The Washington Post National Weekly - December 16, 2018

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THE FIX

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THE FIX

Senate’s bipartisan pushback Senate’s bipartisan pushback A ARON B LAKE

“Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be “Our intelligence agencies continue to asBY A ARON B LAKE that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this resident Trump and top Cabinet offisess all information, but it could very well be tragic event — maybe he did, and maybe he cials have completely obscured and that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this resident Trump and top Cabinet offididn’t!” Trump said in a statement. “That slow-rolled their own intelligence tragic event — maybe he did, and maybe he cials have completely obscured and being said, we may never know all of the facts community’s conclusion about the didn’t!” Trump said in a statement. “That slow-rolled their own intelligence surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Saudis’ killing of Washington Post Global being said, we may never know all of the facts community’s conclusion about the Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is Opinions columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And on surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Saudis’ killing of Washington Post Global with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Thursday, every senator in attendance reKhashoggi. In any case, our relationship is Opinions columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And on Thursday’s resolution is the Senate saying, buked them. with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Thursday, every senator in attendance rewith a unified voice, that that’s simply not Just moments after the Senate passed a Thursday’s resolution is the Senate saying, buked them. good enough. It’s saying that the U.S. governresolution calling for an end to U.S. involvewith a unified voice, that that’s simply not Just moments after the Senate passed a ment needs to be on the record with moral ment on the Saudi side of the war in Yemen, good enough. It’s saying that the U.S. governresolution calling for an end to U.S. involveclarity — moral clarity that Trump and compathe GOP-run Senate voted unanimously for ment needs to be on the record with moral ment on the Saudi side of the war in Yemen, ny simply haven’t provided. It would be one Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) resolution officialclarity — moral clarity that Trump and compathe GOP-run Senate voted unanimously for thing for Trump and Pompeo to say Mohamly blaming Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed ny simply haven’t provided. It would be one Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) resolution officialmed did it but that it’s not worth retaliation; bin Salman for Khashoggi’s death. thing for Trump and Pompeo to say Mohamly blaming Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed they’ve gone further by covering up the Corker’s resolution says, among other med did it but that it’s not worth retaliation; bin Salman for Khashoggi’s death.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST amount of certainty that exists about his role. things: “The Senate . . . believes Crown Prince they’ve gone further by covering up the Corker’s resolution says, among other ball isPOST now in the House’s court. We Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the Sen. Bob Corker’s resolution blames the MELINA MARA/THEThe WASHINGTON amount of certainty that exists about his role. things: “The Senate . . . believes Crown Prince pretty much know it won’t pass the resolution murder of Jamal Khashoggi.” crown prince for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

The ball is now in the House’s court. We Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the Sen. Bob Corker’s resolution blames the calling for pulling out of Yemen, but it could That’s also what the CIA has concluded, but pretty much know it won’t pass the resolution murder of Jamal Khashoggi.” crown prince for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. join in rebuking the Trump administration on it’s a conclusion that Trump, Secretary of State calling for pulling out of Yemen, but it could That’s also what the CIA has concluded, but the crown prince. And if it does so, the bill “If they were in a Democratic administraMike Pompeo and even Defense Secretary Jim join in rebuking the Trump administration on it’s a conclusion that Trump, Secretary of State would go to Trump’s desk, where he’d have to tion,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said of Mattis have taken great pains to undermine. A the crown prince. And if it does so, the bill “If they were in a Democratic administraMike Pompeo and even Defense Secretary Jim decide whether to keep pretending the intelliPompeo and Mattis, “I would be all over them few weeks back, the latter two briefed senawould go to Trump’s desk, where he’d have to tion,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said of Mattis have taken great pains to undermine. A gence doesn’t say what it says — and potentialfor being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia.” tors, with Pompeo saying there was no “direct decide whether to keep pretending the intelliPompeo and Mattis, “I would be all over them few weeks back, the latter two briefed senaly risk more blowback from Congress, includCorker said if Mohammed was on trial, he reporting” of Mohammed’s culpability and gence doesn’t say what it says — and potentialfor being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia.” tors, with Pompeo saying there was no “direct ing potential sanctions. would be convicted within “30 minutes.” He Mattis saying there was no “smoking gun.” ly risk more blowback from Congress, includCorker said if Mohammed was on trial, he reporting” of Mohammed’s culpability and Ultimately this could also just be a momenalso said the difference between Haspel’s Those statements may be technically true, but ing potential sanctions. would be convicted within “30 minutes.” He Mattis saying there was no “smoking gun.” tary, symbolic rebuke — the kind that passes briefing and the one provided by Pompeo and they ignore the fact that CIA assessments Ultimately this could also just be a momenalso said the difference between Haspel’s Those statements may be technically true, but just as quickly as it comes along. Perhaps Mattis was akin to the “difference between aren’t legal documents but did assess Mohamtary, symbolic rebuke — the kind that passes briefing and the one provided by Pompeo and they ignore the fact that CIA assessments senators will think they have done enough darkness and sunshine.” med’s responsibility with “high confidence.” just as quickly as it comes along. Perhaps Mattis was akin to the “difference between aren’t legal documents but did assess Mohamnow, and they can move on.

These were Republican senators, mind you.

They created an impossible standard. senators will think they have done enough darkness and sunshine.” med’s responsibility with “high confidence.”

But to be clear, they all just shined a Trump himself has set the tone as far as CIA Director Gina Haspel conspicuously now, and they can move on.

These were Republican senators, mind you.

They created an impossible standard. spotlight on the Trump-led coverup of obscuring and questioning Mohammed’s acwasn’t furnished at that briefing, but evenBut to be clear, they all just shined a Trump himself has set the tone as far as CIA Director Gina Haspel conspicuously Khashoggi’s killing, and they did it with one tual role. While previously promising accounttually senators did get one with her as well. spotlight on the Trump-led coverup of obscuring and questioning Mohammed’s acwasn’t furnished at that briefing, but evenvoice. That’s pretty remarkable on an issue of ability for whoever was responsible, Trump And they came out of that one assured that Khashoggi’s killing, and they did it with one tual role. While previously promising accounttually senators did get one with her as well. such import and with such an important eventually said Saudi Arabia was just too Mohammed did it. They even went so far as to voice. That’s pretty remarkable on an issue of ability for whoever was responsible, Trump And they came out of that one assured that ally. n important an ally and threw his hands up in suggest Pompeo and Mattis had deliberately such import and with such an important eventually said Saudi Arabia was just too Mohammed did it. They even went so far as to the air. misled them. ally. ©The Washington Post important an ally and threw his hands up in suggest Pompeo and Mattis had deliberately n the air. misled them. ©The Washington Post BY

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This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our This publication was prepared by editors at The partner publications across the country. All articles and Washington Post for printing and distribution by our columns have previously appeared in The Post or on POLITICS partner publications across the country. All articles and washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this THEorNATION columns have previously appeared in The Post on format. For questions or comments regarding content, WORLD washingtonpost.com and have been edited toTHE fit this please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a COVER STORY format. For questions or comments regarding content, question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or INSPIRED LIFE please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your BOOKS question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or local newspaper’s circulation department. would like to place a hold on delivery, pleaseOPINION contact your © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 5, No. 10 local newspaper’s circulation department. FIVE MYTHS

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CONTENTS

ON THE COVER A Hungarian 4 soldier stands outside the 8 ON THE COVER A Hungarian POLITICS 4 parliament building in Budapest.

10 soldier stands outside the THE NATION 8 Photo by MICHAEL ROBINSON 12 parliament building in Budapest.

THE WORLD 10 CHAVEZ of The Washington Post 17 Photo by MICHAEL ROBINSON COVER STORY 12 NOTE TO READERS: The National 18 CHAVEZ of The Washington Post INSPIRED LIFE 17 Weekly will not publish the week of 20 NOTE TO READERS: The National BOOKS 18 Dec 30. It will resume on Jan. 4.

23 Weekly will not publish the week of OPINION 20 Dec 30. It will resume on Jan. 4.

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Nancy Pelosi embraces the ‘feisty grandma’ role MONICA HESSE is a Washington Post columnist.

Lord, do people love a feisty grandma. Give them Ruth Bader Ginsburg, draped in her spangly dissent collar, out­ planking everyone forever. Give them Hillary Clinton, but mostly the version where she’s wearing indoor sunglasses and checking her BlackBerry on an airplane. Elizabeth Warren, she of the spunky Senate floor speeches? Yes! Nevertheless, she persisted! (And then she persisted in getting her DNA tested for Native American ancestry and it was quietly agreed upon that she should persist a little less).

Give them all the older women who are cursing and twerking while wearing Helen Mirren bikinis or talking about their sex lives or asking about your sex life.

Our culture loves meme-ing grayhaired ladies when they’re a little inappropriate.

Which is why, on Tuesday, after Nancy Pelosi dressed down President Trump in a televised Oval Office meeting and sauntered out like she had to get to a lunch date with Audrey Hepburn, being pro-Nancy suddenly became cool again in certain liberal circles.

“Seventy. [Bleeping]. Eight.” gushed one fan on Twitter over a photo of the Democratic leader leaving the White House in a red swing coat and sunglasses.

Pelosi paused to explain why she had requested that the meeting, which also included Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), continue off camera: “I didn’t want to in front of [President Trump and Vice President Pence] say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ” She got back to Capitol Hill and promptly snarked Trump’s border wall: “It’s like a manhood thing for him,” she reportedly told House Democrats. “As if manhood could ever be associated with him.”

Her base, judging by online chatter, loved the unexpected sass. Nancy!

A few weeks ago, the fashionable argument was that Pelosi shouldn’t be in meetings representing Democrats at all.

She was a dinosaur: too elderly, too corporate, too Nancy-ish to regain the title of House speaker.

Let her make way for the young revolutionaries. Let her fade.

But with a few savvy moves, Pelosi last week managed to escape the brittle society-lady stereotype she had been forced into, and let herself be recast as a feisty grandma, one of the few ingratiating roles allowed women her age.

“I was trying to be the mom,” she told colleagues post-meeting, about keeping the peace between Trump and Schumer. But “it goes to show you: You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.”

This is a common enough aphorism, but it’s usually delivered with a more vulgar synonym. The introduction of “tinkle” makes it — well, rhetorically, it accomplishes a lot of things. It makes the entire quote repeatable, for one thing, guaranteeing media attention.

But it’s also a self-consciously prim word. A potty-training word.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) received online praise after a testy meeting with President Trump over border security.

The kind of word that pegs its user as simultaneously polite and saucy, and that depicts Trump as a toddler in need of pull-ups.

It was a strategic word choice for Pelosi’s first White House meeting as presumptive House speaker.

“Tinkle is a fun word. Haven’t heard it since I was a kid,” praised a supporter.

“Nancy Pelosi is everybody’s favorite badass grandma,” responded another.

As adoration of Pelosi scrolled across my screen — and readers filled my inbox suggesting that I should laud her, weeks after readers in my inbox suggested I should loathe her — it felt like an illustration of a known conundrum: The public seems to like female politicians when they do their jobs. But it dislikes them when they’re campaigning for those jobs. We apparently view selfpromotion — or mere selfassertion — as unseemly. Hillary Clinton consistently earned approval ratings in the mid- to high 60s when she served as secretary of state, higher than Barack Obama or Joe Biden during those same years. But when she ran for president, her numbers tanked. Only 34 percent had positive feelings about her in

a poll from the spring of 2016. A similar thing happened to Warren, a progressive superstar at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who saw her ratings dip when she first sought her Senate seat.

So on Tuesday, Pelosi was doing her job, and her fan base loved it.

She was being a boss, they thought. And she was doing it in a way that was specifically feminine, in a way that highlighted her age and her maternal instincts.

In a way, this was a tidy response to criticisms that she was past her prime. Do Democrats really want to send a young, inexperienced revolutionary into contentious White House meetings? Or do they want to send a grandma?

It’s worth mentioning, I guess, that Pelosi shouldn’t have had to wear the perfect coat and choose the perfect naughty phrases to become so beloved. That’s not how it would work in a meritbased world instead of a memebased one. But by leaning into the archetype, she was conveying a carefully crafted message: Everyone else around her might need pull-ups. She was old and experienced, and by god, she was feisty enough to take them all on. n

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BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

America’s failings in one number ROBERT GEBELHOFF is an assistant editor and contributor to the Washington Post opinions section.

There’s something uncomfortably sterile about life-expectancy rates.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that average American life expectancy shortened by a tenth of a year, as it did last year, it’s forgivable if the problem isn’t immediately obvious.

Sure, we might have shaved off a little more than a month from our lifespans, but at the same time, mortality rates for some of America’s leading causes of death, including cancer, heart disease and kidney disease, are falling. What’s the difference between 78.7 and 78.6 years?

But behind that loss — behind the clean bar charts and crisp CDC estimates — is the core of our country’s most shameful social failures.

The recent downward tick of our lifespans is part of a dismal trend that began in 2015. That places us in the longest period of falling U.S. life expectancy since the 1910s — back when the Great War claimed more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of thousands of others fell to the Spanish flu pandemic.

There are two primary forces behind our recent drop in life expectancy — both the result of systemic crises in the United States. The first, as many others have noted, is drug overdoses.

Last year, a little more than 70,000 Americans succumbed to

drug addiction, most from opioids such as heroin or painkillers. It’s a terrible number no matter how you slice it, though a slight ray of hope broke through the data. Public-policy experts now believe we might have gotten past the worst of the epidemic (although overdoses due to powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl continue to surge).

The second force at play is the United States’ gun epidemic.

Firearm deaths are not explicitly included in the CDC’s latest numbers, but we can still find them. They are most clearly evident in the report’s acknowledgment that rates of suicide, overwhelmingly committed by firearms, increased to new heights last

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

year at 14 deaths per 100,000 people.

And while the CDC has yet to report figures on 2017’s firearmrelated deaths, data collected by the Gun Violence Archive suggests that the number of nonsuicide gun deaths rose by 3 percent. Combined with suicides, that means we’re likely to have had around 40,000 deaths from guns last year overall.

But those numbers mask even more disturbing disparities. A study published earlier this month in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine estimates that gun violence has shortened the life expectancy for black Americans by almost twice as much as it has for white ones. Combining data from 2000 to 2016, the study found that guns shaved a little more than two years off white Americans’ lives; black people, however, had to forfeit more

There are two primary forces behind our drop in life expectancy — both the result of systemic crises.

than four. Most of that difference resulted from violence that claimed young black lives during adolescence and young adulthood.

Where is our shame? We are, by leaps and bounds, the wealthiest nation in the world.

We boast medical achievements no other country can claim. And slowly but surely, we are reducing deaths from our most persistent public-health problems. Yet we allow ourselves to be dragged down by such social and racial disparities?

Republicans, to their limited credit, have passed legislation in an attempt to the curb the opioid epidemic, but the paltry funding they dedicated to it illustrates their true commitment to the issue. Meanwhile, Republicans at the state level are scrambling to add bureaucratic hurdles to health-care coverage for lowincome Americans. And we’re all well aware of our government’s complete failure to address gun violence — even though plenty of sensible reforms could reduce deaths, including suicides.

President Trump set out on his Inauguration Day to end “American carnage.” But it’s continuing, and the evidence is plain for all to see. If only we had the leadership to do something about it. n

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A new media landscape for 2020 BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

A

bout 120 people showed up for Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s recent town hall, his first since losing his U.S. Senate race. The Texas Democrat then went home to livestream himself cooking a chicken dinner with his wife, daughter and their pet snake Monty.

That 45-minute broadcast attracted 257,000 views on Facebook — along with more than 12,400 comments.

The 2020 campaign, which is poised to kick into high gear next year with dozens of potential candidates, will take place in a media landscape that has shifted in just the past two years and been radically transformed since the 2008 primary, which began before the release of the first iPhone.

Iowa hay bale speeches and cable news primary debates will still play a role. But Democratic strategists say the quest to capture the attention of Democrats online, through social streams and viral sharing that exude a sense of immediacy and authenticity, could dominate the early months in a crowded field, as energized voters subscribe and swipe in search of a candidate match.

Get ready for a new era when potential presidential candidates will routinely share photos of their chance encounters or kitchen creations on Instagram — as Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) did with her Thanksgiving turkey, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) did with her stuffing, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) did with his husband’s pie in recent weeks.

Others, like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are well on their way to creating entirely independent inhouse news channels, sometimes traveling the country with professional crews who provide multicamera setups and polished feeds that get stream counts in the hundreds of millions.

“A Democrat needs to be able to basically create an alternative media ecosystem to get their messag-

SERGIO FLORES/BLOOMBERG

Potential presidential candidates face a rising demand for sharing personal moments online es out,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, who now co-hosts Pod Save America, a liberal podcast.

“We did not figure that out in 2016 and we have to figure that out in 2020.”

The current king of political social media, President Trump, uses Twitter daily with his unique vernacular to try to set the news cycle, often with false or provocative claims that have the added benefit of getting coverage from traditional news outlets. Democratic strategists uniformly agree that this is not an approach that will work for their candidates, who seek to introduce themselves to the country as more than just opponents or imitators of the president.

“People say Trump is masterful at dominating the press via Twitter. Really he is masterful at dominating the press by being outrageous,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the

director of communications on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

“Democrats should look at social media as their way of telling their own story, not a means of competing for attention for Trump. They will fail at that.”

The candidates also have to find a way to craft their messages to fit the mediums where they are publishing. “The real shift has to do with how do you relate to people in a way that meets their expectations right now,” said Teddy Goff, a senior digital strategist for the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Obama. “A phony stock footage political ad is going to look really discordant next to a funny story about the weekend from your best friend.”

Several unannounced Democratic campaigns have been looking to the example of two standout Democratic social media stars from the 2018 cycles — O’Rourke, who is weighing his own presiden-

Beto O’Rourke, at the time a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, holds a cellphone while speaking to voters in El Paso on Election Day. He became a viral sensation during his campaign.

tial run, and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

O’Rourke became a viral phenom during the campaign, raising $38 million between July and September in appeals so based around his own voice he insisted on personally writing the fundraising emails in his own name.

Usually, the missives are consigned to assistants who employ numbingly similar appeals.

Since winning her race in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Ocasio-Cortez has been recording and posting to her about 1 million Instagram followers a blow-by-blow account of her time in Washington, from getting lost in the U.S. Capitol complex, to caucus orientation rooms, to her late-night lip-syncing of a Kanye West song as she walks the streets of Capitol Hill. She also has engaged in rapid-fire Twitter combat with critics.

But such approaches may not translate easily to candidates less comfortable with an arms-length camera or snappy thumbs. “I am lucky to work with somebody who feels okay being authentic and is able to do it,” says Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez.

“She is getting a lot of engagement.”

Other candidates, who are less familiar with the always streaming approach to daily life, have taken a more traditional approach to creating their own media channels. Former vice president Joe Biden has recorded highly produced YouTube monologues called “Here’s the Deal.” The videos regularly grab more than 100,000 views on Facebook.

Likely the largest independent media operation belongs to Sanders, who invested heavily in creating his content around issues after the 2016 election. He started a podcast, “The Bernie Sanders Show,” booked a public event series and hired a video team that has attracted 1.5 billion views on Facebook and 148 million more on Twitter. (Both platforms count a “view” after a user watches three seconds or more of a video.) n ©The Washington Post

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A divided government comes calling B Y P HILIP R UCKER, J OSH D AWSEY AND R OBERT C OSTA

I

n his first two years in office, President Trump operated without a clear check on his power. With his party controlling both houses of Congress, he issued demands from his bedroom in the form of early-morning tweets, and legislative leaders got in line. He rarely was personally confronted about his untruths and misstatements. And he mostly ignored congressional Democrats, choosing to spar instead with journalists.

That all came to a crashing halt Tuesday. In an extraordinarily heated public fight with the nation’s top two Democratic leaders, the combustible president confronted for the first time the enormity of the challenge he will face over the next two years: divided government.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely next speaker, and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called out Trump’s falsehoods. They exposed him as malleable about his promised border wall. They lectured him about the legislative process and reiterated to him that he lacked the votes to secure the $5 billion he seeks for the wall.

The Democrats also needled him for his party winning Senate contests last month only in reliably red states. They provoked him by highlighting the softening of the economy and the gyrations in the stock market. And they extracted from him a claim of personal responsibility for the budget brinkmanship.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” Trump said. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.”

During 17 extraordinary minutes of raised voices, pointed fingers and boorish interruptions in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Pelosi and Schumer introduced Trump to Washington’s new dynamic.

And no apparent progress was made — perhaps a harbinger for

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pelosi, Schumer introduce Trump to Washington’s new dynamic what lies ahead.

“Unfortunately, this has spiraled downward,” Pelosi interjected midway through the televised meeting.

Once she returned to the Capitol, the speaker-in-waiting told some of her Democratic colleagues that she felt like she had been in “a tinkle contest with a skunk” — and even questioned the president’s manhood, according to a Democratic aide in the room.

“It’s like a manhood thing for him,” Pelosi said in reference to the wall, according to the aide. “As if manhood could ever be associat-

ed with him.”

With Democrats sweeping into power in the House in January, Trump for the first time will be forced to work with the opposition party to govern. And if Tuesday’s spectacle is any indication, Pelosi and Schumer intend to be tough adversaries. They showed an eagerness to challenge the president by using some of his own tactics against him. They tried not only to debate him on policy, but also to hold him accountable for his fact-challenged bluster and to paint him as weak and inept.

President Trump unexpectedly let cameras roll for a debate over government funding with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, right, as Vice President Pence sat quietly.

“When you feed yourself a diet of adoration and echo chambers, you aren’t well prepared to handle actual pushback,” said Stu Loeser, a New York-based Democratic strategist and former aide to Schumer. “The president came into office bragging that he was the world’s greatest dealmaker, but he is yet to show that to the American people.”

Several White House advisers and GOP congressional aides said they believed Trump damaged himself by agreeing to own a possible shutdown and so vividly saying he would not blame it on

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Schumer, as he did an earlier shutdown. By doing that, these people said, the president took away his main leverage: The House could pass a $5 billion bill, and Republicans could come along in the Senate.

Still, some Trump allies believed the Tuesday clash with Pelosi and Schumer was a successful contrast for the president. They argued that he directly and repeatedly conveyed his core message that building a wall is essential to securing the nation’s border with Mexico.

“We need border security. People are pouring into our country, including terrorists,” Trump said.

He added, “You can’t have very border security without the wall.”

Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) said of the televised clash: “I didn’t see anybody who was particularly vituperative.

I thought it was passion, and that happens all the time around here.”

Kennedy added: “If I were playing poker with President Trump and he was across the table from me and he had demonstrated the face that he demonstrated in that meeting, and I wasn’t holding good cards, I’d fold, because I don’t think he’s bluffing. I think he’s prepared to shut down the government.”

At a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans, Vice President Pence explained the president’s performance by saying that the Trump the public sees on the stump at campaign rallies is the same Trump fighting in Washington, according to two senators in attendance.

The conflict comes at a fragile moment for Trump’s presidency.

The Russia investigation is intensifying and becoming more perilous both politically and perhaps legally. House Democrats are preparing a series of potentially dam-

aging investigations into Trump’s finances and allegations of corruption in the administration.

The 2020 presidential campaign is about to begin, starting with an expected free-for-all in the Democratic primaries.

Meanwhile, Trump is scrambling to hire a new chief of staff, having been turned down by his pick for the job after announcing that John F. Kelly would be leaving by year’s end.

After the press pool left the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump repeated to Pelosi and Schumer his claim that many people want to be his chief of staff. Schumer then looked at Kelly, who was standing in the room, and remarked that it appeared he would have to stay on the job for a while, according to an aide who was present.

For months, Trump’s aides have told him he is unlikely to get $5 billion for the border wall in December, but he wants to show his supporters that he is fighting for the funding, according to two White House officials.

Pelosi tried to set the tone for Tuesday’s Oval Office confab. She told reporters later that she began by leading a prayer about King Solomon. She and Schumer sat on couches, with Trump and Vice President Pence seated in twin armchairs in front of a fireplace.

Pence did not say a word, not even after Schumer mocked Trump for winning a Senate seat in the vice president’s home state of Indiana.

Pence sat expressionless as he observed the fireworks.

The vice president was not the only observer, of course. The meeting was intended to be closed to the press, but White House staffers soon ushered in a pool of journalists to capture the exchanges. Although aides often urge him to keep such meetings closed to the media, Trump likes

FROM TOP LEFT: President Trump meets with Democratic leaders Tuesday afternoon, after earlier posting contentious tweets about the border.

Center, House legislative affairs Deputy Director Chris Hodgson, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney witness the meeting. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly listens to the back-andforth.

“Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

the visual of him at the center of a room leading a meeting with lawmakers because he looks like he is “in charge,” according to a former White House official.

On Tuesday, once the television cameras were rolling, Trump welcomed the Democratic leaders to the White House. He called it “a great honor.”

But the visit quickly devolved.

Pelosi twice suggested they transition into a private discussion. “I don’t think we should have a debate in front of the press on this,” she said.

Critics accused her of trying to hide from the public, but Pelosi later told reporters that she did not want to embarrass the president by contradicting him “when he was putting forth figures that had no reality to them, no basis in fact.”

“I didn’t want to, in front of those people, say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ” Pelosi added.

During the meeting, as Trump insisted upon securing funding for his proposed wall — claiming a “national emergency” with drugs and disease pouring into the country — he suggested that Pelosi, too, might support the wall but was afraid to say so for fear of losing Democratic support for her bid to be speaker.

“I don’t think we really disagree so much,” Trump said. “I also know that, you know, Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.”

Pelosi’s rejoinder: “Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”

Then Schumer entered with a zinger: “Elections have consequences, Mr. President.”

And so it went.

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Pelosi and Schumer both took shots at Trump for misstating facts, such as his false claim that “tremendous amounts of wall have already been built.”

After Trump glanced from note cards to discuss border policy, Pelosi said, “His cards over there are not facts. We have to have an evidence-based conversation.”

And Schumer said, “We have a lot of disagreements here. The Washington Post today gave you a lot of Pinocchios, because they say you constantly misstate how much of the wall is built.”

Trump simply scoffed, as if to dismiss The Post’s Fact Checker, which last week debuted the “Bottomless Pinocchio” rating for false claims that a politician repeats at least 20 times.

Trump’s allies said his decision to argue with Pelosi and Schumer on camera was wise political strategy and argued that the Democratic leaders had to play to pressures from their liberal base.

“He knows they can’t be nice to him or their left wing will go crazy,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R) said. “If they had smiled, it would have caused a rebellion. He knew they’d do that and come across that way to the country.”

But Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged that the televised clash “hasn’t solved one thing in terms of compromise.”

Back at the Capitol, reporters asked Pelosi whether the televised acrimony was indicative of the relationship she would have as speaker with the president.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think every day is a new day.”

In fact, every hour is a new hour. By late afternoon came word that Pelosi and Trump had spoken again by phone. The call was, Pelosi said, “constructive.” n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

A boy looks at a photo exhibit in Bucharest , Romania, commemorating the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

History marches in reverse B Y G RIFF W ITTE in Wroclaw, Poland

T

he police came in the pre­dawn stillness of a freezing February morning in southwestern Poland, knocking at the door of a national hero who had once again become a wanted man. ¶ There was a time when Wladyslaw Frasyniuk would have run. As the daring and profane bad boy of Solidarity, Poland’s underground pro­de­ mocracy movement, he had lived as a fugitive from the smothering grip of the communist state security ser­ vices, jumping from trains, fleeing along rooftops and speeding away on motorcycles. ¶ But that was long ago.

Back before the authoritarian regime he was fighting came crashing down, unleashing a new era of freedom in 1989. Be­ fore a 2015 election yielded a government determined to use the liberties and powers of a modern democratic state to snuff out independent institutions. Before Frasyniuk came to realize that history doesn’t travel in only one direction. ¶ “Everything that my generation accomplished,” said Frasyniuk, a revolutionary in his 20s who has become a dissi­ dent once more in his 60s, “has made it easier and easier for this government to consolidate its control.”

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Autocracy is making a comeback, seeping into parts of the world where it once appeared to have been vanquished.

But it is a sleeker, subtler and, ultimately, more sophisticated version than its authoritarian forebears, twisting democratic structures and principles into tools of oppression and state control. It is also, quite possibly, far more potent and enduring than autocracies of old.

After decades of steady expansion of rights and liberties, the pro-democracy watchdog Freedom House has recorded sharp reversals, with the share of nations dubbed “free” declining since 2007. Countries in every region of the world have suffered setbacks, in areas such as free and fair elections, the independence of the press, the rights of minorities and the rule of law.

As Americans worry about the health of their own democracy, the lesson from abroad is that the decline can come bracingly fast.

It has in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that, three decades ago, was at the vanguard of the last great act of the 20th

century: the triumph of liberal democracy over dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain.

Today, the region is on the front lines of history’s march in reverse.

The democratic society that Frasyniuk fought for is in retreat, while a new breed of autocrat advances.

“It’s not autocracy. It’s neo-autocracy,” said Cristian Parvulescu, dean of the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania, a country that critics fear is trending away from the rule of law. “It’s not democracy. It’s post-democracy.”

Some governments in the region, such as Hungary’s, are deep down the road toward indefinite one-party rule. Leaders in other countries, such as the Czech Republic, only seem to aspire to that sort of absolute authority.

But wherever signs of autocracy are emerging, this much is true: They bear little resemblance to the obviously repressive methods so familiar from school textbooks chronicling 20th-century despotism.

There are no strutting soldiers in the streets or cults of personal-

Romanian farmers say the government has not invested in roads and infrastructure to get produce to market efficiently. Some residents in Miskolc, Hungary, fear that immigrants will take over their housing and take their benefits.

ity around the great leader. Opponents and journalists speak openly and loudly, generally without fear of persecution. Instead of building walls to keep their own people in, governments construct tech-laden fences to keep supposed enemies out. Instead of economic isolation and scarcity, a gusher of foreign investment flows.

And yet, ruling politicians and parties have managed to consolidate power to a degree not seen since the communist era. Supposedly independent institutions — including courts and prosecutor’s offices — have become instruments of political control. Newspapers and television stations are bought up by friendly business executives and dutifully preach the government’s line. Elections still take place, but they are used as justification for the majority to impose its will rather than a chance for the minority to have its say.

“In every respect, it looks like Europe. But you don’t actually have the freedoms that makes Europe what it is,” said Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian human

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rights scholar and president of the Budapest-based Central European University (CEU). “It’s new political technology.”

His university has been a victim of that innovation.

Deemed a political enemy because it was founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, the highly regarded institution has been a top target of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He has denounced CEU in speeches, and his government has passed legislation designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the American-accredited school to operate.

But in keeping with the new style, Orban avoided shutting down the university outright — and the storm of condemnation that would come with such a move. Instead, he left CEU dangling in limbo for nearly two years and gave himself a small measure of deniability when it opted to retreat into exile this month. The U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David B. Cornstein, used that ambiguity to blame Soros, not Orban, for the exit.

Orban, considered the architect of the region’s new autocratic model, has boasted of his desire to replace outmoded notions of liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy.”

Others who stand accused of turning their countries away from basic freedoms deny the charge and insist that, in 21st-century Europe, it can’t even be done.

“There’s a principle of irreversibility. Once you reach a certain standard of democracy and human rights, you can’t go back,” Romanian Justice Minister Tudorel Toader said.

He spoke in an interview in his office across the street from the “People’s House,” a 1980s-era marble monument to dictatorial megalomania — and now the seat of Romania’s parliament.

Toader this year forced the firing of a crusading anti-corruption prosecutor who was investigating top government officials.

He has also helped push through legislation that independent authorities have said will severely limit the power of other prosecutors to hold the powerful to account.

But autocracy? Hardly, he says.

“People have the freedom to choose where to travel, where to live, where to work. These are

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things that people didn’t even dare to dream about under communism,” said the former law professor who is now seen by critics as an archenemy of the rule of law. “A Romanian can take a plane and go see the Statue of Liberty. You can’t turn him backwards.”

That is what worries Frasyniuk.

He served four years in a communist prison — and endured frequent beatings from guards — because he wanted his Polish countrymen to know the freedoms of democracy.

But in the past three years, ever since the right-wing Law and Justice party won elections, he has watched the government use the liberties for which he fought to tighten its grip.

The election victory became a pretext for the takeover of previously independent institutions.

The country’s membership in the European Union was transformed into a shield against charges of oppression and a foil in Poland’s long-standing quest for sovereignty. Its integration into the global economy — and the fast-paced growth that has come with it — put money in people’s pockets, overriding more abstract concerns about the rule of law.

Frasyniuk became a successful businessman after communism’s fall. But Law and Justice’s rise brought him back to the streets.

An anti-government protest in June of 2017 led to a brief scuffle with police and an investigation with which he refused to cooperate. That was enough to draw officers to his door in February — though the tactics were less conspicuously brute-force than in the old days.

“Authorities used to treat people like me in a serious manner,” Frasyniuk said, a note of wistful disgust in his voice, his mischievous blue eyes gleaming. “They broke down doors and threw you to the ground.”

If the style was new, the outcome that cold day was familiar.

Frasyniuk was handcuffed behind his back and led away, a throwback to a time when he had “golden miles membership” at his local police precinct.

“I’m proof,” he said, “that you can get a complete historical cycle in one lifetime.”

Still fit but graying at age 64, he is again on the front lines of a

freedom struggle.

But this time, the blind courage of youth is gone. He knows the advantage lies with the autocrats.

In Poland, winner takes all Just about every day this year, Malgorzata Gersdorf has put on a power suit and shown up at Poland’s Supreme Court, a modern glass building framed by fauxcopper columns, etched with the scales of justice, in Warsaw. Her fellow judges recognize her as the court’s leader. She works in the chief justice’s chambers.

But the government declared her retired in July.

“It’s a difference of interpreta-

ABOVE: A man walks down a street in Bucharest with a swastika tattoo.

BELOW: Protesters in Warsaw object to what they see as the anti-constitutional push of the Polish government.

tion,” Gersdorf said matter-offactly this fall during an interview in her office, where a fine old grandfather clock ticks away.

“Mine is based on the constitution.”

The Polish word for it — Konstytucja — dangles from her necklace in cubed black and white letters, like a shield.

But she doubts its ability to protect her.

The right-wing, populist Law and Justice party has followed a path to remake the Polish courts, arguing that the last vestiges of the communist era need to be purged — even though holdover judges have already gone through

a rigorous screening process.

Soon after winning the 2015 elections, the party effectively took over the Constitutional Tribunal, packing the court with friendly judges. Then it moved on to the National Council of the Judiciary, giving itself final say over a body that, as Poland’s arbiter of judicial independence, had been relatively free of political influence.

Finally, it took aim at the Supreme Court.

Constitutionally, Gersdorf ’s term as chief justice runs until 2020. But the government has tried to force her and dozens of Supreme Court colleagues into early retirement. It has sought to replace them — and to fill dozens of newly created seats — in a process that has been boycotted by nearly all of the nation’s judges and denounced by European authorities.

“It’s all been completely different than what you teach your students about what law is,” said Gersdorf, a professor before she became a judge. “At first, we got so dizzy, we all got sick.

“Now we’re used to it. Now we never say, ‘Well, they can’t do that,’ because, the fact is, they can do anything.”

To Law and Justice supporters — and others in the region brandishing the will of the people as a weapon — this is how democracy is supposed to work. To the victor go the spoils. And those include control not only of the courts but also the constitution, prosecutor’s offices, public media, intelligence services, the civil service and other supposedly independent constraints on executive power. Hungary’s government has even cracked down on civil society organizations with the justification that NGOs helping refugees were never elected to anything.

In this view, defenders of judges or bureaucrats or nonprofits are blocking the majority’s desires and using seemingly principled stands to mask their grievance at having been bested at the polls.

“Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose,” said Malgorzata Zuk, a party activist and Warsaw lawmaker. “Sadly, there are some people who will never accept the results.”

But to Gersdorf, it is a perversion of democracy — a deliberate

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COVER STORY misinterpretation of the checks on political power and the ultimate authority of the constitution.

“It’s a very dangerous direction,” she said, one that ultimately leads to “the destruction of the Polish justice system.”

The government didn’t try to stop her from showing up to work, knowing, perhaps, that to do so would provoke a clash. But with protests dwindling and options for halting the government’s takeover seemingly at their end, Gersdorf had all but accepted she would soon be ousted.

Then, the unexpected: An October ruling by the European Court of Justice temporarily blocked the forced retirements.

Local elections, meanwhile, dealt the ruling party a setback.

Late last month, the government retreated, introducing and passing legislation in a single day that will allow Gersdorf and her colleagues to keep their jobs.

Gersdorf ’s hopes have been vindicated — at least for now.

“In general, Polish society loves freedom,” she said. “It will rebel.”

Europe enables Hungary When two lead dancers with the fabled Bolshoi Ballet company decided to defect during a U.S. tour in 1979, their escape from Soviet minders at a packed Los Angeles auditorium required daring, luck and precision-timed choreography.

When Balazs Kadar, a 26-yearold dancer, decided this summer he had had enough of Hungary’s repressive government, he visited an employment office and was told he could have a job in Germany by the following Monday.

He canceled his lease. He sold his car. He said a tearful goodbye to his mom and packed two suitcases. Then he and his girlfriend hailed a ride-share service and sped down the highway to a new life.

“Some friends said I shouldn’t leave Hungary — that I should stay here and fight if I want it to be different,” said Kadar, who is tall with Justin Bieber-esque looks. “But this is the easiest way.

To leave everything and start again.”

The E.U.’s free movement rules were intended to maximize flexibility in the labor market, giving workers the chance to move anywhere on the continent in search

of a job.

But they have also given autocrats like Orban a useful safety valve. Anyone dissatisfied with his government can pick up and go, with not even a passport check standing in the way of self-imposed exile.

Since the prime minister came to power in 2010, hundreds of thousands of people have left the country in one of the biggest migrations of Hungary’s recent history. And although many have been motivated by higher wages elsewhere, political factors have loomed large, as well.

“The problem is not only the

TOP: People exit a subway station in Bucharest. BELOW: Nationalism is a rallying cry for many right-wing groups in Eastern Europe.

wages,” said Agnes Hars, senior researcher at Budapest’s KopintTárki Institute for Economic Research. “It’s the whole environment that makes people depressed.”

Those who have left tend to be young, ambitious and educated.

That’s not a problem for Orban, who pulls his support from the less educated, poorer and older segments of society. But it is a crisis for anyone trying to organize opposition to his rule.

“There’s no protest in Hungary, because people can emigrate instead,” Hars said.

It’s not only individuals. This

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summer, the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations — which advocates for a free media and the protection of minorities — moved to Berlin amid an onslaught of government harassment. Central European University is on its way to Vienna.

Kadar decided to move after spring elections confirmed Orban’s third straight landslide victory had given him a parliamentary supermajority. Kadar didn’t feel he could stay in a country where the government was so hostile toward gay rights, so disdainful of the arts or so stacked in favor of one man and his allies.

“Now we know things will never change,” said Kadar, a classical dancer by training who took a job stocking a warehouse in southwestern Germany.

As freedom of movement siphons off would-be dissenters, E.U. subsidies line the pockets of favored government cronies.

And free trade across the bloc gives Hungary the sort of powerful allies that communist governments of old could never have dreamed of.

When BMW was searching for a spot to build its first European factory in more than a decade, it chose Debrecen, a tidy city of 200,000 people on the eastern Hungarian plains.

Amid corn and wheat fields, a billion-euro factory will rise, further transforming a once-rundown post-communist backwater that has become a hub of German industrial might, with daily nonstop flights to Munich.

Continental politicians periodically denounce Orban as a stain on European democracy.

And Orban frequently rails against E.U. meddling. But between Europe’s corporate giants and Orban, there’s a low-cost love affair.

“Business expectations are at record levels,” gushed German-Hungarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce spokesman Dirk Wölfer.

Under Orban, he said, “the investment climate has been constantly improving” with a corporate tax rate that’s “unbeatable.”

He scoffed at concerns over human rights or the rule of law, and described attempts by the E.U. to hold Hungary to account as “an irritation for the business community.”

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Romania spreads the wealth Vladimir Ciobotaru and his wife welcomed a baby boy to the world recently. They had the Romanian government to thank.

Ciobotaru is a surgeon, which, until recently, meant a salary that came nowhere near the minimum wage in any Western European nation. Even by Romanian standards, it was paltry, the equivalent of less than $600 per month.

He and his wife shared a cramped, single-room apartment, and the idea of starting a family seemed impossible.

Then the government doubled Ciobotaru’s pay.

The couple moved to an airy new apartment. They’re thinking of buying a car.

The pay hike for doctors — the vast majority of whom are public sector workers — has also given a measure of security to Romania’s government.

Romania is decried by watchdogs as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe and denounced by E.U. leaders as an autocracy-in-training. But its economy is gaining strength — Romania saw 6.9 percent gross domestic product growth last year — and the government in Bucharest has managed to maintain its popularity in part by spreading a bit of the newfound wealth.

Poland and Hungary have also enjoyed rapid growth, low unemployment and — even though pay is still well below continental averages — rising wages.

Political scientists have long theorized that growth and prosperity help sustain democracies, with the presence of a robust middle class guarding against a slide into authoritarianism.

But these European governments are proving that democracy’s economic dividends can also be used as a tool to cement power.

The money helps leaders keep their populations happy. It also gives them cash to burn on vanity projects, influence operations and patronage networks populated by favored cronies.

In Romania, the leader of the ruling Social Democrats — a wealthy businessman-turnedpolitician named Liviu Dragnea — has been twice convicted on corruption and vote-rigging charges. It was amid subsequent accusations of even greater

graft that his government ousted the nation’s top fraud prosecutor and pushed legislation that experts say will keep other investigators off the trail.

Muzzling of corruption watchdogs has been a trademark of growing executive authority elsewhere in the region.

“There’s a contagion effect,” said Elena Calistru, who leads the Romanian civic advocacy group Funky Citizens. “Our guys have seen that it’s worked for Poland, and it’s worked for Hungary. Now they’re trying to do the same.”

And many Romanians don’t seem too bothered.

Romania is still the E.U.’s second-poorest country, with large segments of the population scratching out a meager living in the agrarian countryside.

But in Bucharest — a capital city that was leveled and rebuilt in dreary dictator style under the communists — there’s now a bit of bling: posh dance clubs and shopping malls with enough glitz to rival any in the West.

Prime minister owns presses Prime Minister Andrej Babis was facing a revolt. He had vowed that the Czech Republic would never accept a single refugee, but in September parliamentarians were barraging him with demands to make an exception: Couldn’t the country take 50 Syrian orphans?

Then came a stirring piece in Lidove Noviny — the country’s

Club patrons drink and talk as fireworks go off in an affluent area of Bucharest.

oldest newspaper — that seemed to bail him out.

Written by a Czech doctor with long experience on war’s front lines, it argued that the orphans would be better off left exactly where they were.

The only trouble: The doctor and her supposed humanitarian aid organization appear not to exist. And the piece had come to the paper straight from the office of Andrej Babis, who also happens to be Lidove Noviny’s owner.

“It became completely clear that Babis feeds the paper stories that are in his interest,” said Petra Prochazkova, who covered wars in Chechnya, Afghanistan and beyond for Lidove Noviny during a 26-year career — and who uncovered the deception around the supposed doctor. “The newspaper is complicit.”

In the days of Soviet clientstates, the media were state-run and the Communist Party’s control was total.

Today, it’s the power of capitalism that gives politicians outsize influence over the press.

Across Central Europe, newspapers and television stations have been bought up by oligarchs allied with ruling party politicians.

In some cases, the oligarch and the politician are one and the same.

Babis, the Czech Republic’s second-richest man, purchased Lidove Noviny in 2013, just as he was launching a second career in politics.

The paper had been the favor-

ite of Vaclav Havel — the playwright, dissident and, ultimately, president — as well as others among the Czech intelligentsia.

Babis’s purchase, which included a mass-market daily, a television station and a radio station, instantly made him one of the nation’s biggest media barons.

Before becoming prime minister last year, he was forced to put all his companies in a trust. He has denied exerting influence over any editorial content, and the papers’ editors insist that Babis doesn’t meddle.

But they also argue that reporters are deluding themselves if they think the media are different from any other business in which the owner has an interest.

Prochazkova said her paper had gradually begun to echo Babis’s nationalist and anti-refugee views. But it wasn’t until the scandal over the story on Syrian orphans that she admitted it to herself. “I was given freedom to write what I wanted, so I turned a blind eye to what was happening,” said Prochazkova, who has since resigned.

Jaroslav Kmenta, a former investigative reporter for Mlada Fronta Dnes, didn’t wait. He quit the paper on the day it was sold to Babis. He and the paper’s former editor now work at a small start-up magazine that produces hard-hitting investigations — including ones focused on the prime minister.

In recent months, Kmenta said, he has been repeatedly called in for questioning by security services. They demand to know his sources and threaten him when he refuses. That, he said, is new in the Czech Republic. “There’s now constant pressure on us — pressure for every story we write,” he said.

For now, the Czech media are seen as freer than those of other countries in the region. Meanwhile, Babis is weaker than his counterparts in Hungary or Poland, and is engulfed in a corruption scandal that threatens his hold on the government.

But with all the models around him for consolidating control, Kmenta is not optimistic. Babis is a smart man, and the path to ever-greater power has become well-traveled.

“Just wait a few years,” Kmenta said. ©The Washington Post

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A plan to ease insect-stressed trees BY

J ENNIFER O LDHAM

H

ikers climbing above tree line in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest nowadays encounter a startling landscape: the gray skeletons of millions of dead lodgepole pine.

It is on these slopes of the Rocky Mountains that the U.S. Forest Service would pioneer a novel approach to rid forests of the detritus from “epidemic levels” of beetle infestations that wiped out 38,000 square miles of trees — an area larger than the state of Maine. What’s left fuels historic wildfires, prevents wildlife and cattle from finding forage, threatens to topple onto campsites and slows regeneration of trees needed to sustain the beleaguered timber industry.

The plan would allow construction of up to 600 miles of temporary roads to log, thin and set prescribed burns across 850,000 rugged acres from the ColoradoWyoming border north across the Snowy and Sierra Madre ranges.

The 15-year project, a marked departure from the agency’s historical approach to restoration, is moving forward as President Trump blames the deadliest wildfire in California’s history on “gross mismanagement of the forests” — a widely disputed allegation.

“This is a new way of doing business — it’s unique for us not only in terms of size but the amount of collaboration,” said Melissa Martin, planning and information program manager for Medicine Bow. “This is about providing resiliency for the future, so we don’t wind up in a situation 100 years from now [like] we find ourselves in today.”

That situation is bleak. A generations-old policy of fire suppression and reduced timber harvests caused stressed, overstocked forests that were unable to fend off mountain pine beetles and spruce bark beetles. Both insects bore through bark to lay their eggs, and the larvae that hatch spend the winter in place, emerging only when fully grown to begin the

NATIONAL AGRICULTURE IMAGERY PROGRAM

U.S. Forest Service wants to log, thin and set burns across several million acres in four states cycle anew the next summer.

Their activity severely disrupts a tree’s nutrient system.

Unleashed by drought and warm winters — both tied to climate change — the rice-size insects have attacked huge swaths of the Rockies, Tetons, Cascades and Sierra Nevada since the 1990s.

Nearly half of the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, or 81.3 million acres, needs attention. Their poor condition, in combination with a succession of wildfire seasons unprecedented in their deadliness and destruction, is forcing a reckoning among federal agencies, environmentalists, timber companies, ranchers, outdoor enthusiasts and local communities.

Environmentalists, who have often battled the government on the issue, agree that Washington must speed efforts to cull beetle kill in forests up to five times denser than a century ago. Tinder-

dry dead trees jeopardize the purity of water supplies for parched cities and the lives and property of millions of people who live in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface — areas prone to wildfires.

“If we are going to have a chance at combating climate change, forests are one of our best tools for mitigation because they sequester carbon,” said Chris Topik, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests initiative. “So it’s vital that we help them to adapt.”

The Trump administration’s shift to decades-long management plans encompassing vast stretches is in stark contrast to the Forest Service’s historical practice of grooming parcels of 3,000 to 10,000 acres over a period of months. In New Mexico, the agency is preparing an environmental report for the 185,586-acre Luna Restoration Project in the Gila

Years of beetle infestation have devastated the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming, which is littered with dead trees. A proposed 15-year project would get rid of the detritus.

National Forest. Work on the 179,054-acre La Garita Hills Restoration Project in Colorado’s Rio Grande National Forest is underway.

The Medicine Bow project would authorize clear-cutting on up to 95,000 acres, selective logging on up to 165,000 acres, and other treatments such as prescribed fire and hand-thinning on up to another 100,000 acres. Martin said funding could come from the federal government and other sources.

Not everyone considers the plan a good idea. Some biologists say science does not back up the efficacy of the treatments proposed, particularly logging and the prescribed burns that the Forest Service calls necessary for lodgepole pine to reproduce and more diverse species to take root.

“They say they are going to reduce fuel loads to limit wildfires, and the literature doesn’t support that,” said Daniel B. Tinker, an associate professor at the University of Wyoming, who has studied the region for 23 years.

“We’ve had fires this summer that burned through areas that were clear-cut 15 years ago. Those stands weren’t supposed to burn for 100 years.”

Conservation groups also say that the Forest Service truncated scientific review in a rush to meet congressional demands for increased timber production on public lands. For now, the proposal does not specify which parcels would be targeted and where those hundreds of miles of road would be built.

“They are trying to fast-track this,” said Marla Fox, an attorney for WildEarth Guardians. “This is in line with the agency’s shift and approach under the Trump administration to ‘get out the cut,’ which means ‘let’s do some logging in the name of restoration.’ ” The agency is scheduled to make a decision on the Medicine Bow plan in mid-2019. If approved, it could provide lessons on how to help the West’s overgrown forests weather climate change and fire. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Shortage of shingles vaccine worsens BY

L ENA H . S UN

A

national shortage of a new vaccine to protect against the painful rash known as shingles is worsening, even as the manufacturer announced plans to boost deliveries.

Demand for the two-dose Shingrix vaccine has skyrocketed since it became broadly available in the United States in the spring, say pharmacists. The new vaccine provides much greater protection than an older, single-shot vaccine from a disease that affects 1 in 3 adults and can cause debilitating nerve pain that can last months, or even years. Demand is also surging because federal health officials recommended it last year for healthy adults at age 50 — a decade earlier than previous recommendations. People who have already had shingles, as well as those who received the old vaccine, or have had or are unsure if they have had chickenpox, are also urged to get it. Those recommendations took British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline by surprise, leaving it scrambling to keep up with demand, say company representatives.

Company officials estimate about 115 million people in the United States ages 50 and older are eligible for the vaccine. Shingles, a painful condition that causes blisters, occurs when the chickenpox virus resurfaces decades later. There are an estimated 1 million cases of shingles each year in the United States; the risk of the disease increases as people age.

“All I want for Christmas is for my pharmacy to get some Shingrix,” tweeted one woman.

Consumers have been searching for pharmacies with Shingrix doses on neighborhood listservs, in postings on social media, and in visits to pharmacy after pharmacy.

A Pennsylvania man wrote on Facebook that his wife was told by her local supermarket pharmacy that the waiting list was about 12 months. A CVS pharmacist in Gaithersburg, Md., and a Walgreens pharmacist in downtown

ISTOCK

Drugmaker struggles to catch up with high demand, leaving people waiting for months Washington said a few weeks ago that they hadn’t received any shipments since August.

“It’s worse now,” said a pharmacist at Walgreens, who declined to give her name because she wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.

The pharmacy is not keeping a waiting list because “there’s no promise of when it’s going to come out again.”

“As soon as they get it in, it’s going out pretty quick,” said Michael Rothholz, chief strategy officer for the American Pharmacists Association.

Sean Clements, a spokesman for GSK, said the manufacturer has increased supply of Shingrix in the United States, shipping “large volumes” every two to three weeks. Starting in December, Clements said the company will move to a twice-monthly shipping schedule. He declined to provide specifics. The GSK representative

said 300,000 doses were shipped in November, and another 160,000 doses were shipped Dec. 3.

GSK makes Shingrix at a facility in Rixensart, Belgium, which is already at maximum capacity, said a company customer service representative. It takes six to nine months to produce the vaccine.

Although certain elements were produced before the vaccine received approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the company is still playing catch-up, officials said during a briefing on their latest quarterly report.

“We need to get the supply expanded as fast as possible because we can pretty much sell anything that we make now in the U.S.,” said Luke Miels, president of GSK’s global pharmaceuticals division, during the earnings call.

U.S. pharmacies began offering the vaccine broadly in mid-March.

New federal health recommendations have urged people to get a vaccine for herpes zoster, or shingles, a painful condition that causes blisters.

By May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting shortages. Since the spring, drugstore chain CVS has had difficulty keeping an ample supply across the chain’s 9,800 stores and more than 1,100 clinics because of limited supply from the manufacturer, said spokeswoman Amy Lanctot.

Shipments arrive about every three weeks, she said. The supply “did get a little better in the fall,” she said. But since then, it has gotten worse, she said. “It’s just not being made in the amounts that are needed.”

Complicating the situation is the recommendation for consumers to get their second dose within two to six months of the first.

Many consumers are struggling to find their second dose. Pharmacies are supposed to give priority to those patients. Some pharmacies are requiring consumers to get their second dose at the same place they got their first shot. Others will give the second shot if consumers show proof they have gotten the first one, regardless of where. GSK said preliminary data show that more than 70 percent of people have completed the series.

The CDC says patients who wait longer than six months don’t have to start over. But they should get the second dose as soon as possible because the maximum immunity — more than 90 percent — is based on two doses. Protection stays above 85 percent for at least the first four years after vaccination, the CDC says. GSK did not study how much immunity is provided by one dose.

Consumers who have gotten the shots, which is given in the muscle of the upper arm, like the annual flu vaccine, say the side effects have included pain, soreness and swelling at the injection site for two to three days, muscle aches and flulike symptoms, headaches and upset stomach. But those side effects pale in comparison to one of the most common and serious complications of shingles, debilitating nerve pain that has no treatment or cure. n ©The Washington Post

15 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2018

SUNDAY, December, 16, 2018 18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Washington’s calm in the storm of revolution N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C AROL B ERKIN

S IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown

By Nathaniel Philbrick.

Viking. 366 pp. $30

An illustration of George Washington at Yorktown. The general’s victory over his temper, Philbrick suggests, was as important as his victory over Cornwallis.

ince 2014, Nathaniel Philbrick has been narrating the story of America’s struggle for independence.

In “Bunker Hill,” he focused on the earliest confrontation between the British and American armies, and in “Valiant Ambition,” he reconstructed Benedict Arnold’s path to treason. In his latest book, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown,” he picks up this saga in 1780, as Washington and his Continental Army, low on supplies, idle and restless, wait anxiously for the French navy to come to their aid.

Philbrick is a master of narrative, and he does not disappoint as he provides a meticulous and often hair-raising account of a naval war between France and England, and a land war that pitted American and French troops against British regulars and Loyalist volunteers. The French government, Philbrick reminds us, was driven less by a commitment to American liberty than by a desire for revenge against its imperial rival, England.

With no navy of their own, the Americans remained confined to land operations in 1780 and 1781, as they had been throughout the war. By the winter of 1780, Continental Army morale was low — and it would sink even deeper in early 1781 when news reached Washington that Benedict Arnold had escaped capture after pillaging Richmond.

But the loss of Arnold was far from the only thing troubling Washington. For many months, he had nurtured a fervent wish that the French navy would mount a joint effort with his army to recapture New York City. The French, however, had other plans: an assault on Lord Charles Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown. A bitter Washington knew he was in no position to argue. In late July 1781, Washington received word that a French fleet was headed to the Chesapeake; it was now up to the combined American and French

ISTOCK

ground forces to cover by foot the 550 miles from White Plains, N.Y., to rendezvous with Adm. Comte de Grasse. The Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French troops traveling with Washington’s Continental soldiers, was not optimistic about their success.

Rochambeau would prove wrong. Ragged and driven beyond endurance, Washington’s men persevered, and together, the revolution’s military and naval forces would bring Cornwallis to his knees. This is the moment Philbrick has been building to, and he re-creates the battle between de Grasse’s navy and Adm. Thomas Graves’s British warships and the military siege of Yorktown with all the drama they deserve.

Not everyone will find Philbrick’s detailed coverage of naval and military engagements easy to follow or fully engaging.

This should not deter readers, however, for despite the author’s obvious relish in recounting the battles on sea and land, those engagements are not the entire focus of the book.

How men respond to the manmade hurricanes that whirl around them lies at the heart of the story. In developing this theme, Philbrick offers finely drawn portraits of men whose characters shaped history. These include the self-absorbed Adm. Mariot Arbuthnot, the bloodthirsty cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton, the genial Marquis de Lafayette and the callous Lord Cornwallis, but the central figure — the man who overshadows all others — is Gen. George Washington.

As the commander in chief, Washington knew he must live up to the image of a man whose “brow is sometimes marked with thought, but never with inquietude.” In the face of mounting frustration with the French, intense disappointment with the American public’s response to the Army’s needs and a growing fear that the American cause would be lost, Washington struggled to maintain his equanimity. His victory over his temper, Philbrick suggests, was as important as his

victory over Cornwallis.

In “In the Hurricane’s Eye” Philbrick occasionally succumbs to the lure of historical fortunetelling that marred his previous book. Here he declares that Yorktown “was where the road to the Civil War began.” Most historians who have studied and debated the origins of the Civil War have found it far more difficult to define where X marks the spot. But such pronouncements — offered largely, one suspects, for dramatic effect — do not detract from the authentic drama of the story Philbrick has to tell, a drama that ultimately centers not on nature but on Washington. From his anguished question “Whom can we trust now?” after learning of Arnold’s treason to his “silent adieu” to his troops at New York’s Whitehall, Washington remains the true eye of the hurricane, the calm within the storm. n Berkin is the author of “A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism.” This was written for The Washington Post.

16

SUNDAY, December, 16, 2018

Foothills Magazine presents its 7th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2018 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2019

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine ncwfoothills.com