress Laraine Day. During the offseason, both men returned to Southern California, but Stengel stayed placidly in Edna’s home town of Glendale, while Durocher headed for Hollywood, just a few miles away, where he hung out with pals like Frank Sinatra, boasted about losing “prodigious amounts” at the race track and joined high-stakes card games at the Friars Club.

One revealing difference between the two men was their treatment of black players. In the spring of 1947 Durocher was managing the Dodgers as Jackie Robinson was preparing to break the color barrier. When players signed a petition protesting the move, Durocher called a team meeting and declared: “I do not care if the guy is yellow or black or if he has stripes like a f---in’ zebra.

I’m the manager of this team and he plays.”

The Yankees and Stengel lagged far behind and didn’t add their first black player until eight years later. Stengel cracked to some writers, “I finally get a n----- and he can’t run,” and as Appel writes, “For the rest of his life, this one line would be cited as an example of his racism.”

The Ol’ Perfessor and the Lip had very different styles and temperaments, but they shared a basic understanding: Baseball is a game, an entertainment. Yes, theater. And for a good chunk of the 20th century, these consummate actors made baseball fun for generations of fans. Not a bad legacy. n Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

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19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Working through the Kinks’ history

America’s path to a dystopian future

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

C

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

all it aesthetic contrarianism or even reverse snobbery, but I tend to prefer artists and works that most fans relegate to second place or lower: Buster Keaton’s movies above Charlie Chaplin’s, “Krazy Kat” rather than “Peanuts,” the acting of Barbara Stanwyck over that of Katharine Hepburn, Carl Nielsen’s symphonies instead of Gustav Mahler’s. And in my pantheon, the Kinks come ahead of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who. The case for the Kinks goes something like this: They invented the power chord, notably in their first big hit, “You Really Got Me” (1964), and helped pioneer the concept album with “Arthur” (1969). More than their peers, they engaged in satire and social criticism, starting in 1965 with “A Well Respected Man.” Three years later, they got the jump on the modern environmental movement with their album “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.” Their hit “Lola” (1970) injected sexual ambiguity into rock. Their songs have been covered and re-covered by groups from the Pretenders to Van Halen, and crop up frequently as themes in TV ads and series (e.g., “Living on a Thin Line” in “The Sopranos”). Their paean to Englishness, “Waterloo Sunset,” was performed in the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

They’ve been so prolific that no one seems to know exactly how many albums to credit them with.

Even Carey Fleiner, the author of this new study of the group, fudges the score: “The Kinks released nearly three-dozen official albums between 1964 and 1996.” (Newcomers should start with the two-CD album “Kinks: the Ultimate Collection.”)

Some things, however, we can say with certainty. The core of the group has been the brothers Ray and Dave Davies, born — in 1944 and ’47, respectively — and raised in London.

When the Kinks became part of the British Invasion, an influential cadre of Americans treated them as literal invaders. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists took exception to the Kinks’ onstage rowdiness, and the federal government accepted the union’s recommendation to deny the Kinks permission to perform in the United States.

They also created characters: the aforementioned Well-Respected Man, Arthur and Lola, along with Dandy, Mister Pleasant, Plastic Man, Johnny Thunder, Wicked Annabella.

The band was plagued by the Davies’ sibling rivalry, a condition exacerbated by their position as the last-born of eight children.

The Kinks last performed together in 1996. Rumors of a reunion circulate from time to time, but so far it’s been no-no-no-no-no-la.

Fleiner, who teaches classics at the University of Winchester, has given us not a bio of the band, but rather a series of linked essays on such subjects as the marketing of the Kinks and their sense of humor. For the most part, she is astute, but occasionally she overreaches. Regarding “David Watts,” the Kinks’ irresistibly catchy portrait of schoolboy envy, she writes that “the song is peppered with ‘fa fa fa fa’s,’ a parody of affected middle- and upper-class speech.” Possibly, but let me suggest a simpler explanation. The ultra-lyrical Kinks took every opportunity to sprinkle fa fa fa’s, la la la’s, and do do do’s into their songs. What Fleiner takes for a parody may be just one more application of the greatest nonsense syllabary in the annals of rock.

But if readers close the book still looking for a handle on the Kinks’ protean artistry, perhaps that’s for the best. Fleiner has left us to work out our own Kinks. n Drabelle is a former contributing editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

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W

THE KINKS A Thoroughly English Phenomenon

By Carey Fleiner Rowman & Littlefield.

244 pp. $45.

AMERICAN WAR

By Omar El Akkad Knopf.

333 pp. $26.95.

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

hen you wade into the ever-agitated waters of social media, you realize just how quickly the currents of infectious bile are flowing. Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, “American War.” The mainspring of this imagined future clash is not race and slavery, but science and the environment. We learn that as climate change ravaged Earth, intelligent societies abandoned fossil fuels, but the South clung to its peculiar institution and kept pumping, excavating and burning. As El Akkad tells it, that act of rebellion called down the North’s wrath, which, when the novel opens, has sparked devastating biological weapons attacks that have reduced the United States to a fractured third-world power.

Although such a cataclysmic story might suggest a sprawling epic, El Akkad keeps his novel focused on the members of one ill-fated family in Louisiana, starting in 2075, when the country is enjoying a fragile, if often violated, peace. Sarat Chestnut lives with her parents and siblings in a corrugated steel container salvaged from the shipyard, where supplies periodically arrive from the new superpowers in Asia and North Africa. Hearing rumors of good jobs, her father has plans to move the family North for a better life. But when those dreams are slaughtered, Sarat and her siblings are reduced to the status of refugees within their own ebbing nation.

Sarat and her fellow survivors manufacture a grotesque simulacrum of normal life, but their efforts are constantly interrupted by fresh outrages. These wounded souls are trapped between warring factions, exploited for propaganda, used as human shields and recruited for suicide missions.

Sarat “learned that to survive

atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to the republic of pain,” El Akkad writes. He illustrates how resentment ferments in boredom to produce an acid that can poison any peace. Odd superstitions arise along with strange rituals of grieving — just as spiritualism flourished around the agony of the Civil War. But this story is always Sarat’s.

El Akkad has done nothing less than reveal how a curious girl evolves into a pitiless fighter. Her change appears subtle month to month, but shocking by the end.

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet,” he writes, “keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.” That transformation feels all the more horrifying because we sympathize with her so deeply and feel so viscerally the outrages she endures. El Akkad never apologizes for Sarat’s acts of retribution, but he draws us into the murky moral realm of her justice, a place plowed by murder and seeded by torture.

The reflection between Sarat’s private ordeal and the country’s vast, ongoing calamity is sustained by a series of intercalary chapters: excerpts from history books, news reports, memoirs and speeches. These disturbingly realistic documents flesh out our vision of a world struggling to restore order amid spasms of chaos.

And perhaps most relevant is the way El Akkad re-creates the rhetoric of factional righteousness, the self-validating claims of the aggrieved that keep every war fueled.

How can such a toxic cloud of antipathy ever be vented? “What am I supposed to do, now that it’s done,” Sarat pleads, “just snuff it out like a candle?” That’s the challenge “American War” poses as we consider how to break the cycles of vengeance spiraling around our own era. n Charles is the editor of Book World and host of The Totally Hip Video Book Review.

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OPINIONS

How to fix health care, stat STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a Washington Post business and economics columnist. He is also Robison Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University.

There is a simple explanation for why Republicans in Congress can’t agree, even among themselves, how to replace the Affordable Care Act, as demonstrated once again in the days leading up to last week’s congressional recess. On the most fundamental question — whether medical care is a right that should be guaranteed to all citizens, or merely another consumer good — the party’s elected representatives are hopelessly conflicted.

A sizable minority of Republicans, as a matter of freemarket principle, believe that nobody has a right to medical care, or anything else for that matter, beyond what they are willing to spend and can afford to pay. When you hear them railing about the “creation of another government entitlement program” or “forcing the healthy to subsidize the sick,” that is what they are really saying — they just don’t have the political courage to come out and say so.

Indeed, if members of the socalled “Freedom Caucus” had their druthers, they wouldn’t stop at repealing Obamacare — they’d repeal Medicare and Medicaid as well.

And then there is the majority of congressional Republicans who believe that, in a country as rich as ours, no citizens should be denied medical care because they are too poor or too sick. They are unwilling to come out and say it, however, because to do so would commit them to raising the taxes and enacting the regulations necessary to make that a reality.

If these Republicans had their druthers — and if they thought they could withstand a hard-right challenge in the next Republican primary — they would fix Obamacare, not repeal it.

Because this is a dispute about ends, not means, it is not easily amendable to compromise. So Republicans are left to try to paper over their differences by tinkering with “community rating,” “high-risk pools” and other things they barely

understand but now have suddenly assigned make-orbreak political significance.

But what if a newly elected Republican president eager for a political victory were to utter the unutterable — to declare that he is willing to acknowledge the right of all Americans to buy all the medical care they need for no more than 15 percent of household income? It would be a stunning political concession from the leader of an increasingly conservative party.

What could a self-styled dealmaker demand from Democrats in return?

For starters, he could propose that the third of Medicaid spending that now benefits lowincome seniors be transferred, as it should always have been, to Medicare, along with the Obamacare taxes necessary to pay for it. Spending for seniors is the fastest-growing part of a Medicaid program that has become a fiscal time bomb for state governments, which pay anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the cost of the program. Send it to Medicare as a new Part E and he would instantly win 50 governors and thousands of state legislators as political allies, along with the support of the insurance industry.

With seniors taken care of, this president could delight Republicans everywhere by proposing to “end Medicaid as we know it,” and instead provide its beneficiaries a voucher that would allow them to buy any managed care plans sold on the

DIEGO CERVO/ISTOCKPHOTO

state’s health insurance exchanges.

To finance coverage for the nonpoor, the president could demand an end to the regressive policy of exempting employerpaid health insurance from being taxed as income — a tax loophole that costs the Treasury more than $250 billion a year. Instead, that money would be used to provide every household with a tax credit that could be used to pay for insurance.

This would obviate the need for Obamacare’s controversial insurance mandate, because someone would have to be an idiot not to use the credit to buy, at minimal cost, a policy that protects against huge medical bills in the event he gets hit by a truck or needs treatment for a life-threatening disease. And because it is age-adjusted, the credit would obviate the need for another controversial Obamacare rule, the one preventing insurance companies from setting premiums for 60year-olds at no more than three times what they charge 20somethings.

Finally, this president could demand that Democrats agree to malpractice reform limiting pain and suffering awards for medical mistakes. This could be coupled with a requirement that the limits only apply if doctors follow practice guidelines based on extensive new research on medical outcomes financed under Obamacare.

Political hands will have noticed by now that these demands are guaranteed to generate howls of protest from a

number of powerful Democratic constituencies: advocates for the poor, who are deeply invested in defending both the structure and funding levels of the current Medicaid program; labor unions, who will fight to the death to protect the tax advantage of the gold-plated health-care benefits they have negotiated for their members; and trial lawyers, huge Democratic Party donors, many of whom make their living suing doctors.

But a Republican president who dares to sacrifice sacred cows of his party has the right to demand that Democrats sacrifice sacred cows of their own.

President Trump has already demonstrated that he doesn’t know enough about health care to supervise this process himself, while the people around him have shown themselves to be so wedded to their old partisan or ideological positions that they can’t be much help, either. He needs to turn elsewhere for help.

There are politically savvy governors, respected healthpolicy experts and independentminded members of Congress who could come together behind closed doors and easily agree upon a grand bargain that Trump could sell to the voters — and sell to Congress. And if he succeeds, he would have created a working majority in Congress not just for health care, but for infrastructure and tax reform as well.

And what if it doesn’t work? In that case, he would be in no worse position than he is now, which is facing the real prospect of a failed, one-term presidency. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Trump got Syria and China right DAVID IGNATIUS is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He also co-hosts PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues at Washingtonpost.com, with Fareed Zakaria.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy has been a dizzying spectacle of mixed messages and policy reversals during its first three months. But in recent crucial tests, President Trump made good decisions about Syria, Russia and China — moving his erratic administration a bit closer toward the pillars of traditional U.S. policy.

The decision to strike a Syrian air base was a confidence builder for an inexperienced and sometimes fractious White House, a senior official said.

Trump couldn’t be sure when he launched the attack that a Russian wouldn’t be killed, or that some other freak mishap wouldn’t arise. The military option he chose had two virtues: It was quick, surprising Russians who hadn’t expected such prompt retaliation; and it was measured, sending a calibrated message rather than beginning an open-ended military intervention.

Trump famously likes to win, and he can probably claim a win here after weeks of chaotic setbacks. As a result, the Syria operation, generally praised at home and abroad, has consolidated the power of Trump’s core foreign policy team, in ways that may alter the political balance of this White

House.

Here’s the consensus among top Republican and Democratic former officials I spoke with: National security adviser H.R. McMaster ran a tight interagency process; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis offered the president clear, manageable options. Trump wisely stayed off Twitter, encouraging his team members to do the work rather than disrupting them.

Perhaps the most visible beneficiary is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has found his voice after an agonizingly slow start. Tillerson clearly has gained Trump’s confidence and has also forged an alliance with the decisive backstage operator in this White House, senior adviser (and Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner.

The knives are out for Stephen K. Bannon, who bid to be Trump’s key strategist but is now branded by some close to Trump as a

divisive, self-promoting personality whose days are numbered. What seems to have angered Trump and his inner circle is the bid for supremacy by “someone who came on board 72 days before the election,” as one aide put it. “People are tired of games” from Bannon, he said.

Trump has also tilted toward China and away from Russia in the triangular game of nations played by this administration.

That rebalancing is the opposite of what Trump seemed to favor during the campaign, when he blasted China and wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin at every opportunity. But it’s a more sensible and sustainable course.

The trickiest maneuver was simultaneously bombing Syria and meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The goal of the summit, officials say, was for the two self-styled “big men” to get to know each other. They spent nearly four hours in oneon-one conversation, explaining how they look at issues such as North Korea and global trade.

The White House described a “textured” conversation, with Trump at one point offering Xi a backhanded compliment: “We had a long discussion already. So far, I have gotten nothing.

Absolutely nothing.”

Trump’s impulsive,

unpredictable style has confounded the Chinese, who like to plan every detail, but officials say their overall satisfaction was conveyed by their lack of criticism in a communique after the summit.

Tillerson then took Trump’s message to Moscow the following week. He told top Russian officials that their alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a loser, and that the United States will work with Moscow on a political transition to replace Assad with another figure acceptable to Russia. “We want them to have to make choices,” one official explained. “We can work together or against each other.”

The Trump team feels that after the strike on Syria to enforce the chemical weapons ban, the United States has regained the strategic initiative from Putin.

“Russia is catching as opposed to pitching for a change,” one senior official said. “They are on the back foot, surprised by Trump.”

Rebuffing Putin is a worthy goal, if an unlikely one for Trump.

Former defense secretary Bob Gates offers the crucial caveat: “There’s merit in getting Russia off balance politically, but being militarily unpredictable when Russian forces are directly involved is a very risky business.” n

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OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

WikiLeaks’ motive is like media’s JULIAN ASSANGE is the editor of WikiLeaks.

He wrote this for The Washington Post.

On his last night in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a powerful farewell speech to the nation — words so important that he’d spent a year and a half preparing them. “Ike” famously warned the nation to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Much of Eisenhower’s speech could form part of the mission statement of WikiLeaks today. We publish truths regarding overreaches and abuses conducted in secret by the powerful.

Our most recent disclosures describe the CIA’s multibilliondollar cyberwarfare program, in which the agency created dangerous cyberweapons, targeted private companies’ consumer products and then lost control of its cyber-arsenal. Our source(s) said they hoped to initiate a principled public debate about the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

The truths we publish are inconvenient for those who seek to avoid one of the magnificent hallmarks of American life — public debate. Governments assert that WikiLeaks’ reporting

harms security. Some claim that publishing facts about military and national security malfeasance is a greater problem than the malfeasance itself. Yet, as Eisenhower emphasized, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Our motive is identical to that claimed by the New York Times and The Washington Post — to publish newsworthy content.

Consistent with the U.S. Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release it to the media.

And we strive to mitigate legitimate concerns, for example

BY SHENEMAN

by using redaction to protect the identities of at-risk intelligence agents.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, defended publication of our “stolen” material last year: “I get the argument that the standards should be different if the stuff is stolen and that should influence the decision. But in the end, I think that we have an obligation to report what we can about important people and important events.”

The media has a long history of speaking truth to power with purloined or leaked material — Jack Anderson’s reporting on the CIA’s enlistment of the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro; the Providence Journal-Bulletin’s release of President Richard Nixon’s stolen tax returns; the New York Times’ publication of the stolen “Pentagon Papers”; and The Post’s tenacious reporting of Watergate leaks, to name a few. I hope historians place WikiLeaks’ publications in this pantheon.

President Thomas Jefferson had a modest proposal to improve the press: “Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, ‘Truths.’ 2nd, ‘Probabilities.’

3rd, ‘Possibilities.’ 4th, ‘Lies.’ The first chapter would be very short,

as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information.” Jefferson’s concept of publishing “truths” using “authentic papers” presaged WikiLeaks.

Large public segments are agitated by the result of the U.S. presidential election, by public dissemination of the CIA’s dangerous incompetence or by evidence of dirty tricks undertaken by senior officials in a political party. But as Jefferson foresaw, “the agitation [a free press] produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

Vested interests deflect from the facts that WikiLeaks publishes by demonizing its brave staff and me. But WikiLeaks’ sole interest is expressing constitutionally protected truths, which I remain convinced is the cornerstone of the United States’ remarkable liberty, success and greatness.

I take some solace in this: Joseph Pulitzer, namesake of journalism’s award for excellence, was indicted in 1909 for publishing allegedly libelous information about President Theodore Roosevelt and the financier J.P. Morgan in the Panama Canal corruption scandal. It was the truth that set him free. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

World War I BY

M ICHAEL K AZIN

One hundred years ago this month, on April 6, 1917, Congress voted to declare war on imperial Germany. The First World War was the pivot of the 20th century: It took the lives of 17 million people and resulted in the collapse of three major empires (the German, the Ottoman and the Austro­Hungarian). In the aftermath, totalitarian regimes both right and left came to power, leading to a second, far bloodier global conflict. Alas, for most Americans, the “Great War” holds little interest, particularly compared with the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam — all conflicts remembered as titanic moral struggles that transformed the nation. This neglect has given rise to some serious misconceptions about the war in which more than 116,000 Americans died.

MYTH NO. 1 The U.S. was neutral in fact as well as name until 1917.

America was an “exemplar of peace,” according to the title of the first chapter of Margaret E. Wagner’s forthcoming history of the United States during the war, sponsored by the Library of Congress. The keepers of Woodrow Wilson’s postpresidential home in Washington echo that conventional wisdom: His “primary goal at the outset of the European war . . . was to maintain American neutrality and to help broker peace between the warring parties.”

But his private sympathies were never in doubt. A German victory, the president told his closest adviser when the war began, “would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.” So the federal government did little to prevent U.S. businesses from selling goods and lending money to Britain and France.

MYTH NO. 2 Americans who opposed going to war were isolationists.

There is no myth more powerful than the notion that most Americans resisted intervention because they

wanted to remain aloof from the problems besetting the rest of the world.

But some Americans, like many prominent critics of the war elsewhere in the world, wanted a new global order based on cooperative relationships among nations and gradual disarmament.

Militarism, they argued, isolated peoples behind walls of mutual fear and loathing. Of course, not all Americans who tried to stop the rush to war shared this global outlook. But they did fear the growth of a huge standing army that might be used in future conflicts abroad.

MYTH NO. 3 Opposition dissolved once war was declared.

Accounts of wartime politics at home usually focus on the stringent Espionage and Sedition acts of 1917 and 1918.

Conservative author Wendy McElroy writes that these laws “were used to destroy what was left of the left wing in America.”

Yet, despite the legal challenges, many peace advocates refused to remain silent and even thrived for a time. Some organized the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace to demand free speech and oppose the draft. Other antiwar

NATIONAL ARCHIVES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Red Cross worker, right, talks with U.S. soldiers at Camp Hospital No. 43 in Gievres, France, in September 1918. The United States entered the war 100 years ago this month.

stalwarts established the National Civil Liberties Bureau (renamed the ACLU in 1920) to defend Americans prosecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights.

MYTH NO. 4 African Americans backed the war as a path to equal rights.

The historian David Kennedy quotes a black assistant to the secretary of war as a stand-in for the majority of African Americans: “This is not the time to discuss race problems,” asserted Emmett Scott. “Our first duty is to fight. . . . Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.”

But other black leaders, such as A. Philip Randolph and Ida Wells-Barnett, refused to encourage African Americans to join a segregated army to fight for a democracy abroad that they did not enjoy at home. And quite a few ordinary black people agreed.

Most black draftees grudgingly joined the rigorously segregated army, but few saw combat; they were, instead,

assigned to menial labor done in uniform.

MYTH NO. 5 Nearly all young men obeyed the new conscription law.

Resistance to conscription was quite strong. About 3 million eligible men never registered, in violation of the law — compared with the 24 million who did. And some 338,000 who did register either failed to obey an induction notice or deserted after they joined the ranks. The Justice Department was able to arrest only a small percentage of these lawbreakers. A large number of Mexican Americans and others slipped across the southern border, where prosecutors could not touch them. Altogether, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted conscription during World War I than during the Vietnam War half a century later. n Kazin is the author of “War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918,” teaches history at Georgetown University and is the editor of Dissent. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2017

24

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