There has been so much political bad news in the past 14 days that I don’t know where to start, or what to emphasize, in this article. The year started with the now-famous tweet by President Trump about Pakistan. This came out of the blue at an early hour on New Year’s Day, and seems to have been prompted by something he saw on a Fox News morning news show. At least that is what those in the media who try to track what prompts the President’s tweets have determined. I understand that most of the tweets are prompted by what he sees on television, especially on morning news shows to which he appears to be addicted, and which he watches before he has checked in with any of his advisors.
That tweet set off a flurry of action and counter action, charge and counter charge between the US government and that of Pakistan, the sum of which looks to be cooler, maybe much cooler, bilateral relations and some loss of US military assistance to Pakistan. Pakistan, in this case, seems to be doing the right thing by trying to keep the relationship open and working, although it has leverage through its ability to complicate seriously our war effort in Afghanistan, and also to make the US objective of getting the Afghan Taliban into a peace process more difficult to achieve. The dust has not cleared yet, so a lot remains unknown, even the level of the cut to security assistance. It seems to range between $235 million and $1.2 billion.
Having dispatched Pakistan to the lower depths of his estimation, the President, without much thought I suspect, took on most of the rest of the world. In a meeting with a small bipartisan Congressional delegation to try to sort out serious immigration problems, Trump used vulgar language to describe African, Caribbean, and some Latin American nations, that I am sure the entire world knows by now, and which insulted these nations. Though this meeting was not public, the language was such an egregiously insulting racial slur that it got out immediately. Since I suspect all readers already know what he said, I will not repeat it here, not only because I suspect The Friday Times would not print it anyway in its entirety, but because it shames me to think I have a President who would use a racist explicative even in a meeting he thought was private.
Is it a great surprise that President Trump is racist? Not really. He leaped to political prominence with his dogged campaign to convince Americans that Barack Obama was not born in the United States despite all the evidence to the contrary, and was therefore an illegitimate president. The racial dog whistles during his primary and general election campaign were clear to those who listened. His ambiguous response to the white supremacy riots in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer only added confirmation, and there are episodes in his far past that reek of racism.
What his words last Thursday to the Senators did was spell out the fact plainly to all Americans. His approval numbers have been declining to record lows for a president in his first year of office, so this will certainly give them a further push downward. But there is a core of supporters that will either not believe it even though it is vouched for by some of those in the meeting (including at least one member of his own party). But the Republican Party generally, and especially those Republicans in Congress, have yet to come to grips with the anchor Trump is putting on his party.
Barring some miraculous recovery, or really stupid mistakes by the Democrats, this could be bad news for the Republicans in the mid-term elections in November this year. A major poll (almost a half million people surveyed), yet unpublished, but previewed by Ronald Brownstein, a veteran political reporter, in the Atlantic magazine shows that not only are younger and white-collar white male voters who supported Trump in 2016 are beginning to fall away. These voters were always skeptical of Trump, but may have been among those who could not bear to vote for Hillary Clinton. More importantly, the blue-collar whites, central to his support base are also beginning to drift away. This is particularly true for the younger males and for women. Studies have shown that some voters (even among the blue-collar, lower-income groups) do not respond primarily to economic motivation in their voting habits, but are inclined to base their judgement on “character,” and that may explain the decline in Trump’s support among this core group. The clear evidence of his racism could accelerate this decline.
The President followed up his nasty New Year’s Day tweet on Pakistan with another macho tweet on North Korea on January 2. This was the one about having a “bigger button” on his desk than North Korea’s leader. This was provoked by Kim Jong-Un saying something equally immature (which Trump learned about from TV) about being ready if attacked and having a nuclear button on his desk. I noticed that Pakistan and India have again exchanged words, veiled threats I guess you could call them, over nuclear deterrence. These exchanges reminded me of a book review I read on a new book by Daniel Ellsberg, called “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Pakistani readers may not recall Daniel Ellsberg, but most Americans over 40 will recall him as the guy who is probably responsible for the beginning of the anti-Vietnam war effort in the US when he copied secret documents, which he managed to get published in 1971 by the New York Times. “The Pentagon Papers” basically showed Americans that they had been systematically lied to by their government about the war.
But Ellsberg was essentially a nuclear expert who worked on nuclear strategy and policy before and after his excursion into anti-war activism. And his book relates the overkill strategy which was first adopted by the US military in the Cold War, a strategy so secret neither the president not the Secretary of Defense were aware of it. Ellsberg’s first victory in his anti-nuclear role was to find a way to make sure President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara learned of it. When the did they changed it.
Ellsberg has spent much of his life trying to slow or even stop the nuclear arms race. He would be opposed to Trump’s plan to increase the US nuclear arsenal. The danger of nuclear war, he says, persists as long as nuclear weapons exist. He was present at the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 (so was I, on the island of Martinique only a few hundred miles from Cuba), and information we found only decades later has made him revise his estimate of the time that we weren’t that close to a nuclear exchange, that Khrushchev would surely back down. Secretary McNamara hit the nail on the head, when he said to President Kennedy in a meeting at the beginning of the crisis that it was not a military problem, it was a domestic political problem—i.e. that Kennedy might lose the next election if he backed down. Fortunately, that time, Khrushchev backed down. But can we always count on that. Ellsberg’s point is that the logic and reason we expect from our leaders in such circumstances disappears in the pressure of events. This worries me most when I hear that Pakistan and India are again exchanging rhetorical threats which involve nuclear deterrence.
The author is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh
That tweet set off a flurry of action and counter action, charge and counter charge between the US government and that of Pakistan, the sum of which looks to be cooler, maybe much cooler, bilateral relations and some loss of US military assistance to Pakistan. Pakistan, in this case, seems to be doing the right thing by trying to keep the relationship open and working, although it has leverage through its ability to complicate seriously our war effort in Afghanistan, and also to make the US objective of getting the Afghan Taliban into a peace process more difficult to achieve. The dust has not cleared yet, so a lot remains unknown, even the level of the cut to security assistance. It seems to range between $235 million and $1.2 billion.
Having dispatched Pakistan to the lower depths of his estimation, the President, without much thought I suspect, took on most of the rest of the world. In a meeting with a small bipartisan Congressional delegation to try to sort out serious immigration problems, Trump used vulgar language to describe African, Caribbean, and some Latin American nations, that I am sure the entire world knows by now, and which insulted these nations. Though this meeting was not public, the language was such an egregiously insulting racial slur that it got out immediately. Since I suspect all readers already know what he said, I will not repeat it here, not only because I suspect The Friday Times would not print it anyway in its entirety, but because it shames me to think I have a President who would use a racist explicative even in a meeting he thought was private.
Is it a great surprise that President Trump is racist? Not really. He leaped to political prominence with his dogged campaign to convince Americans that Barack Obama was not born in the United States despite all the evidence to the contrary, and was therefore an illegitimate president. The racial dog whistles during his primary and general election campaign were clear to those who listened. His ambiguous response to the white supremacy riots in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer only added confirmation, and there are episodes in his far past that reek of racism.
What his words last Thursday to the Senators did was spell out the fact plainly to all Americans. His approval numbers have been declining to record lows for a president in his first year of office, so this will certainly give them a further push downward. But there is a core of supporters that will either not believe it even though it is vouched for by some of those in the meeting (including at least one member of his own party). But the Republican Party generally, and especially those Republicans in Congress, have yet to come to grips with the anchor Trump is putting on his party.
President Trump's new year tweet set off a flurry of action and counter action, charge and counter charge between the US government and that of Pakistan
Barring some miraculous recovery, or really stupid mistakes by the Democrats, this could be bad news for the Republicans in the mid-term elections in November this year. A major poll (almost a half million people surveyed), yet unpublished, but previewed by Ronald Brownstein, a veteran political reporter, in the Atlantic magazine shows that not only are younger and white-collar white male voters who supported Trump in 2016 are beginning to fall away. These voters were always skeptical of Trump, but may have been among those who could not bear to vote for Hillary Clinton. More importantly, the blue-collar whites, central to his support base are also beginning to drift away. This is particularly true for the younger males and for women. Studies have shown that some voters (even among the blue-collar, lower-income groups) do not respond primarily to economic motivation in their voting habits, but are inclined to base their judgement on “character,” and that may explain the decline in Trump’s support among this core group. The clear evidence of his racism could accelerate this decline.
The President followed up his nasty New Year’s Day tweet on Pakistan with another macho tweet on North Korea on January 2. This was the one about having a “bigger button” on his desk than North Korea’s leader. This was provoked by Kim Jong-Un saying something equally immature (which Trump learned about from TV) about being ready if attacked and having a nuclear button on his desk. I noticed that Pakistan and India have again exchanged words, veiled threats I guess you could call them, over nuclear deterrence. These exchanges reminded me of a book review I read on a new book by Daniel Ellsberg, called “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Pakistani readers may not recall Daniel Ellsberg, but most Americans over 40 will recall him as the guy who is probably responsible for the beginning of the anti-Vietnam war effort in the US when he copied secret documents, which he managed to get published in 1971 by the New York Times. “The Pentagon Papers” basically showed Americans that they had been systematically lied to by their government about the war.
But Ellsberg was essentially a nuclear expert who worked on nuclear strategy and policy before and after his excursion into anti-war activism. And his book relates the overkill strategy which was first adopted by the US military in the Cold War, a strategy so secret neither the president not the Secretary of Defense were aware of it. Ellsberg’s first victory in his anti-nuclear role was to find a way to make sure President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara learned of it. When the did they changed it.
Ellsberg has spent much of his life trying to slow or even stop the nuclear arms race. He would be opposed to Trump’s plan to increase the US nuclear arsenal. The danger of nuclear war, he says, persists as long as nuclear weapons exist. He was present at the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 (so was I, on the island of Martinique only a few hundred miles from Cuba), and information we found only decades later has made him revise his estimate of the time that we weren’t that close to a nuclear exchange, that Khrushchev would surely back down. Secretary McNamara hit the nail on the head, when he said to President Kennedy in a meeting at the beginning of the crisis that it was not a military problem, it was a domestic political problem—i.e. that Kennedy might lose the next election if he backed down. Fortunately, that time, Khrushchev backed down. But can we always count on that. Ellsberg’s point is that the logic and reason we expect from our leaders in such circumstances disappears in the pressure of events. This worries me most when I hear that Pakistan and India are again exchanging rhetorical threats which involve nuclear deterrence.
The author is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh