The Washington Post National Weekly - July 8, 2018

SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2018

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ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

‘Are you alone now?’

Raids separate immigrant families in the American heartland. PAGE 12

Politics Democrats begin court fight 4

Nation Those with disabilities find work 8

5 Myths MS-13 23

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. 8TH ANNUAL

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THE FIX

Is Michael Cohen about to flip?

BY

A ARON B LAKE

M

ichael Cohen once said he would “take a bullet” for President Trump.

He reportedly said he would rather “jump out of a building than turn on Donald Trump.”

He now sounds ready to leap.

In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos that ran Monday morning, Trump's former lawyer and fixer sent his clearest signal to date that he is prepared to flip on Trump. And while there have certainly been other signs recently, this one came from the horse's mouth.

“Once I understand what charges might be filed against me, if any at all, I will defer to my new counsel, Guy Petrillo, for guidance,” Cohen said.

Pressed on his past commentary about being willing to do anything for Trump, Cohen again hinted at flipping: “To be crystal clear, my wife, my daughter and my son, and this country have my first loyalty.”

Cohen agreed to this interview knowing that this would be a prominent question. It can’t have been a coincidence that a trio of stories emerged a couple weeks back, all pointing toward possibly flipping on Trump. There was a Wall Street Journal story indicating that he was unhappy with Trump for not helping with his legal bills. CNN quoted an anonymous source close to him saying, “If they want information on Trump, he’s willing to give it.” Then Cohen resigned as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee by citing not just the investigation he faces, but also his disagreement with the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border. That latter justification seemed conspicuous, given Cohen has pledged complete loyalty to Trump and rarely spoken publicly about policy.

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BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen said that he will fight back against attempts to discredit him or his family.

Cohen’s interview came with another big signal: the reported end of a joint agreement between Cohen and Trump’s legal team to share information. Such things often presage a more antagonistic relationship or even cutting a deal to inform on someone else. Michael Flynn’s lawyers stopped sharing information with Trump’s lawyers, for example, shortly before he flipped.

Former federal prosecutor Patrick Cotter said the move would be, at least, a signal of diverging legal strategies.

“Sometimes it is as simple as the two parties want to pursue different defenses, ones which may be inconsistent but not necessarily asserting or dependent on the other person’s guilt,” Cotter said, adding: “Of course, ending a [joint defense agreement] would also be a necessary first step to seeking to cut a deal.”

If we’re really reading between the lines, it could also be significant that Cohen declined 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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 39

downplay criticisms of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “I don’t like the term ‘witch hunt,’ ” he said. Cohen faces problems unrelated to the Russia probe, but if he flipped, he would be providing evidence for that investigation.

So a message is clearly being sent; the question is why. Is Cohen truly prepared to flip, or are all these signals being sent in the name of forcing some action from Trump — whether through paying legal bills or something more absolute, such as a pardon?

If it’s the latter, it doesn’t seem to be working.

The signs that Cohen may flip date back months, to shortly after he was raided by federal investigators. There does seem to be more of a concerted effort since Cohen retained Petrillo, a veteran of the Southern District of New York, with which Cohen would be cutting a deal. Thus far, it doesn’t seem to have elicited the reaction that is being sought.

In fact, the opposite seems to have occurred.

Trump and the White House have minimized Cohen and suggested that his legal problems have nothing to do with it. Asked by Stephanopoulos about that treatment, Cohen grew rigid and assured. “I will not be a punching bag as part of anyone’s defense strategy,” he said. “I am not a villain of this story, and I will not allow others to try to depict me that way.”

Is Trump unconcerned about what Cohen might provide? Has he just been blind to the signs? Does he not think he can pardon Cohen or pay his legal bills, politically speaking? Or is this just part of the intense public negotiations that are going on right now?

There are so many questions. But now a threat that had been danced around has clearly and unequivocally been made. Cohen has put the ball in Trump’s court. n ©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER A boy walks down a road in the Jefferson Trailer Park, also known as “Little Mexico,” in Norwalk, Ohio. Photo by MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ of The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s court pick already targeted

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Even without a nominee, Democrats focus on turning GOP’s Murkowski and Collins BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

Liberal political strategists hope to block President Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee by replaying a strategy they used to help defeat the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year.

The multimillion-dollar plan of advertising and grass-roots activism will focus heavily on persuading two Republican defenders of the ACA, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine), to buck the president again by denying his first choice

to replace retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Trump is expected to announce his nominee Monday.

One group, Demand Justice, launched a $5 million campaign Thursday with ads in both senators’ states focused on the possibility that the next justice will provide the majority vote to allow states to ban abortion, overturning the 1973 decision in Roe v.

Wade. NARAL Pro-Choice America announced plans to take out full-page ads in four Maine newspapers highlighting the issue.

“We had a particular success

with Murkowski and Collins, obviously, in the ACA fight,” said Brad Woodhouse, the executive director of Protect our Care, a liberal umbrella group that did organizing around the fights in 2017 over what had been President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement. “So we kind of understand how to do the work in those states.”

Republicans have 51 votes in the Senate and need 50 votes to confirm Trump’s nominee, assuming Vice President Pence votes with them to break a tie. If Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) does

Democrats hope GOP Sens. Susan Collins, left, and Lisa Murkowski will buck President Trump on his Supreme Court nominee as they did on the Affordable Care Act.

not return to vote after months of absence fighting cancer and Democrats hold together in opposition, a single Republican defection could sink the nominee.

The advertising and organizing effort will face a large counterattack from conservative groups. The Judicial Crisis Network has promised to undertake its own campaign, focusing on Democratic senators in states that Trump won in 2016 who are facing reelection in the fall. The group spent about $10 million to ease the confirmation of Trump’s first Supreme Court pick, Neil M.

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POLITICS Gorsuch, and has not yet announced a budget for a second nominee.

“I think it will not be an easy one for Democrats in those states to simply say, ‘I am going to tack hard left,’ ” said Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the group. “We are not attacking Collins and Murkowski at all. They were supportive of Gorsuch, and we think they will be supportive here.”

The Democrats targeted by the group include Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, all of whom voted for Gorsuch.

The liberal strategy, which employs multiple staff members in each state, will include generating letters to the editor, sending people to the senators’ events and organizing phone calls to their offices.

The groups plan to argue that any Trump nominee from his preselected list would be a vote on the high court that will again allow abortion to be outlawed in every state and undo the ACA’s mandate that health insurers not discriminate against people with preexisting conditions.

“We have had support in the past from Senators Collins and Murkowski around the defunding of Planned Parenthood, around the protection of Roe v.

Wade, and we believe that is a very important piece of this puzzle,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood.

The liberal groups also plan to focus advertising and organizing on the states of the three Democratic senators who voted for Gorsuch. All three come from states where opposition to abortion is strong, and all face tough reelection fights this fall.

Liberals hope that concern about the ACA proves decisive with these senators as well. Demand Justice, an umbrella group that includes planned Parenthood and NARAL, will start airing ads Tuesday in all three of those states, arguing that Trump’s pick will determine whether insurance companies can discriminate against people with preexisting medical conditions.

The Justice Department joined a federal lawsuit in June to argue that the recent legislative repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans are hoping to take the same tactic to ease the confirmation of Trump’s pick to replace Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, right, as they did with that of Neil M. Gorsuch, left.

invalidates provisions of the law that ban insurers from charging more or denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions.

That case could eventually reach the Supreme Court, where the last decision to let ACA stand, in 2012, came on a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining more liberal justices to protect the law.

One Nation, the public policy arm of the main Republican Senate advertising effort, Senate Majority PAC, also has announced plans to run spots against vulnerable Democratic senators in states that Trump won, though no budget has been made public.

“Will Joe Donnelly cave to the extreme left?” ran the tagline of one digital ad that One Nation launched recently.

Antiabortion groups also plan to organize in key states to pressure Democratic senators. The Susan B. Anthony List has 104 canvassers in Indiana, who have been going door to door to organize opposition to Donnelly.

“The pro-life movement is strongest when we are talking to them one-to-one,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the group.

Donnelly, who opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, told the Indianapolis Star in June that it was too soon to say how he

would vote on the nominee, while declining to say whether Roe should be overturned. “It’s the law of the land,” he said.

Manchin, who opposes abortion with the same exceptions as Donnelly, suggested in a radio interview that Trump should avoid picking a justice who will overturn Roe. “If he picks somebody that’s hardcore on Roe v. Wade or that hardcore on repealing health care, that’s a bigger lift,” Manchin said.

Heitkamp, who has argued that reproductive decisions should be left to a woman, her family and her doctor, does support a ban on federal funding of abortion in most cases. She said she wants to do a “thorough vetting” of the president’s nominee before making a decision.

At the core of the liberal argument is the idea that any of the president’s nominees will be tainted if they come from a list he announced during the campaign.

Trump also announced during the campaign that if he put two or three justices on the court, an overturn of Roe “will happen automatically, in my opinion.”

“Our point to Susan Collins is stop going around and pretending that there is some magic question that is going to give you legitimate reassurance [that the nominee will protect Roe],” said

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Brian Fallon, who is leading Demand Justice. “If they came from the list, it’s fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Collins has suggested that she has a different view. “I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade,” she told CNN’s “State of the Union” last Sunday. But she also has said she has not ruled out voting for someone from Trump’s list, saying that although there are some she would not support, she first wants to hear their views on upholding precedent.

During the debate last year over the ACA, Collins made clear her objections to blocking federal funds for Planned Parenthood, which other Republicans had inserted as part of an effort to weaken the organization, a major provider of abortion services.

Murkowski also said she was committed to protecting continued funding of the group. Since Kennedy announced his retirement, she has called for “exacting scrutiny” of his replacement. “His retirement is a historic moment for the court because he was the swing vote in so many decisions of great consequence,” she said in a statement.

The fight for the favor of individual senators will take place amid a much broader effort by Democrats and Republicans alike to energize voters around the confirmation process for the nominee. The Alliance for Justice, a liberal group that focuses on Supreme Court nomination fights and vetting, plans to elevate the nominee’s record on federal regulatory law as part of an attempt to raise civil rights, labor and environmental issues.

Underlying it all is an awareness that the political environment is combustible and unpredictable. Nan Aron, the founder and president of the Alliance for Justice, cited past court nominee fights as instructive, noting that successful opposition to conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987 led to the appointment of a moderate Kennedy.

“Everyone knows what is at stake this time,” she said. “As the fight to save the ACA demonstrated, when people are galvanized enough to pressure Democrats and Republicans, you can have an effect.” ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump embraces big-money donors BY

M ICHELLE Y E H EE L EE

There was the exclusive dinner at the home of a tobacco heir and the soiree at the residence of a Washington developer. More recently, men in suits and women in cocktail dresses sipped drinks in the luxurious ballroom of Washington’s Trump International Hotel.

At each gathering, the guest of honor was President Trump. The people there to celebrate him were some of his wealthiest supporters, who in the case of the hotel fete wrote six-figure checks to hear him crack jokes and discuss his agenda in a rarefied setting.

Even as Trump holds court in large arenas filled with thousands of cheering supporters, he also has been giving rich financiers and business executives up-close access, helping cultivate the kind of big-money outfit he once derided. The effort is intended to boost his favored candidates in this year’s midterms — and to bolster his own reelection prospects.

The money is flowing to America First, an independent operation stocked with former Trump aides that aims to scoop up $100 million through two entities, with the bulk of the funds so far flowing to a nonprofit arm that is not required to disclose the names of its donors.

The chase for wealthy backers is exactly what Trump denounced on the campaign trail in 2016, saying it made candidates “psychologically” beholden to donors and declaring it was “not going to happen with me.”

But as president, he is now immersing himself in that world, wooing figures such as investor and former ambassador Ronald Weiser and Oklahoma oil executive Harold Hamm over New York strip steak and arugula salad.

His allies cast it as a pragmatic move, making the same argument that aides to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did when she embraced big-money support in her bid.

“He understands the nature of the political landscape today,”

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

America First groups look to raise $100 million for midterms and 2020 with the president’s help Sean Spicer, former White House spokesman and senior adviser to America First Action, the super PAC, said of Trump. “You can’t unilaterally disarm if the other side is going to utilize super PACs.” They say it does not conflict with Trump’s oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp” because the rich donors are simply trying to help Trump achieve his aspirations for the country, not get something out of him.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Among the Trump loyalists who have financially benefited from the effort are former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, who campaigned for Trump.

Their firms, along with ones run by former campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson and former campaign digital media di-

rector Brad Parscale, all earned at least tens of thousands of dollars each since 2017, the super PAC’s federal filings show.

Group officials say America First was modeled as a Trumpfocused corollary to Organizing for Action, formed after the 2012 campaign by President Barack Obama’s allies to support his legislative agenda.

Their stated goal is to keep GOP control of Congress in 2018 and to get Trump reelected in 2020. But exactly how they’ll get there remains nebulous.

America First groups say they have raised $46.1 million — less than half their goal. The groups have focused their electoral spending on the special elections in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Georgia this cycle.

As for the midterms, America First Action has helped a proTrump Republican incumbent in New York fend off a primary

On the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a VIP reception and dinner with campaign donors in Washington.

challenger. The super PAC says it is holding off on the bulk of its spending, waiting to see how it can complement outside spending from other major GOP groups as November approaches.

Some longtime GOP donors and strategists are skeptical, privately noting that they expected the groups to be more actively fundraising and spending by this point in a midterm election year.

The two-day Trump hotel event this month in Washington, which included panels and dinner, raised an estimated $5 million for the super PAC, one official said.

Guests paid $100,000 for entry and $250,000 for VIP access to get an insider pitch about the benefits of Trump’s policies from the likes of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

“This was an amazing event to actually get close to the powerful people who have such an impact, not just in America but the world,” said Dontez Sanders, a real estate investor from Ohio.

The events capped off with Trump’s roughly 45-minute, celebratory speech. He was “on fire,” one attendee said, rattling off at least 20 accomplishments from his first 500 days.

He brought champion boxer Evander Holyfield to the stage and gave an “examination” of his famed bitten ear. He thanked individual attendees in the crowd by name and marveled at the wealth of one of those present.

After the official events ended, guests mingled at the hotel lobby bar, some still wearing their “America First” lanyards.

“I give so much credit to Donald Trump, who needed this like he needed a hole in the head,” said Charles Gucciardo, a lawyer from New York who attended the dinner. He said he once waited six hours at a Trump event to shake the president’s hand — and then failed.

“I’ve seen Donald Trump four times so far, but I’ve never gotten to shake his hand,” he lamented.

“I just want to shake his hand!” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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Picking up where Pruitt left o≠ BY

S TEVEN M UFSON

A

ndrew Wheeler, until now the low-profile deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, became a likely successor to the scandal-plagued Scott Pruitt on Thursday and an appealing alternative for those hoping to continue to roll back key EPA policies.

Wheeler spent a decade lobbying for just the sort of companies the agency regulates, and before that he worked for Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who rejects climate change. Drawing on more than a quarter-century in Washington, Wheeler is expected to pick up where the departing Pruitt left off — only without the controversy that constantly plagued him.

Even if Wheeler ends up recusing himself from specific EPA decisions, his record as a lobbyist suggests his views might not differ much from those of President Trump. At the firm Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting, Wheeler represented energy companies, mining companies and a mixture of others with issues like food and salvaging automobiles. Among his professional activities, he once listed his post as vice president of the Washington Coal Club.

“I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda,” Trump tweeted as he announced that he had accepted Pruitt’s resignation. “We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”

The Senate confirmed Wheeler for the deputy slot by a 53-to-45 vote. It would need to confirm him again for the top position if he were nominated by Trump.

“There is every reason to expect that he will pursue just as vigorously all the regulatory policies and initiatives in progress that were initiated by Pruitt,” said Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School’s environmental law program.

Pruitt had moved to Washington as an outsider and EPA antagonist following a stint as Oklahoma attorney general. By contrast, Wheeler knows Washington well

ALEX EDELMAN/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The acting EPA administrator is expected to continue rolling back key environmental policies and even has experience within the agency, where he served four years during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. His combined experience might make him more effective, especially if he isn’t distracted by the type of investigations that dogged Pruitt.

Wheeler sent an email to EPA employees after news broke about Pruitt. “I am both humbled and honored to take on this new responsibility at the same agency where I started my career over 25 years ago,” he said. “I look forward to working hard alongside all of you to continue our collective goal of protecting public health and the environment on behalf of the American people.”

But environmental groups vowed to fight him as much as they have the outgoing chief.

“Andrew Wheeler is equally unqualified to serve as the nation’s chief environmental steward,” Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director for government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense

Council, said in a statement. “This veteran coal lobbyist has shown only disdain for the EPA’s vital mission to protect Americans’ health and our environment.”

While a lobbyist, Wheeler’s best-paying client was Murray Energy. The coal-mining company paid his firm $300,000 or more annually from 2009 through 2017, according to records from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Wheeler arranged and attended a March 28, 2017, meeting between chief executive Robert E. Murray and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

Murray, who had contributed heavily to the Trump campaign, laid out a four-page plan for rolling back regulations and protecting coal plants in danger of closing because of competition from other fuel supplies.

The Trump administration has already taken steps to address most of the issues on Murray’s list.

The president recently ordered the Energy Department invoke Cold War-era energy emergency

Andrew Wheeler, seen during his 2017 confirmation hearing to be deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, will now serve as the acting administrator.

He spent a decade lobbying for companies that the agency regulates, such as energy and mining companies.

powers to take actions that would prevent the closure of coal and nuclear power plants for at least two years, which is what Murray has been seeking.

On Capitol Hill, Wheeler not only worked for Inhofe but as staff director and chief counsel to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where he worked to defeat climate-related legislation that came before lawmakers.

He supported efforts to exempt industrial plants from pollution controls in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and limit their liability for harm caused by the release of toxic chemicals. He favored the elimination of the New Source Review permitting process that is an important part of environmental legislation.

As a lobbyist, Wheeler commented on a 2010 National Journal blog post that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “has functioned more as a political body than a scientific body” and that the group should revisit its 2009 finding that carbon-dioxide emissions posed a threat to public health.

According to Goffman, Wheeler does not need to recuse himself from most agency decisions. Goffman said that the EPA ethics office takes a narrow view of conflicts of interest.

“Policy or program-level decisions of general impact are not subject to recusal requirements even if Wheeler advocated for specific outcomes with respect to such policies or rules when in private practice,” Goffman said.

Many Republicans will find that Wheeler’s track record makes him the sort of EPA leader they want.

“Andrew Wheeler is the perfect choice to serve as Acting Administrator,” Inhofe said in a statement Thursday. “Andrew worked for me for 14 years, has an impeccable reputation and has the experience to be a strong leader at the EPA. I have no doubt and complete confidence he will continue the important deregulatory work that Scott Pruitt started while being a good steward of the environment.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Tapping into a new employee pool BY

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

C

olton Channon needed just 90 minutes each day.

Every morning for about a month, in training designed for him, the high school senior with an intellectual disability practiced making steel brackets for trucks at a Des Moines factory. The skill took more than a few tries to master. But his coworkers, he said, cheered him on.

A supervisor stayed close, showing him how to pack the parts neatly into boxes that would ship to Ford, Honda and General Motors. The effort produced something the 20-year-old once deemed distant: a job offer he could see turning into a career.

As the nation’s unemployment rate nears the lowest point in 50 years, sinking in May to 3.8 percent, companies are searching more widely to fill vacancies. Advocates say the labor shortage, coupled with growing openness to workers with mental and physical limitations, has brought record numbers of people with disabilities into the workforce — and it has also pushed employers to adopt more inclusive practices to support the hires, such as longer and more hands-on training.

Over the past year, the jobless rate for workers with disabilities has fallen at a faster rate than among the general population, dropping 2.5 percentage points, from 9.5 percent to 7 percent.

At the same time, the share of working-age people with disabilities in the United States who are employed — a historically low figure — hit 29.7 percent in May, up 1.7 percentage points from a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Firms are more likely now to reach out in places they’ve never reached out before,” said Andrew Houtenville, research director of the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.

“They’re also customizing jobs for people who might have previously been left out of the labor market.”

In Channon’s case, Dee Zee Manufacturing, a truck and SUV accessory-maker, offered person-

CALLA KESSLER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Companies increasingly hire Americans with disabilities as vacancies grow harder to fill ally tailored training during school hours and held a job for him after graduation in May, paying $10 an hour.

Channon, who reads at a seventh-grade level and took five years to complete high school, had worried he would have to settle for a job like his first one, which he dreaded: washing dishes at a grocery store.

Dee Zee officials said the arrangement was partly motivated

by Iowa’s worker drought and part-

ly by its desire to attract workers who will stay with the company.

At 2.3 percent, the unemployment rate in greater Des Moines is far below the national average of 3.8 percent. Dee Zee faces tough competition for workers from other plants.

More than 500 manufacturing positions are open in the area, according to Indeed, a jobs website, including at John Deere and wind turbine-blade plants.

The National Organization on

Julie Propp sweeps at the Kwik Star in Marshalltown, Iowa.

Propp went from making $3.49 an hour as a janitor elsewhere to making $11.25 at the gas station.

Disability (NOD), which tracks hiring trends, said that 62 percent of employers in its 2018 survey of 200 companies had adopted “leading practices” in training and technology for staffers with disabilities, up from 57 percent in 2016. Firms are partnering with local organizations that support people with disabilities, drafting policies on recruiting such individuals and hiring senior leaders to monitor their retention.

The moves toward a more inclusive workplace have also given momentum to the push to outlaw the practice of paying disabled employees below federal minimum wages in sheltered workplaces.

Over the past four years, Alaska, Maryland, Vermont and New

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NATION Hampshire have banned employers from paying workers with disabilities below the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, some companies are discovering the benefits of a more inclusive workplace, said Michelle Krefft, a director at Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation, a state agency that connects disabled workers to jobs.

“People with disabilities, as a group, have generally experienced barriers living in a world that is not designed for them,” Krefft said. “They are innovators by nature. More companies are waking up to this.”

Ernst & Young, the global consultancy firm, recently swapped out traditional job interviews for hands-on auditions for candidates with developmental disorders, said Hiren Shukla, EY’s neurodiversity program leader.

Over the past two years, the firm has hired 14 people with autism as account-support associates. EY hopes to add six more this summer.

“We think we have hit upon an untapped workforce,” Shukla said.

One is James Hudgins, 33, who works in the firm’s Dallas office.

He was selling car parts before a state workforce development agency put him in touch with EY last year.

The company trained him, and Hudgins quickly picked up coding. He soon found a way to automate progress reports.

Krefft said businesses have a financial stake in making accommodations.

She said more manufacturers are offering job shares, allowing workers to split one full-time role.

(That can be ideal for workers with physical limitations who have trouble working eight-hour shifts, she said.)

Meanwhile, Janet Bruckshen, executive director of Washington Vocational Services near Seattle, said she has noticed more tablets in use that help deaf workers communicate.

Some employers, though, still hesitate to hire people who rely on screens.

“We still get comments like: ‘We can’t do it. Workers need to communicate with customers,’ ” Bruckshen said. “But all it takes is saying, ‘Wait a sec. What if we figure out an accommodation?’ ” n ©The Washington Post

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To protect its coral reefs, Hawaii targets sunscreens BY

L INDSEY B EVER

From Banana Boat to Coppertone, major sunscreen brands will soon have to revamp their products or stop selling them in Hawaii.

State lawmakers passed legislation that would ban skin-care companies from selling and distributing sunscreens on the islands that contain two chemicals deemed damaging to coral reefs.

The bill was opposed by various companies and business associations and even some dermatologists, who worry that the ban may discourage people from wearing sunscreen at all.

But Gov. David Ige (D) signed the bill Tuesday, making Hawaii the first state to enact legislation designed to protect marine ecosystems by banning such sunscreens.

The bill, S.B. 2571, states that the chemicals, oxybenzone and octinoxate, “have significant harmful impacts on Hawaii’s marine environment and residing ecosystems.” The legislation aims to keep sunscreens that contain those chemicals off store shelves.

However, the products would still be available to those who have a prescription from a licensed health-care provider, according to the legislation.

State Sen. Mike Gabbard (D), who introduced the bill, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that it would be “a first-in-the-world law.”

“So, Hawaii is definitely on the cutting edge by banning these dangerous chemicals in sunscreens,” Gabbard said in an email to the newspaper. “When you think about it, our island paradise, surrounded by coral reefs, is the perfect place to set the gold standard for the world to follow.

This will make a huge difference in protecting our coral reefs, marine life, and human health.”

According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, coral reefs are crucial to marine and human life.

In addition to protecting sea

CALEB JONES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Beachgoers are seen in Honolulu. Hawaii has passed legislation that bans sunscreens containing chemicals deemed harmful to coral reefs.

creatures, the Smithsonian said, the reefs provide food, medication and tourism jobs, among other things — at a value of $30 billion to $172 billion per year.

“Unfortunately, people also pose the greatest threat to coral reefs,” according to the Smithsonian. “Overfishing and destructive fishing, pollution, warming, changing ocean chemistry, and invasive species are all taking a huge toll. In some places, reefs have been entirely destroyed, and in many places reefs today are a pale shadow of what they once were.”

Environmental organizations argue that certain sunscreens — which research has shown can wash off from skin into the water while swimming or bathing — can be toxic to the coral reefs.

The Star-Advertiser reported that the law, which would go into effect in 2021, was opposed by ABC Stores, the Hawaii Medical Association, the Hawaii Food Industry Association, Chamber of Commerce Hawaii, the Personal Care Products Council and Bayer, which manufactures sunscreens

by Coppertone.

Jay Sirois, director of regulatory affairs for an association that represents sunscreen manufacturers, recently told NPR: “We’re

taking away a product, or products . . . that have been shown over the course of time to be safe and effective” against the harmful effects of the sun.

Bayer said in a statement in May that the company intends to comply with the legislation but that “eliminating the use of sunscreen ingredients considered to be safe and effective by the FDA with a long history of use not only restricts consumer choice, but is also at odds with skin cancer prevention efforts. What has been scientifically proven is that exposure to UV radiation from the sun causes skin cancer. And sunscreen is one of the most effective ways to protect yourself from UV exposure, in addition to wearing protective clothing, sunglasses and staying in the shade.”

Johnson & Johnson, which owns Neutrogena, agreed with the position taken by its trade organization, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. The association said “the health, safety and welfare of millions of Hawaii residents and tourists has been severely compromised” by S.B. 2571, which will ban “at least 70 percent of the sunscreens on the market today, based on weak science blaming sunscreens for damage to coral reefs.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

A new future or repeat of the past?

BY T AMER E L- G HOBASHY AND M USTAFA S ALIM

In Samarra, Iraq

At the main checkpoint outside this central Iraqi city, where regular army soldiers and police are joined by militiamen commanded

by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr — a onetime battlefield foe of American forces — it is the flags of Sadr’s militia that fly most prominently.

While the city’s checkpoints are supposed to be jointly operated, it is clear who is in charge.

Sadr’s 12,000 armed followers protect — even dominate — this city, ensuring peace in a place that is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim but is home to one of the world’s holiest Shiite shrines. The militia’s role in Samarra reflects Sadr’s evolution from public enemy to enforcer of order.

In May, Sadr’s ticket won an unexpected victory in Iraq’s national elections after running on a platform of eradicating sectarianism, fighting corruption, and sidelining both American and Iranian influence in the country.

Though he is not seeking to become prime minister himself, Sadr has emerged as the likely kingmaker. With his ticket winning the most parliamentary seats of any party, he is in a strong position to shape Iraq’s next government.

His electoral victory was the latest surprise from the 44-yearold cleric. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, his militia, then known as the Mahdi Army, fought fierce battles with U.S. troops. In the following years, his militia fueled a sectarian war that deeply divided the nation. After a brief exile from public life, Sadr returned after the rise of the Islamic State, rebranding himself as an advocate for Iraq’s sovereignty.

Sadr’s transformation, coupled with his win at the polls, has led to head-scratching: Who is the real Moqtada al-Sadr?

The performance of his militia, now known as the Peace Brigades, suggests Sadr has shed his sectarianism and is committed to healing the Sunni-Shiite wounds that have corroded Iraq’s society and security.

MAHMUD SALEH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In Iraq, an ex-firebrand is now a likely kingmaker, but some wonder how much he’s truly changed But the brigades’ conduct in Samarra also shows that he may not have been so fast to relinquish his autocratic tendencies and still retains a taste for subordinating Iraq’s laws to his own rule.

A decade ago, the city was at the epicenter of a ruinous civil war.

Suspected al-Qaeda militants had bombed the golden-domed alAskari mosque sacred to Shiites, sparking a years-long sectarian conflict throughout the country.

Sadr, who was leading a populist Shiite revival in Iraq’s south, called for unity. But in reality, his Mahdi Army became a central player in the revenge killings.

After the rise of the Islamic State, the Mahdi Army was reborn as the Peace Brigades. Sadr ordered his fighters to Samarra in 2014, and they beat back the militants who had surrounded it as nearby cities fell to the Islamic State.

The Sadrist fighters were warily

accepted by the Sunni population and by commanders of Iraq’s army, which had crumbled in the face of the Islamic State blitz.

Majid Hamid, the deputy commander of the brigades in Samarra, said he is proud of his membership in the Mahdi Army but insists that the Peace Brigades are different — despite drawing many of the same fighters.

In other Iraqi cities, Shiite militias that mustered in response to the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State often abused the local Sunni populations. But in Samarra, the deployment of Sadr’s Peace Brigades helped ensure that the city remained prosperous and secure for its 300,000 Sunni residents.

Mahmoud Khalaf, Samarra’s mayor since 2005, credited the brigades with facilitating the return of residents who had fled the Islamic State threat. In other cities, Shiite militias stand accused of expelling or killing Sunnis.

Iraqi security forces and members of the Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigades), a group formed by Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada alSadr, inspect the site of suicide bombings at a power plant in Samarra in September 2017.

Sadr’s militiamen have also sought to build bridges to the community by restoring the city’s electricity lines and water networks.

And, Khalaf said, the Peace Brigades have effectively policed themselves, immediately punishing members who were accused of looting shops, stealing civilian vehicles or acting imperiously.

However, many military and government officials see the Peace Brigades as an obstacle to bringing Iraq’s various armed groups under central government command.

The militia’s vehicles bear license plates marked with “The Peace Brigades” rather than the province where the vehicles are registered. The militia has ordered, unlike in other cities, that outsiders be sponsored by a local resident to enter Samarra and must leave their government identification at the checkpoint until they depart.

“They are a stifling presence in the city, controlling everyone’s movements, and the police and army are subordinate to them,” said the provincial official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals by Sadr’s forces.

“They are behaving like a police state, and this shows their true intentions,” the official said.

Since the militia entered Samarra, more than 1,000 residents have been taken into custody by “unknown” groups with no word on their fate, a senior city official said. He said that the national government is investigating the disappearances and that Peace Brigade militiamen are the leading suspects.

Many city residents refused to talk about the brigades, saying they fear punishment for being critical of the group.

Hamid, the Peace Brigades commander, said the strict procedures imposed in Samarra are the sole reason the city has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 2014. A native of Iraq’s Shiite south, Hamid said he cannot wait to return home once a strong Iraqi government presence is established in Samarra. n ©The Washington Post

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In event of war, tra∞c may stall U.S. M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM In Suwalki, Poland BY

I

f they had to head off a conflict with Russia, U.S. commanders are worried that the most powerful military in the world could get stuck in a traffic jam.

Humvees could snarl behind plodding semis on narrow roads as they make their way east across Europe. Tanks could crush rusting bridges too weak to hold their weight. Troops could be held up by officious passport-checkers and stubborn railway companies.

Although many barriers would drop away if there were a declaration of war, the hazy period before a military engagement would present a major problem. NATO has just a skeleton force deployed to its member countries that share a border with Russia. Backup forces would need to traverse hundreds of miles. And the delays — a mixture of bureaucracy, bad planning and decaying infrastructure — could enable Russia to seize NATO territory in the Baltics while U.S. Army planners were still filling out the 17 forms needed to cross Germany and into Poland.

During at least one White House exercise that gamed out a European war with Russia, the logistical stumbles contributed to a NATO loss.

That possibility is tangible for troops who have gotten stuck trying to move between training exercises in Europe — like the U.S. Army squadron that budgeted two weeks last year to get their Stryker armored vehicles back by train to Germany from the Black Sea nation of Georgia. It took four months, leaving the troops sitting in Germany without their rides or weaponry, said Lt. Col. Adam Lackey, the commander of the squadron.

“We have to be able to move as fast or faster than Russia in order to be an effective deterrent,” said Ben Hodges, the U.S. Army’s former top general in Europe.

Since retiring in December, Hodges has devoted himself to raising the alarm from his perch at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, and he

MICHAL CIZEK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

If Russia and NATO clash, gridlock, red tape could hobble American forces traveling through Europe successfully pushed to get troopmobility issues on the agenda of a NATO summit in Brussels this month. The United States and NATO, Hodges said, need to be able to “mass enough capability in place so that Russia doesn’t make a terrible miscalculation.”

The original rationale for the NATO alliance was to defend against a potential war with Russia. Western troops regularly practiced for large-scale conflict — and the front line between East and West Germany was just miles away from where more than 200,000 U.S. troops were deployed.

But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western planners threw away the playbooks in the hope of new cooperation with Moscow. For years after NATO’s 2004 expansion into territory that had once been the Soviet Union’s, the alliance had no plans for how to defend its new members.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of

Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula provided a jolt. Western planners went to retrieve their Cold Warera playbooks from the dustbin.

But their Russia-fighting muscles had atrophied to the point where they could barely flex, and their ability to move across Europe had decayed.

In some cases, military planners in Moscow had a better picture of bridges, roads and the weak points of the new NATO territories — because they used to be the Soviet Union’s.

Whereas Russia has no challenge moving its troops inside its own territory, a thicket of peacetime rules has complicated military movements within Europe.

Germany, for instance, allows trucks loaded with tanks and other heavy equipment on highways only at night on weekdays. Sweden, which isn’t a member of NATO but works closely with the alliance, requires three weeks’ notice before most military person-

A U.S. military convoy travels through the Czech Republic on its way from the Baltics to the U.S. base in Vilseck, Germany, in 2015.

nel and equipment can enter. The rails on Baltic railroads are set apart wider than the Western standard, meaning that trains have to be laboriously unloaded, then reloaded near Poland’s border with Lithuania. That can add days to a major movement of troops.

“If you can get there in 45 days, you’re just late to the fight,” said Maj. Gen. Steven Shapiro, the twostar officer charged with organizing the U.S. Army’s movements in Europe. “There are days where we move at the speed of war. But, generally speaking, that’s outside of the current norm.”

NATO leaders are just beginning to address the underlying issues. They have worked with the European Union in the past year to boost funding for infrastructure and reduce bureaucratic roadblocks. At the Brussels summit, they are expected to approve two new military commands that would speed transit from the East Coast of the United States all the way to NATO’s border with Russia. That would boost the number of people working full-time to solve the problems, which even still will take years to eliminate.

In a related move, leaders are also expected to approve plans to increase the number of NATO troops that could make the rapid journey if needed, to about 30,000 within 30 days. NATO now has a rapid-reaction force of 5,000 troops on standby to deploy within 10 days, and military planners fear that is not enough.

Taken together, these changes would mark a significant boost in NATO’s efforts to try to deter Russia, although they would not come close to the military resources that were ready for a short-notice fight at Cold War heights.

The hope is that they can avoid war by being able to rush troops to scare off the enemy across the border. “As long as we can provide credible and strong deterrence, including the ability to move forces, then we are preventing conflict,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last month. n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

After raid, a family is torn again In Ohio’s Little Mexico, a 12-year-old boy who is a U.S. citizen adjusts to a life without parents E LI S ASLOW In Norwalk, Ohio BY

H

e had been afraid to go outside since his mother was detained in an immigration raid 14 days earlier, but now someone was pounding on the front door of their trailer. Alex Galvez, 12, waited until the knocking stopped and then cracked the door open to find a small flier left behind on the top step. He carried it into the kitchen and read it to his older sister. “Emergency giveaway outside the Post Office! Free food in your time of need!”

“I’m not going,” Alex said, once he had finished reading the flier. It had been the promise of free doughnuts that enticed his mother and dozens of her co-workers out of the planting fields and into the break room that day, where instead they had been met by 200 federal agents with plastic handcuffs and guns.

Alex folded up the flier and tossed it onto the table.

“I’m sorry, but I think you need to go,” said his sister, Estefany, 18. “We could always use the food.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“We can’t hide in here forever,” she said,

Alex Galvez, 12, center, plays with his second cousins in Norwalk, Ohio. Alex was separated from his mother after an ICE raid.

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

handing him an empty plastic bag. “I have to go to work. You’re the only one who can do it.”

Since the day of the raid, they had been staying in the trailer with a rotation of older relatives — two more children adjusting to a life without their parents as a result of U.S. immigration policies. Even as President Trump and his administration promise to reunite families separated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the U.S. border, a similar crisis continues unabated within the country’s interior, where children are separated from their undocumented parents with little scrutiny and increasing frequency.

In the past few months, ICE has carried out the three biggest workplace immigration raids of the past decade, including one on June 5 at a nursery here in rural Ohio, where 114 gardeners, florists and other workers were detained and put into court proceedings for deportation.

Many had lived for several years in a Norwalk trailer park of 74 homes known as Little Mexico, where aid workers now estimate that more than 90 children are missing one parent and at least 20 are left with no parent at all.

One of them is Alex, an American citizen like most children in the trailer park, with a wardrobe of Cleveland Cavaliers T-shirts and frosted tips dyed orange at the barbershop inside Walmart. He had spent all 12 of his years in Norwalk, population 17,000, and for much of that time, he had lived in the trailer parks of Little Mexico, in a beige double-wide with his sister and mother, Nora Galvez, who first came to the United States in 1999. The air outside their trailer smelled of smoke and rubber from the neighboring pallet factory. The favorite community soccer field was a gravel lot. But Alex knew every one of the 74 families in the two trailer parks, and he and his friends could wander freely on their bikes from one trailer into the next. Many people in conservative Norwalk regarded Little Mexico as an ugly annex, a place to be left alone, but to Alex that meant it had always felt peaceful and undisturbed.

Now he walked out of the trailer with his empty shopping bag into a scene that looked to him like something out of “Fortnite,” his favorite apocalyptic video game. There were gardens of dying flowers and trash cans overloaded with uncollected garbage. More than a dozen trailers had been abandoned in the hours after the raid, and many had windows left open or toys scattered in the yard. Five residents of Little Mexico had been deported, and 34 others remained in detention, including Alex’s mother. Several more residents had packed up and fled Ohio that night, after a rumor spread that ICE was also planning to raid the trailer park. Those who remained were mostly out of a job or too afraid to go to work, and after two weeks of unpaid bills, some had also lost their electricity.

“A ghost town,” Alex called it, as he made his way toward the one-room post office at the center of the park. But what bothered him more than the rows of darkened trailers was imagining what might be happening inside. He

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Residents of the Jefferson Trailer Park in Norwalk, Ohio, gather to receive donated food, clothing and diapers. The park, known as Little Mexico, is populated almost entirely by immigrants from the Mexican state of Chiapas. Charity groups and individuals have been making donations to the residents since the ICE workplace raids.

had heard about the 27-year-old who mysteriously stopped eating or speaking in the days after his sister was detained in the raid, eventually dying in the hospital a week later. He knew about the 23-year-old who had become suicidal after his girlfriend’s family decided to flee for Mexico, hanging a noose outside of his trailer until a relative took him to a hospital.

On the exterior walls of the post office, Alex saw a few new brochures for suicide hotlines and free mental-health counseling. A few dozen people were gathered outside, mostly children, young mothers and several volunteers from local nonprofit organizations. One of them handed out crayons and bubbles to children. A woman distributed crates of eggs from the back of her truck. A nurse checked residents’ blood pressure. Volunteers came up to Alex offering pizza, milk, vegetables and books, until he began to politely wave them away.

“We’re fine,” he said. “We don’t really need much.”

“Are you alone now?” one volunteer asked, and Alex shook his head.

“I’m with my sister,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for his shoulder, tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening to you. It’s unthinkable.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ve been through it before.”

One of the things that had confused him during the past few weeks was the shock he sometimes saw reflected back at him in strangers’ faces — the volunteers who toured the trailer park in utter disbelief, or the TV anchors who broke down in the middle of their live broadcasts from the U.S. border. They said separating a parent from a child was cruel and

un-American. They said the United States was in the midst of a singular humanitarian crisis.

They said these were the actions of a country they no longer recognized. But, to Alex, the act of family separation seemed quintessentially American. It was the cornerstone of his American experience.

His father had been deported when Alex was 3, yanked from work during a raid at Casa Fiesta, a local Mexican restaurant, and then flown back to Chiapas. An uncle had been deported two years later, and then an aunt had left for Mexico a few months after that, forcing their two children to stay for a little while in Alex’s trailer. At age 8, he and his mother had been pulled over on their way home from Walmart by ICE agents, who detained them in a holding facility overnight before releasing them, since Nora was a longtime Ohio resident with no criminal record and therefore, according to her court paperwork, “not a priority for removal.” Four other relatives had been deported or fled to Mexico in the years since then, a family reshaped again and again by separation. Alex’s father remained in Chiapas, with a new wife and two half brothers Alex had never met. His half sisters had come and gone between Mexico and the United States. The only person Alex had never been separated from was his mother.

So that night, when his sister Estefany came home alone from work at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center, Alex suspected what had happened, even as his sister began filling in the details: ICE agents had arrived at 7:15 a.m., wearing camouflage and tactical gear, swarming the greenhouses with the help of barking K9s and helicopters, rounding up several hundred employees and then separating them into

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COVER STORY

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

two lines. Estefany, who was born in Ohio, had gone into one line for U.S. citizens, and her mother had gone into the line for undocumented workers. Agents had handcuffed her mother with plastic zip ties and led her toward a bus, and Estefany had run to join her, trying to convince ICE agents that she, too, was undocumented. But inside her wallet was a U.S. Social Security card, so agents led Estefany back into the other line for citizens as her mother boarded the bus. Nora shouted over her shoulder that there was $140 cash in the house and that Estefany needed to remind Alex to wash out his knee. He had skinned it a few days earlier in a bike accident, a small surface wound. “Make sure he washes it twice a day,” Nora called out, before the bus pulled away.

Estefany was old enough to act as Alex’s legal guardian, and she had been trying her best to take care of him with the help of other relatives, even as she was learning how to take care of herself. She had originally applied to Corso’s for a summer job, hoping to make a little money before starting her final year of high school, but now she was the family’s primary earner, with no plans to return to school. She had written her first rental check and returned to work at the nursery wearing sunglasses big enough to hide her puffy eyes. Other relatives were helping with cooking, child care and errands, but Estefany considered herself responsible for Alex, even now, as the sky darkened outside their trailer on their 15th night alone.

“It’s getting late,” she told him. “We need to be better about going to bed.”

“I know,” he said, “You should get ready,” she said.

“In a little while,” he told her.

They had been sharing a room for the past weeks, relying on each other’s company to make it through the night, since both of them struggled to sleep. On the first night after the raid, they had driven at 2 a.m. to the Customs and Border Protection station in Port Clinton, Ohio, to ask if their mother was inside, but Estefany said nobody would tell them. On the second night they had driven back, and this time they were told that Nora was inside but they couldn’t see her. On the third night they had tried one more time, and when they were stopped at the door Estefany had lost her patience. “Who benefits from this?” she remembered asking. Was it American taxpayers, who were paying to finance the raid and resulting deportations? Or American workers, most of whom were so disinterested in low-paying farm work that Ohio had announced a crisis work shortage of 15,000 agricultural jobs? Or Corso’s Nursery, a family-owned business now missing 40 percent of its employees?

She wanted to know, out of 114 minimumwage workers detained at Corso’s, how many were narcos or rapists or cartel members or killers for MS-13? “These were just hard-working people, making $9 an hour and going about their lives,” she remembered saying.

Alex, meanwhile, had decided to write a letter to ICE. His mother was still in detention, waiting for her first court date on the possible path toward deportation, and he thought maybe he could still help her. “The only thing my Mom ever did was work,” he had written. “She loved me so much. I can’t live without my Mom. I don’t have anybody but her. I have been crying every day. I can’t sleep.”

Children play soccer outside their mobile homes in the Norwalk trailer park, where they also wander freely on bikes.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Come on. Let’s go to bed,” Estefany said again. It was nearing midnight, but Alex turned on a Harry Potter movie.

“A little bit longer,” he said, and Estefany sat down next to him.

Alex was still on the couch the next morning, wrapped under a blanket and watching soccer on TV when his phone rang. He looked down at the restricted number and waved to his sister.

“It’s her!” he said. Then he answered the phone and put it on speaker.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She tried to call home from detention a few times each week, even though it meant paying nearly $1 per minute. Alex and his sister had been allowed to visit her for the first time six days after the raid once she had been moved to a detention facility in Tiffin, Ohio, where they spoke for 15 minutes through a shield of plexiglass. His mother had started to cry when she saw Alex, and the only way either of them could make it through a conversation was by talking about routine things, by pretending, which had become their habit ever since.

Yes, Alex always told her, he was getting along with his sister. Yes, he was sleeping well.

Yes, everything was getting back to normal in the trailer park. Yes, his knee was healing just fine.

“See you soon,” he said, and then he handed the phone to his sister.

Only once they hung up and returned to the emptiness of the trailer did the uncertainty and fear begin to creep back in. On TV a few days earlier, Alex had heard Trump promise a “major increase” in immigration enforcement, and just a few days earlier 143 undocumented workers had been detained at a meat processing plant across the state in Salem. Alex had barely seen any of his friends since the raid, but their text messages told the story of families unraveling. One friend had fled with his father to Tennessee after his mother was detained in the raid. Another had moved in with relatives across the state. Two more were still living in the trailer park under the care of undocumented relatives, trying to avoid being seen.

Alex and his family had gotten advice from a volunteer lawyer, who told them it was still possible Nora could receive a bond and be returned home with an ankle monitoring bracelet, but so far she hadn’t even been given a court date.

“She’s going to get deported, right?” Alex asked his sister now.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Will we stay here?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Will we move back to Mexico?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, “but it’s going to be okay. We’ll find a way to stay together.”

He turned away and looked at the TV. Nothing about his 12 years in the United States suggested that was likely, and if he was going to be living without his parents, he didn’t want to be treated like a child.

“You don’t have to say that,” he told her. “I know it’s probably not true.” ©The Washington Post

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HEALTH

After retirement, men get to work BY

D AWN F ALLIK

G

lenn Sears returned to his native Honolulu seven years ago to retire, but living in a condo on the 35th floor with his “perfect wife of 58 years,” he didn’t meet many people. And many of his old friends had either moved to the mainland or died. The 83-year-old former civil engineering professor was bored and lonely.

Then he read about an international program called Men’s Sheds. It is sort of like a Boy Scouts for adults, a place where men can learn new skills and work together on community projects: building park benches, making toys for children’s hospitals or volunteering at food drives.

In 2015, he started to put together a group in Honolulu, advertising in local community centers and on Craigslist. A friend offered him the use of a vacant warehouse — if he could cart away a 28-ton concrete pile. Sixty volunteers showed up with tools and jackhammers.

Now they use the space to fix up outrigger canoes, offer powerequipment training and repair abandoned bikes. And Sears has plenty of new friends and a new mission: opening two more Men’s Sheds groups on Oahu, with the hope to start more on other islands.

“People are lonely, and they’re looking for something to do and to make friends, and that’s exactly what this provides,” Sears said.

Men’s Sheds started in Australia in 1995 and is now expanding in the United States, with groups in nine states. The program’s goal is to give men, usually of retirement age, a place to go, something to do and people to chat with, said Barry Golding, author of “The Men’s Shed Movement: The Company of Men.” The idea, named after the backyard space where many men keep their workspace and tools, emerged after a public health conference on men’s health, Golding said. A big issue for men is social isolation, which affects both mental and physical health, particu-

DAWN FALLIK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

For lonely, bored retirees, Men’s Sheds teaches skills and provides a sense of community larly in retirement, said Charlotte S. Yeh, the chief medical officer for AARP. “With men, they often identify with their job, and when they retire they think they are going to keep the same friends they’ve had in the workplace, but then they find they no longer share the same interests,” she said. “Then they depend on their spouses to develop networks, but they may not have spouses, or that may not work out.” (That is, not all people automatically make friends with their spouse’s friends.)

Loneliness is not just an emotional state of feeling disconnected. More and more, researchers believe that loneliness has an impact not only on mental health, but physical well-being.

People who feel lonely and are socially isolated were up to 32

percent more likely to die early, according to a 2015 meta-analysis.

A 2017 study published in the Lancet Public Health looked at 466,901 British men and women and found that loneliness was associated with a 58 percent higher risk of death in men, compared with a 34 percent increase in women. Feeling socially isolated — having little contact with others — had a stronger link to mortality than loneliness, which is more of an emotional state of feeling disconnected, the authors said.

The struggle with loneliness is an issue globally. Britain recently appointed a government position to address the problem, and in the United States, former surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy told The Washington Post last year that he believed loneliness to be at an “epidemic” level.

Reg Flanigan, 74, left, and Rakesh Bhaskar, 72, work to shape a wooden trophy on the lathe at a shed in Melbourne, Australia.

The Men’s Sheds movement has more than 1,000 groups around the world. Each group offers a gathering space where men, mainly of retirement age, can chat, but the main goal is to create connections and a sense of community, organizers said.

The motto is “shoulder to shoulder,” said Lindsay Oates, president of the Victorian Men’s Shed Association in Australia.

“Men feel more comfortable talking while they’re doing something side by side, whether it’s sitting at a bar or working on a project,” he said, something that has been explored in studies of gender difference in communication by Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, who also wrote a book on the topic, “You Just Don’t Understand.”

“Here, you come in, everyone knows you, you can work on a project or have a cup of tea and chat, it’s all good,” Oates said.

Each group has its own space, hours and membership fees. (One shed charges $20 a year, another $85.) No one is required to take part in the activities. It is perfectly okay to show up for a chat, a cup of tea or coffee, and a game of pool, and many members do just that, said shed organizers in the United States, Australia and Britain.

In Australia, the government helps fund sheds with small grants, but some do additional fundraising through barbecues, selling their work at shows and taking individual orders for such tasks as cutting firewood for seniors, making ukuleles and, in one case, creating bow-tie display boxes for a local store.

Reg Flanigan’s shed, tucked away in an underground parking garage in downtown Melbourne, makes “boomerang bags,” or reusable grocery bags. The 74-year-old retired airline pilot joined the group after his wife died and he found himself sitting at home alone — a lot. He would visit his children and seven grandchildren, most of whom live locally, but he didn’t have a strong group of friends or a regular hangout.

Then he saw a television ad for the Men’s Sheds program and

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TRANSPORTATION started going a couple of days a week, learning how to use the wood tools, and said it has made a huge difference in his life.

“I come here, I chat with people, and I feel like I accomplish something,” said Flanigan as he worked on a lathe, creating a football-shaped trophy for a friend. “I was nervous at first, but people were really welcoming, and now I come at least once a week.”

Members often come with metal- or woodworking skills and share those with others. Some people just show up to chat, say shed organizers in Australia and Great Britain.

Joe Holasek, 75, who belongs to a shed near Minneapolis, said he joined after seeing a flier in a local community center. After retiring at age 70 from Honeywell as a manager, he had time on his hands, even with a family and three grandchildren. “You retire, you don’t feel like stopping completely and you want to do stuff with other people, and it’s good to get together and get out of the house,” he said.

Although Men’s Sheds focus on retired men, some welcome younger ones, and several include women.

Anthony Bright, 47, said he started the Melbourne shed in 2013 after being turned down from other sheds for being too young. Although he was married and working as a nutrition counselor, he didn’t have a group of friends to hang out with, and he liked the idea of creating a community where all men were welcome. The youngest member of the group now is around 30, he said.

“After I started it, I was here for 26 weeks by myself, thinking this was a nightmare,” Bright said.

“Then men started turning up, and we added a cooking program and night hours, and it’s taken off.” He said there are now about 70 members.

For Sears, in Honolulu, the sheds are more than just a place to take a class or find something to do. He said many men are lonely and don’t know where to find friends, particularly once they leave work.

“People are so depressed and they’re sitting home and watching TV, and then they find they belong somewhere,” he said. “It’s really saved lives.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

If you’re looking for more leg room, don’t ask the FAA BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

I

f that airline seat is a tad snug for your burgeoning backside or the distance between rows makes you claustrophobic and fearful that a bit of reclining could crush your knees, blame it on the money-hungry airline.

That’s the message from the Federal Aviation Administration, which said last week that squeezing the nation’s expanding bottoms into shrinking airline seats is not its problem.

The FAA did so despite a demand for federal regulation of seat size, a lawsuit brought by the consumer group Flyers Rights, and a judge’s order that the agency reconsider its position.

Reconsider, the FAA did, concluding that there is “no evidence that a typical passenger, even a larger one, will take more than a couple of seconds to get out of his or her seat” in the case of an emergency.

Seat width on many major airlines has shrunk from about 18.5 inches to 17 inches. Seat pitch — the distance between your seat and the one directly in front of you — has decreased from an average of 35 inches to 31 inches, and on some airlines it has been reduced to 28 inches.

While seats have grown smaller, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the average weight of a woman these days is equal to the average for men in the 1960s: 166 pounds. Men on average weigh almost 196 pounds. Men pack a 40-inch waistline. Women tickle the tape around the waist at 38 inches.

That has caused a lot of grumbling from passengers — some of whom are members of Congress, who spend a lot of time on planes — and led to a demand that the FAA do something about the unwelcome squeeze.

On Tuesday, the FAA said no, it’s not going to go through the formal rulemaking process for something that ought to be sorted out between the passengers and

FABIAN BIMMER/REUTERS

Seat width on many major airlines has shrunk from about 18.5 inches to 17 inches, while the average weight of people has only gone up.

the airlines.

The Flyers Rights Education Fund figured that suing the airlines was a fools errand, so it petitioned the court to order the FAA to get involved. The FAA said it would rather not, pointing out that seat spacing did not affect the safety or speed of passenger evacuations.

That FAA ruling resulted in what Judge Patricia Millett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit called “the Case of the Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat.”

“Aircraft seats and the spacing between them have been getting smaller and smaller, while American passengers have been growing in size,” Millett ruled from the bench, ordering the FAA to think again.

Flyers Rights President Paul Hudson said the group is absorbing the FAA documents, which arrived Monday night, but that a second appeal to the court seemed likely.

“This response is mainly couched in the idea that they don’t know of evidence that larger passengers in smaller seats, and older passengers, would be able to get out as quickly as smaller passengers, younger passengers,” he said.

“We’ll be reviewing it, but it’s likely we’ll be going back to the appeal court.”

Others, however, said that the decision is likely to embolden airlines.

“This is like a carte blanche to let the airlines do whatever they want. It is a free ticket to narrow seats and put in more rows of passengers,” said Brent D. Bowen, a professor at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Ariz., campus.

Bowen, who for 28 years has put out the Airline Quality Rating, said most airlines “automatically put you in the worst seats and you have to buy your way out.”

“They have a strategy only to put you in the middle of a row in a tiny seat in the back of the aircraft,” he said.

Frequent fliers know how to work the system to find the best seat, he said, but “it’s going to have a severe impact on the people who don’t fly very much.”

The only solution to the seat squeeze, he says, will come if Congress steps in.

“There’s no alternative, because the airlines are not going to set a reasonable standard,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Want to better yourself? Do nothing.

N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D EBRA B RUNO

D IN PRAISE OF WASTING TIME

By Alan Lightman TED Books/Simon & Schuster. 102 pp. $16.99

o you do calf stretches while you’re brushing your teeth? Listen to a podcast if you take a 10minute walk? Scroll through Twitter while you’re on the phone with your mother?

We see the multitasking, hyperconnected struggle against wasting time all around us: Mothers and nannies pushing strollers talk nonstop to friends on their cellphones and ignore the child gazing out at the world with fresh eyes. Taking a selfie with the art at a blockbuster show has become more important than actually looking at the works.

“We are losing ourselves,” writes Alan Lightman in his new book, “In Praise of Wasting Time.”

The physicist, novelist and essayist says that without downtime, our minds have no time to rest, to rejuvenate and, even more profoundly, to foster an internal sense of identity, “a deeply rooted and constant manner of honoring your inner self, affirming your values, and arranging your life so as to live by those values.”

At first glance, it seems more than a little ironic to read a case for wasting time from a man like Lightman. The MIT professor, TED talker and writer is as prolifically and comfortably at home in the fanciful world of novels as in the awe-inspiring world of astrophysics.

But now he acknowledges that he, too, is guilty of the same mistake he sees in all of us. “For any unexpected opening of time that appears during the day, I rush to patch it, as if a tear in my trousers.” He adds, “Unconsciously, without thinking about it, I have subdivided my day into smaller and smaller units of efficient time use, until there are no holes left, no breathing spaces remaining.”

I can’t help thinking that Lightman is probably trying to convince himself as much as his readers. But that might mean being a little less prolific. This is the sec-

ISTOCK

ond book he’s come out with this year. In March, he released “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” a meditation on religion and science. And he’s turned out an additional 20 or so books, ranging from the whimsical to the profound, over the past 30 years.

It’s ironic that this is a short book, just 90 pages of text (along with colorful illustrations), under the imprimatur of TED Books: “small books, big ideas,” which are, as the publisher explains, “long enough to explore a powerful idea but short enough to read in a single sitting.” So, perfect for the truncated attention span.

Let’s also keep in mind that this might be an argument aimed more at those with the luxury to waste time. In other words, not the single mother who commutes an hour to a job, oversees homework and runs a few loads of laundry before she collapses into bed.

Ever the scientist, Lightman constructs a careful and wellsourced argument, citing the anecdotes of artists, scientists and writers to build his case methodically and convincingly. Not only does the creative mind need rejuvenation and rest to develop the habit of divergent thinking, he says, there’s also a larger, more spiritual loss: Those of us who never unplug from the wired world will “die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually,” he warns. He compares this to our destruction of the natural world.

Lightman admits that even though he believes his message, he’s also lost part of his inner self.

“By inner self, I mean that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. . . . When I listen to my inner self, I hear the breathing of my spirit. Those breaths are so tiny and delicate, I need still-

ness to hear them, I need slowness to hear them.”

His solution is that we should all start to develop the habit of mind that allows for contemplation and reflection. “We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.” Even just a halfhour a day of wasted time is a gift we give ourselves, he says. And no, this does not mean scrolling through Facebook, catching up on Colbert or commenting on the latest ridiculous tweet. No notifications. No cellphone. Just sit on the porch and listen to the birds chirping. n Bruno is the author, with Bob Davis, of “Beijing from A to Z: An Expat Couple’s Adventures in China.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Fantasy sports: From Ali to Nixon

Latest in spy saga takes aim at Russia

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN V . R OBERTS

hat if? What if Bucky Dent’s home run over Fenway’s Green Monster, leading the New York Yankees to the 1978 American League East title, had gone foul? What if Muhammad Ali had gotten a draft deferment as a conscientious objector? What if Richard Nixon had been good at football?

These are a few of the intriguing questions posed in this collection of 31 essays edited by Mike Pesca, a former sports reporter for NPR. At their best, these essays are genuinely thought-provoking.

But as with any collection, the contributions are wildly uneven.

Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in the movies, proves he’s a better actor than he is a writer, offering a dollop of witless whimsy about a childhood letter he wrote to basketball star Dan Majerle. A piece by Jon Bois of the sports news website SBNation, “What If Basketball Rims Were Smaller Than Basketballs?” is plain silly.

Some of the fantasies are delightful, however.

L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated asks, “What If There Had Always Been Sports PR Flacks?” and produces an edited version of Lou Gehrig’s famous farewell speech, which includes the line, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this Earth.” Homogenized by corporate communications, the “luckiest man” phrase is edited out because it “may be a touch arrogant.”

The best essays are serious attempts at counterfactual history that take a pivot point in the national narrative and examine it from a different perspective. A fine example comes from Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer, who contemplates the impact of Richard Nixon’s ineptitude at football, which the future president played — badly — at Whittier College. “A robust football career might have pushed Nixon away from an interest in politics,” he

writes, “a combative arena in which he very much hoped to demonstrate the manful prowess he lacked on the football field.”

Zelizer digs deeper, however, positing that Nixon’s athletic futility helped shape his flawed character. A man who succeeded at sports might have been “imbued with a self-worth derived from bona fide achievements on the fields of play in his youth.” Instead his failure produced an insecure, even paranoid, personality and taught “the grim lesson that he had to be ruthless to get by.”

Leigh Montville, who has written for the Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated, examines the career of Ali, the heavyweight champion who became a heroic symbol of antiwar sentiment and racial pride after refusing to join the Army in April 1967. That defiance triggered his banishment from boxing at the height of his prowess, and Montville asks: “How much more history could he have made?”

Yet, Montville insightfully points out, without his martyrdom, Ali would have been just another athlete, not a cultural icon. The draft board’s decision cost him victories inside the ring but amplified his voice outside it.

Mary Pilon, who has written for the New Yorker and Bloomberg Businessweek, assesses the impact of Title IX, the federal law mandating equality in college athletic programs. “Even the slightest amount of sports participation among young men and women,” she writes, “instills a sense of selfesteem that is applicable to other arenas. Though without a Title IX you can strike the ‘and women’ part from that last sentence.”

So what if this book had never been published? Readers would be deprived of many resounding base hits. And a few real foul balls. n Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. This was written for The Washington Post.

I UPON FURTHER REVIEW The Greatest WhatIfs in Sports History Edited by Mike Pesca Twelve. 308 pp. $28

SPYMASTER

By Brad Thor Emily Bestler Books/ Atria. 327 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

R ICHARD L IPEZ

t’s refreshing to find a selfdescribed “conservative libertarian” thriller-writer bashing Russia instead of liberals.

Brad Thor may be a regular contributor to Fox News, but his new book is way out of sync with the current cozy-up-to-Putin rightwing zeitgeist. In “Spymaster,” the 18th book inhis Scot Harvath international espionage saga, Thor convincingly portrays Russia as a reborn Cold War-era evil empire hellbent on reconquering its former territory — first by fomenting strife among the NATO alliance and then by grabbing the Baltic states before anybody can say, “Oops.”

Thor’s many fans — more than 15 million of his Harvath books have been sold — will find his former Navy SEAL hero aging a wee bit in this one. In his mid-40s, Harvath now takes performanceenhancing “Hulk sauce” injections. Harvath is even contemplating marriage to his longtime main squeeze, Lara, giving up his pursuit of Swedish flight attendants.

As his action-hero youth recedes, Harvath also considers replacing his beloved longtime boss, Reed Carlton, as head of a private intelligence company that performs controversial deeds — abductions, black-site renditions, torture — away from, but on behalf of, the CIA. Carlton’s descent into a fog of Alzheimer’s is untimely, as his organization has been tasked with retrieving some tactical nukes filched from a U.S. base in Poland and spirited into Belarus. Harvath convinces U.S. President Paul Porter that Russian machinations could lead to World War III, and the operative is given free rein to thwart the Russian intelligence agency.

It’s a big job saving the world, but Harvath is up to it. He and his team of commandos track down and capture Russian baddies and then make them sing like canaries.

Readers learn all the latest interrogation techniques — one specialist

loosens tongues with a kind of aroma therapy — and by the time you get to the last page of “Spymaster,” you’ll know the difference between a “Mark 48 belt-fed machine gun” and a “LaRue Tactical 6.5 Grendel FDE rifle with a Schmidt & Bender 5-25x56 scope with an illuminated reticle.”

These minutiae on firearms and Thor’s geopolitical musings — especially on Putin’s territorial ambitions — are often more interesting than what actually happens in the novel. His narrative prose ranges from the workmanlike down to the snooze-inducing. Tree limbs cracking with ice echo “through the forest like gunfire.”

Russian soldiers in a Swedish bar stand out “like sore thumbs.”

Some of Thor’s action scenes trundle along well enough, but not so with the events where Harvath isn’t present. To sow discord and confusion within NATO, Russia stages terrorist bombings across Europe. These scenes are oddly underwrought. At an Istanbul subway attack, bombs “tore through everything — flesh, bone, steel, tile, and concrete. Aboveground, buildings shook violently.

Some thought it was an earthquake.”

Thor’s banality even spoils an otherwise exciting scene where Harvath and some of his cohorts skydive into Lithuanian airspace, glide over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, then parachute into a pasture at night. The best line Thor can come up with for Harvath as he soars across the inky sky is: “There was absolutely no other feeling in the world like it.”

In a last-page twist — it’s actually the only surprise in the entire book — a betrayal is revealed that feels less like a logical result of anything that has come before than a marketing tease for Scot Harvath thriller No. 19. n Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2018

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OPINIONS

A public servant truly served by the public DANA MILBANK is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post.

I am skeptical of reports saying that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was forced to resign. ¶ There is no way that guy could have been forced out of his office — even with special­ops teams involved. Pruitt spent the past 16 months turning the Environmental Protection Agency in­ to a paramilitary operation, with the sole purpose of pro­ tecting him. ¶ Pruitt had spent some $4.6 million on secu­ rity, enlisting a round­the­clock detail that followed him everywhere, even to Disneyland and Italy, whisking him from his office — where a $43,000 soundproof phone booth cocooned him and a panic alarm connected him di­ rectly to the security office — to the $50­a­night room in a condominium that he had rented from a lobbyist.

He clothed his security agents in $2,750 worth of “tactical pants” and “tactical polos,” the Intercept reported. He got them $88,000 worth of security radios, holsters and travel charges. He let it be known that he liked to travel around with police lights flashing and the siren blaring — the better to avoid traffic — and this undoubtedly improved the experience in the Chevy Suburban with bullet-resistant seats that he leased for $10,200 a year.

He made sure his guards were equipped, on the ground, with a $931 breaching kit of the type they used to break down the door to his lobbyist-owned condo when he was napping and staff grew panicky that they could not reach him. In the air, he flew first class to minimize his contact with passengers who might “endanger his life.” Even the administrator’s skin was well protected; he dispatched his security detail to the RitzCarlton to find him the scented lotion he required.

Democrats are gleeful about Pruitt’s resignation, and Republicans are disinclined to defend him. This is unfortunate, for Pruitt was one of the greats.

In fact, he was possibly the alltime-greatest public servant, if we take that term to mean, literally, “one who is served by the public.”

By this measure, Pruitt’s accomplishments were nonpareil. It wasn’t just the quantity of investigations his activities occasioned — Fourteen? Sixteen? Depends on who’s counting — but the breadth of his behavior.

Taxpayers are said to have paid for: his travel home to Oklahoma, sometimes by private charter or military jet; his government aides doing house-hunting for him and putting his hotel rooms on their personal credit cards; a lobbyist-arranged trip to Morocco and attempts for a similar trip to Australia; $1,560 worth of fountain pens with Pruitt’s signature on them; raises for aides loyal to Pruitt and consideration of opening an EPA office in Tulsa so Pruitt could work near home. Along the way, Pruitt reportedly demoted or sidelined those who resisted such schemes, used private email and phones for government work, and attempted to get jobs for his

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt resigned Thursday.

wife with the Republican Attorneys General Association and Chick-fil-A. And yet, Pruitt survived — for 503 days from swearing-in to resignation. That’s an eternity in the Trump administration. Anthony Scaramucci set the standard, lasting just 10 days in his job managing White House communications. If we take Scaramucci’s 10-day figure to be the standard of measurement — one “mooch” — then Pruitt survived an amazing 50.3 mooches, even while enduring more than a dozen scandals, any one of which would have doomed a lesser man.

Yet here was President Trump in April: “He’s been very courageous. Hasn’t been easy, but I think he’s done an absolutely fantastic job. I think he’ll be fine.” In June, Trump declared that “Scott is doing a great job” despite “being attacked very viciously by the press.” (Hence the need for tactical pants and bulletresistant car seats.)

How did Pruitt do it for so long? Some say it’s because he was effective at the EPA, where he did a very skillful job of not enforcing environmental

regulation. Others point to his prodigious sycophancy: having his staffers seek out a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel, dining so often at the White House mess that he was urged to eat elsewhere, and letting it be known that he would be willing to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III if Trump fired Jeff Sessions as attorney general and gave Pruitt the job on an acting basis.

But I think a third explanation may account for Pruitt’s longevity in the face of insurmountable scandal. While the media, and the Democrats, were getting all worked up about the mattress and the lotion and Chick-fil-A and Disneyland and the phone booth and the bulletproof seats and the rest of Pruitt’s pennyante corruption, relatively little attention was going to the emoluments, which are of much greater value: Ivanka Trump’s trademarks and Jared Kushner’s investors and foreign governments pumping millions into Trump properties.

Now Pruitt is gone, and Trump is about to be caught with his tactical pants down. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

GOP’s long-game strategy pays off DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

During the bitter campaign of 1968, half a century ago, Richard M. Nixon tapped anger over the liberalism of the so-called Warren Court — the Supreme Court led by Nixon’s longtime rival, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Even then, the anger was nothing new. For years, billboards demanding “Impeach Earl Warren” had dotted the byways of the South and Midwest, put there by conservatives outraged by the court’s landmark decisions regarding civil rights, voting rights, religion, free speech, sexual liberation, protections for accused criminals and more.

But Nixon’s presidency was not the triumph conservatives desired. Like many presidents before him, Nixon took an offhand approach to appointing justices. When Warren retired, Nixon’s choice to replace him was the vain but lightweight Warren E. Burger. His pick for associate justice, Harry A. Blackmun, was Burger’s pal from Minnesota. A conservative dud, Blackmun entered the liberal pantheon with his abortion rights opinion in Roe v. Wade. Richmond lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. was 64 when Nixon appointed him, so his time on the court was short by today’s standards. Only William H. Rehnquist, who later became chief justice, proved to be a powerful and enduring conservative force — and Nixon might not have nominated him if

his preferred choice had been faster to return a phone call.

Four vacancies: only one accidental home run. But the conservatives didn’t fold. Instead, the right dug in for a long war to control the Supreme Court. It was a war of ups and downs: They were disappointed by President Gerald Ford’s nominee, John Paul Stevens, and again by President George H.W. Bush’s choice of David Souter. Even conservative beacon Ronald Reagan fell short when he promoted the agile compromisers Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy.

Through each letdown, conservatives maintained their focus and, in the process, they transformed the selection of justices from a haphazard art to a polished science.

With the retirement of Kennedy, conservatives stand at the brink of claiming their prize.

President Trump intends to swap the idiosyncratic Kennedy for a solidly reliable conservative justice. The resulting five-vote majority of rock-ribbed conservatives will surely dominate the court with a philosophical unity unseen in the United States since Warren’s longago heyday.

In making his choice, Trump will probably rely on the precision-tooled machinery of the Federalist Society. Founded in the early 1980s amid frustration over the continued left lean of the courts, the group rallied rightleaning legal scholars and government officials to create a pipeline for young conservatives to rise without friction from liberal pressures. Never again should Republican presidents have to guess, as Nixon did, at the bona fides of a potential judge: The Federalist Society would foster the development of a farm system for the future bench.

Within the community — which now numbers in the tens of thousands — conservative ideologues bolster their confidence in their own ideas.

The group’s logo features a bust of James Madison, principal author of the Constitution, but it

might as well be a likeness of the late justice Antonin Scalia. As faculty sponsor of the first chapter at the University of Chicago’s law school, Scalia was present at the creation, and when Reagan added him to the Supreme Court in 1986, Scalia became a role model and yardstick for conservative judges of the future.

Today, the court is filling up with justices stamped from Scalia’s mold. Like him, they were appointed relatively young, in hopes they would have long tenures ahead of them. They arrived at the court with track records that made their views clear — but unmuddied by controversy.

Trump’s nominee will be a wellknown quantity, a relative youth with the stamp of the Federalist Society. The actuarial tables will promise decades of dependable service to the conservative cause.

And with that, conservatives will arrive at the magic number toward which their movement has been working all these years.

Five.

Today’s politics is so focused on winning the next election, the next news cycle, or even just the next Twitter thread. This moment reminds us that politics also involves the long game. Now Democrats will have to play it. n

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OPINIONS

BY KAL FOR THE ECONOMIST

A defense of Mexico’s new leader JAMES R. JONES was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 1993 to 1997 and is now chairman of Monarch Global Strategies, which advises U.S. companies on doing business in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. This was written for The Washington Post.

One week ago, Mexicans chose Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known nearly universally as AMLO, as their next president. López Obrador has been referred to by many Mexicans and some analysts of Mexico as anti-business and anti-American. In reality, he is neither.

I have known López Obrador for 25 years, since I was U.S. ambassador to Mexico. The words that best describe him are pragmatic and driven. He is driven by a desire to improve the living conditions of Mexicans who remain poor.

Over the years, I’ve discussed and argued with AMLO many times. While he may have preconceived notions about a correct approach (as all of us do), he will listen and sometimes be persuaded by different facts and opinions. He is not afraid to change his position on an issue if he is convinced that there is a better way. Consider: After seeing improved economic opportunities for Mexicans, he has come to support the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free-trade agreements.

It’s true that López Obrador is wary of the close and, in his view, corrupt relationships in the past between certain powerful businesses and the old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) political regime, which he opposed during his developing

political career. But AMLO is at heart a pragmatist. He recognizes that to help his primary constituency — the poor and disadvantaged — he must grow the economy, and he understands that economic growth comes from a competitive private economy, not from the government. The redevelopment of the Zocalo, the historic center of Mexico City, was a publicprivate partnership, with the two main actors being Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest business leader, and López Obrador, then mayor of Mexico City. This project transformed the area, helping all levels of society.

López Obrador is clearly wary of President Trump and his rhetorical excesses and policies that negatively affect Mexico and Mexican citizens who live and

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

work in the United States. The Mexican president-elect has also long opposed the imposition of economic and security policies on Mexico from abroad, typically emanating from the United States. Rather than being antiAmerican, AMLO is a nationalist who is highly protective of Mexican national sovereignty.

But López Obrador also recognizes that the interdependence between the United States and Mexico means that our two countries must work together to resolve shared problems.

While previously critical of the constitutional energy reforms of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, AMLO now says he wants to restore Mexico’s hydrocarbon energy production, and he recognizes that he needs private capital to do so. His main concern is corruption, and his team will closely audit this. He will also emphasize development of alternative energy, such as solar power. He recognizes that in energy, as in other sectors of the economy, foreign investment is needed. Based on our discussions over the past year, I expect he will continue to respect the independence of the central bank, although that issue will have to be closely monitored by watching his appointments to the board. I also

believe he will employ a conservative fiscal policy as he did while mayor of Mexico City, thus showing balanced and mutually supportive fiscal and monetary policies Mexico is essentially a conservative, family-oriented country, but its people are fed up with decades of corruption and violence. These are the issues that got AMLO elected, and they will dominate the beginning of his administration. Still, while López Obrador’s rhetoric will highlight the plight of the poor, especially in the country’s south, expect him to promote economic growth through the private sector.

Mexico’s poverty problem is too severe to be solved during his presidency, but he will strive to lay the foundation for a long-term solution. His aim is to instill hope for the next generation through major investments in education, health-care delivery and infrastructure development.

It will take time for AMLO and the business community to develop trust, just as developing an operational partnership with the United States will take some forbearance on both sides of the border. But both are possible if all sides recognize that cooperation is needed if Mexico is to achieve its potential and be a strong partner for the United States. n

SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

MS-13 BY

J OSÉ M IGUEL C RUZ

The Trump administration’s campaign against immigration conflates the flow of undocumented immigrants from Central America with the growth of MS­13 — the brutal transnational street gang. The president and the attorney general frequently say that stopping the former means stopping the latter. Information about the four­decade­old gang, formal­ ly named Mara Salvatrucha, is scarce, but we know enough to dispel some of the misconceptions that have grown up around it.

MYTH NO. 1 MS-13 was created by Salvadoran ex-guerrillas.

National Geographic said in 2011 that many original MS-13 members “were former guerrilla fighters who brought their war experience and a hardened attitude towards life and death.”

But the gang originated in Los Angeles, mostly in the areas of Koreatown, Pico-Union and Westlake, in the early 1980s. It was formed by children of refugees fleeing El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. The original members were teenagers and young adults who bonded around metal music, marijuana and the need to belong to an identitybased group in a foreign land.

Their hand sign, with the forefinger and pinkie extended, comes from the practice of flashing horns in heavy metal.

Most members were too young to know their homeland’s conflict firsthand, but they appropriated war stories to frighten rival gangs.

MYTH NO. 2 MS-13 is well-organized and controlled from El Salvador.

In 2012, the Treasury Department designated MS-13 a significant transnational criminal organization and named some of its members as targets of U.S. economic sanctions. Some law enforcement officials told InSight Crime in 2016 that decisions about MS-13 activities are made in El Salvador, not in the United States.

But the gang is only loosely

organized in this country. It can be better described as a federation of teenage barrio cliques that share the MS-13 brand. The gang is more structured in El Salvador — where its development, after arriving from Los Angeles, responded to local policies and prison conditions — than in Honduras or Guatemala.

There are important differences in the way it operates in every country and in various regions of the United States. Local or national leaderships are usually not recognized across borders, despite the efforts of some operatives, primarily from El Salvador, to control cells on the East Coast. Most of the gang’s activities and criminal dynamics seem to be more determined by local conditions.

members in El Salvador in 2016 showed that 91 percent have never been to the United States.

Those who leave often do so because of family, joining the massive migration flows from Central America, not because the gang instructs or sponsors them.

In many cases, they are trying to flee the group and its violence. As with other brand-name gangs that have spread in the United States, the growth of MS-13 seems to be linked more to the relocation of family groups than to a deliberate expansion plan.

MYTH NO. 3 Illegal immigrants come to the United States to expand the gang’s reach.

According to U.S. officials, MS-13 leaders in El Salvador are sending gang members to the United States to bolster local cells.

Yet only a minuscule share of undocumented immigrants who have entered the country in the past few years are linked to MS13, according to Stephanie Leutert at the University of Texas.

The overwhelming majority of those who have joined the gang in Central America have never left their countries. A Florida International University survey of mostly imprisoned gang

MYTH NO. 4 Halting migration from Central America will stop MS-13.

Trump has made the case repeatedly that U.S. immigration laws have enabled MS-13 to infiltrate American communities.

But most MS-13 members living in the United States joined the gang here, because of social conditions or life events, according to a study by InSight Crime and American University.

As with many other street gangs, recruits often come from broken families or have parents who work several menial jobs to get by.

Factors such as community services, the quality of the school

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force members partnered with ICE to arrest a suspected MS-13 member in Virginia on Aug. 10, 2017.

system, a student’s peers in school and local law enforcement policies play more critical roles in determining the success of the gang than immigration. In Homestead, Fla., for instance, where the local government offers many of these salutary resources, a substantial and growing Central American immigrant community has produced no significant reports of MS-13 expansion.

MYTH NO. 5 MS-13 poses a threat to communities all over America.

MS-13 is not a large street gang; it’s not even among the biggest in the country. According to Justice Department data, it has some 10,000 members here — half the size of the Bloods and one-fifth the size of the 18th Street Gang (or Barrio 18), MS-13’s archenemy.

While its activities in some cities are brutal, MS-13’s threat on American soil is concentrated in a few Hispanic communities, especially around Long Island, Los Angeles and Washington. n Cruz is the director of research at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2018

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