Understanding Nancy Pelosi: She ‘Knows Exactly What Her Leverage Is’

FRESH AIR

When U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was first elected to Congress, there wasn’t a women’s bathroom near the House floor, and it would be several years before women were allowed to wear pants in the chamber. Things have changed since then. Pelosi has now led the Democratic Party’s House caucus for 18 years, and our guest at Time, national political correspondent Molly Ball, says she’s used her negotiating talents to outmaneuver President Trump repeatedly in policy battles.

Ball’s new book traces Pelosi’s political skills back to her roots in her father’s Democratic machine in Baltimore. She describes how Pelosi outworked and out thought male rivals to ascend the leadership ladder in Congress, why she became the preferred target of Republicans in congressional elections and, somewhat surprisingly, why she found working with President Obama so difficult.

DAVIES: Tell us about her background, her family.

BALL: One of her mentors earlier in her career, Jack Murtha, used to say about her, don’t think she’s from San Francisco. She’s from Baltimore. And that’s both literally true and true in a deeper sense, right? Her father was a congressman from Baltimore and then became the mayor of Baltimore. He came out of the machine politics of Baltimore, a Democratic city. She was born in 1940, when her father was already in Congress. So literally from the day she was born, she was part of this very Catholic, very Democratic, very Italian family that was involved in the political life of the city and the nation.

And that machine politics, as you know from Philadelphia, was very much about the sort of tribes and factions of the city. The different ethnicities all had their own little neighborhoods, and they all had a sort of boss who could deliver their votes, often in exchange for something. So when you see the kind of deal-maker that Nancy Pelosi is, when you see the kind of negotiating that she does on Capitol Hill, I think a lot of it does trace back to her roots in Baltimore.

DAVIES: What about Nancy Pelosi’s mother? Tell us about her.

BALL: Her mother’s very important to her, I think at least as important as her father. And one of the things I tried to do in the book was sort of restore the significance of her mother to her life. You know, I think inevitably because her father was a politician, her mother sort of gets erased from this narrative, but she was very much shaped by her mother. And she talks very frankly, which I think is interesting, about how stifled her mother was. Her mother had a lot of ambitions that she wasn’t able to fulfill simply because she was a woman. She wanted to be an auctioneer. She wanted to go to law school. She wanted to have her own business. And all of those dreams were thwarted because she had to stay home and raise the children and keep the house and because, quite frankly, her husband wouldn’t let her.

There was a point where she had a business. She’d invented and patented a beauty product, and she wanted to market it nationally. But she needed her husband’s signature in order to do that, and he wouldn’t give it to her. So I think it shaped her that her mother was stifled in that way. But it also shaped her that her mother was a very strong and aggressive woman, a sort of – I don’t want to be stereotypical, but, you know, the sort of fiery Italian American mother who – there are family stories about how she once punched a poll worker in the face. She was known to – she once put LBJ in his place and told off Ronald Reagan. So this was not someone who was afraid to get in people’s faces, and I think that’s certainly a characteristic you also see in her daughter.

DAVIES: You know, and the kind of urban machine politics that her family was involved in functions – you know, it’s about loyalty and favors, but it’s also just about an awful lot of hard work – street lists and knowing where your votes are and turning them out. And there’s a lot of hard work involved. Nancy Pelosi, then Nancy D’Alesandro, grew up when the machine was quite active. Did she play a role herself?

BALL: She did. Her mother was responsible for a couple of things in the household as sort of the brains of the political operation. One was the Women’s Democratic Club that operated out of the basement, and they did a lot of that hard work you’re talking about – pounding the pavement, doing the precincts and making sure everything was in the right place. And then also the favor file, which is the other side of what you’re talking about, the sort of constituent services operation, where there was a list that was maintained in the family’s living room of all of the things – all the favors people needed from – whether it was their mayor or their congressman.

And so from the time she was about 11, Nancy D’Alesandro was in charge of being in that living room and maintaining that favor file, telling people – answering the phone and telling them where they could go if they needed to get into city hospital or needed help getting housing or any of the sort of government services. So she was a very active part of that operation from a pretty early age.

And I think the point you make about how hard that work is is important because it’s also very individual, right? This is politics at a very individual level where you know every single voter, and you know what they care about, and you know where they live, and you’re turning them out precinct by precinct, block by block. So I think that that’s really important to her sense of politics as well.

DAVIES: So Nancy grows up, goes to Catholic school, goes to college and actually, after college, gets a job in a senator’s office, where, ironically, Steny Hoyer, who would later be her No. 2 in Congress for so many years, was also employed. This was sort of the dawn of the feminist wave of the ’60s. Did Nancy see her – Nancy D’Alesandro see herself as a career woman?

BALL: I think she did. She, like her mother, wanted to go to law school and never ended up doing so. And she did take this job in the senator’s office. But she also met the man who would become her husband while they were both in college. And so she ended up, kind of like her mother, giving up all of those dreams in order to become a housewife.

Now, she never stopped doing her political activities, being active in the Democratic Party, being a volunteer and pushing the stroller while distributing leaflets, but she didn’t immediately have a career – in fact, didn’t have a career until many, many years later, and it’s a sort of interesting irony of her life that even though she saw the sort of trap that her mother had fallen into, she ended up doing almost the same thing after she graduated from college.

DAVIES: So she raised five children but stayed active in the party, held fundraisers at her house. How did she get into formal politics, into the Democratic Party in California?

BALL: Well, her first ever real office – office with some sort of power, with some sort of vote – was the San Francisco Library Board in 1975. And I tell this story in the book of how the mayor at the time, Joe Alioto, called her up and asked her to take this spot on the San Francisco Library Commission. And she turned him down. She said, well, you know, I’m perfectly happy being a volunteer. I’m happy to help. I don’t need that kind of official position. And even though she considered him something of a chauvinist, a sort of old-fashioned man, he reprimanded her.

He said, no. You’re doing the work. You should have something to show for it. You should have the power that comes with it. You should be able to make decisions. And this was really a revelation for her. And when she and I talked about it, she described it as a sort of feminist moment where she realized that, yes, she should be able to have that kind of power if she was going to be doing all the work. And everything sort of changed for her once she had that official position. She realized that, particularly as a woman, if you were just sort of talking, no one might listen to you. But if you had a vote, they had to respect you. They had to listen to your voice.

DAVIES: She gets into Congress in 1987. And not many politicians make their first run at elected office for Congress and win. She, in a way, was kind of in the right place at the right time. A congressman died. His wife took the seat. She got colon cancer and said that Nancy should run for the seat. But she still had to win it. It was a field of 14 people, including one that was quite formidable. How’d she pull it off?

BALL: Well, I think there are actually quite a few people in the Congress today who that’s their first office. But that’s sort of (laughter) another discussion. But yeah, she did have to fight for it despite having the deathbed endorsement of her friend, Sala Burton, who’d held the seat before her untimely death of colon cancer. And she really did model her operation on the politics that she learned in Baltimore, on counting every vote, on knowing the neighborhoods block by block and precinct by precinct.

She knew the value of showing up. She was a tireless campaigner. She’d be up at 5 in the morning waving signs for the commuters. And she’d be out late at night, you know, speaking at a bingo parlor or a lady’s bridge club. And so her principal opponent was a man named Harry Britt, who was sort of the successor of the famous Harvey Milk, the tragically assassinated member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And this was at a time when the AIDS crisis was really coming on the national radar.

And if elected, Harry Britt, her opponent, would have been the first openly gay man elected to Congress. So a lot of the campaign was about who could better represent the gay community. And Nancy Pelosi talked about all the connections she had, her ability to be effective in Washington. But her principal opponent’s argument was, we need to be represented by one of our own in Congress. And she won pretty narrowly. She won – there was – it was sort of two rounds of voting. And she won that first round by just a few thousand votes.

DAVIES: The other big part of it was money, right? She raised a lot of money. And she, at this point, had family wealth to contribute, too.

BALL: That’s right. Her husband was a banker and financier. They lived in New York for a few years before moving to his hometown in San Francisco. And he became quite successful. So even at that time in 1987, they were quite well-off. And yes, she put quite a lot of her own money into the race in addition to being able to raise funds. Because she had this background as a fundraiser, because she’d spent so much time raising money for other politicians, she was then able to call in a lot of those favors. And she outspent the entire rest of the field combined to win that race.

DAVIES: You write that when she got to Congress, she already knew 200 representatives and senators personally and that many owed her a favor. That’s pretty remarkable for a freshman. Why was that?

BALL: It’s very unusual for a freshman member of Congress. But she had helped so many people get to Congress. She had held all of these fundraisers in her home. Her house in San Francisco had become a sort of well-known stop on the fundraising circuit. So not just San Francisco politicians, but politicians from all over the country who were coming through California to raise money would stop at their home.

She also spent a term as the finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, basically raising money for all of the Senate candidates in tough races in 1986. So that meant that she got to know a lot of senators and helped a lot of them. And a lot of them grew to respect her through that and also, perhaps, owed her a favor. So – and this was exactly what she ran on.

Her slogan when she ran for office that first time was, a voice that will be heard. And it was all about her connections and her ability to be effective in Washington, which, if you think about it, is pretty odd for someone who’s never actually been in office before. In fact, one of her campaign consultants looked at this proposed slogan and said, wait a minute. We’re going to run a first-time candidate on this idea that they’re effective and accomplished? And the answer was, yes. That’s what we’re going to do. And it ended up working.

DAVIES: You know, a lot of people serve in Congress for decades but never become leaders. They are active on their committees. Nancy Pelosi decided, first, in 1988, she would run for one of these leadership posts, a whip. She stayed at it, eventually was elected the whip. She became the leader of the caucus in 2002. They were in the minority. So she told the post of minority leader and then eventually became speaker in 2007 after the Democrats won the majority in Congress in 2006. But running for these leadership posts is a little different from just serving in Congress. Tell us how you do it. How did she manage to win these internal battles for leadership?

BALL: It requires building a lot of support among your colleagues. So that means raising money for your colleagues, campaigning for your colleagues, helping them get elected and stay elected. It means proving that you have the sort of chops to do the job, proving that you know the ins and outs of the policy, you know the way the House works and functions. But it’s a lot of just building those relationships.

And interestingly, although she came from the liberal wing of the caucus, from a pretty early point in her career, she was building relationships with the more moderate and conservative Democrats in the House. And she became friends with a sort of crusty, old chauvinist from Pennsylvania, Jack Murtha, who was known for his work on defense spending. And because he saw something in her that made him take her seriously, he became a sort of crucial validator for her.

You have to remember, when she got to the House in 1987, out of 435 members of the House, there were only 23 women. So she wasn’t really going to get anywhere by getting all the women in the House to vote for her. There just weren’t that many. She needed to get all the men to take her seriously. She needed to get them to see her as someone who could do this job and wasn’t just a sort of dilettante, as she was often caricatured. So getting those older and more conservative and male members to take her seriously and to see her as a force to be reckoned with was really crucial to her being able to win that position.

DAVIES: Right. And, you know, you mentioned that in the 2000 congressional election cycle, she donated 3.9 million to other Democratic candidates. That’s certainly a way to win a lot of friends. The other thing was just the sheer level of work and the stamina she showed. What were her days like?

BALL: She has always had a really remarkable amount of energy. She doesn’t need a lot of sleep. I’ve never seen her eat an entire meal (laughter). She seems to – she doesn’t drink coffee. She doesn’t drink alcohol. She seems to live mostly on dark chocolate and chocolate ice cream, which she eats every day. But she has this incredible level of energy. And she traces a lot of it to being a mother. And as a mother myself, I identify with this a little bit. I think you find, when you become a mother for the first time – much less when you have five children – that the amount of capacity that you thought you had just increases exponentially when you – just because it’s so much work to take care of small children.

And so a lot of her energy derived from having been – having had five children in the space of six years, and having to raise this large family. That sort of makes you the leader of a caucus, in a way. And I think some of it is just natural. I think some of it has just got to be the way that she is naturally. I’ve actually asked her this question. I’m certainly not the first to ask, well, where do you get all this energy? How do you do it? And she’ll just give you this sort of blank look and say, well, I’m Italian. We have great stamina. And I think she really believes that she’s just genetically superior for being Italian.

DAVIES: You know, the other interesting thing is about having – raising a large family and, like, being a leader in a congressional caucus is, you know, you end up having to be very, very efficient with your time and get things done and yet have enormous patience to deal with people who think they’re important and can throw tantrums and need to be taken care of.

BALL: That’s right. When you think about it, politicians and toddlers have a lot in common, right?

DAVIES: (Laughter).

BALL: They’re egomaniacs. They’re self-centered. They’re unreasonable. They want everything and they want it now. And they’re not really interested in hearing why you need to get – you need them to do something else. So I do think that managing a caucus is a lot like managing a large family. And I think she did learn a lot from that. And, you know, a friend of Nancy Pelosi’s, when she was still a youngish mother, said she knew she was destined for success in politics when she saw all five children folding their own laundry.

And the way she ran the house was disciplined. It was efficient. It was, you know, her – she hardly ever – I have a hard time believing this. But her children say she hardly ever had to scold them because she would just give them that cold glare of disappointment. And the shame that they would feel for disappointing her was enough to make them behave. And so I think you see that in the way she manages the House Democratic Caucus as well, that she doesn’t often have to bring the hammer down and really punish people because they’re just so afraid of disappointing her.

DAVIES:  You know, for the first several years that Nancy Pelosi was the leader of the Democratic caucus, she was there when the Democrats were in a minority, and so it was a matter of getting the most she could with Republicans who were in charge. And you tell a number of stories. One that comes to mind is when Tom DeLay, the congressman from Texas, called her to say that they had to reduce the number of Democrats on one of the committees after this had all been agreed to. And she really showed some spine. How did she respond to him?

BALL: I love this answer. I love what she said to him when he told her that he was going to go back on this agreement she’d made with the Republican speaker at the time. She said, life on this planet as you know it will not be the same if you persist in this notion. So she was very much laying down a marker that said – and they tried to argue with her. They said, oh, we’ll go out and badmouth you in the media if you do this. She said, I don’t care. They said, well, actually, no, this is better for you. You get a larger percentage of the seats if the committee is smaller. She said, I don’t care. We had an agreement. We’re sticking to the agreement. And life as you know it will not be the same if you persist in this notion.

So from the very beginning, she was a very tough leader. She was a very strong leader. I think she viewed the leaders who’d come before her as being a little bit weak-willed and letting people get away with too much. And so at various points as minority leader before becoming speaker, a lot of what she was doing was trying to instill a sense of party discipline and wake up the Democratic caucus to the idea that they needed to work as a unit if they were going to have any kind of leverage in negotiations with the majority. And it is still, I think, the No. 1 thing that she says to and about her caucus today. She says, our diversity is our strength. Our unity is our power.

DAVIES: And we got to work as a team. It really is interesting because when you’re in the minority, you have to know how far you can push, right? I mean, and part of that involves knowing the circumstances in which the Republican leaders will need some Democratic votes because their own caucus was restive and some of them wouldn’t go along with leadership. And so it’s one thing to be tough and show steel, but to do it well, you really have to have done the homework and know exactly where you stand, where the votes are, right?

BALL: That’s right. And I think the other sort of favorite word in Nancy Pelosi’s vocabulary is leverage. She always knows where those pressure points are, knows exactly what her leverage is. Sometimes it’s that, as you say, the opposition is divided, and that means that if the Democrats are unified, they have a lot of leverage because the majority needs their votes. Another thing is just knowing what the priorities are. So in many of the negotiations with the Republican majority in the last few years, she knew that they wanted to increase military spending. So in order to get that, she was going to require them to increase some domestic spending or to protect some domestic spending that the Democrats cared about. So knowing those pressure points, knowing what it is your opponent values in the negotiation, enables her to to maximize that leverage.

And then just the fact that she is so effective – it becomes a sort of virtuous cycle, I guess you would say, that because she’s so successful at keeping the Democratic caucus united, it gives her a lot of credibility in that negotiation to say, I can bring along all of my votes. Can you do that? Because I haven’t seen you do that, but you’ve seen me do that a lot.

DAVIES: In 2006, the Democrats get the majority in Congress. She then becomes speaker the following January. And then in 2008, Barack Obama wins the White House. And Pelosi is speaker at a time when the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. And you have a president with an ambitious policy agenda. And there were things they took on like the Affordable Care Act. But it’s interesting that you write that one of the toughest things for her was dealing with President Obama. What was hard about that?

BALL: I don’t think she would say that he was hard to deal with. I think she – they – the two of them became very close. And she cherished that relationship very much. And I think he came to respect her as well. But this was a common refrain during the Obama administration from Democrats in the House and Senate. They just never felt that Obama was fully engaged with the Congress and knew his way around the Congress. Having only been a senator for a few years, never having been in the House and, you know, not being the sort of schmoozer who is always having people over to the White House and wining and dining representatives and so on, many of the House Democrats were often frustrated with President Obama’s negotiating abilities, felt that he was giving away too much on the front end and wasn’t maximizing leverage. So if you can imagine, if you’re someone like Nancy Pelosi who values leverage, that’s going to be extremely frustrating.

DAVIES: Right. Well, and she was frustrated, as many in Congress were, that the Obama administration would want Congress to actually draft some of these really critical pieces of legislation, almost as if – I think you write – the Democrats in Congress felt that the Obama team wanted to get credit for these policy initiatives but not get their hands dirty in actually doing the work of making things happen. And then I guess the other thing was that Obama tended to think he was going to get Republican support. And she would tell him, no, they will string you along and then vote against you and then blame Democrats for everything that goes wrong.

BALL: That’s right. She had had a lot of experience watching how the Republicans did business and had become, I think, pretty appropriately cynical about their willingness to work in a bipartisan fashion. So pretty much from the beginning, you know, you mentioned that Obama came in with this ambitious policy agenda. He also, of course, came in with a crashing economy. And so the first order of business was to try to do something about that. And Obama really did think that because the situation was so dire and because he had run on this message of sort of uniting the country and because he came in with this very strong popularity, he thought that he could get some Republican support.

But the Republicans pretty much decided at the outset that that was something they were not going to do. And Nancy Pelosi became a useful foil for them, in part because Obama was so popular, right? And they could always say, well, you know, we like Obama fine, but Nancy Pelosi and the Washington Democrats, they are the problem here. They’re the ones getting in the way. They’re the ones who won’t work with us. And it wasn’t true. She would’ve been willing to work across the aisle if she believed that they were really going to deal with her. But she also wasn’t naive enough to think that they were totally sincere in all of their protestations.

DAVIES: What was Nancy Pelosi’s role in getting the Affordable Care Act passed?

BALL: She was really instrumental to its passage, and I don’t think that her role has been fully appreciated. A lot of the histories of the Affordable Care Act have centered on President Obama or have centered on the challenge of getting it through the Senate. But she was key to getting it through the House. And not only that – when the Democrats lost their 60-vote majority in the Senate and had to essentially start from scratch, there were a lot of people in the White House in the Obama administration who wanted to give up, who thought that this just wasn’t going to be possible. It was too large a hill to climb, and it was looking politically toxic as well, and maybe they should toggle back their ambitions and try for something a little bit smaller, something that wouldn’t be truly universal but would maybe just increase the number of children with health insurance. And Nancy Pelosi was the one who in that meeting turned to President Obama and said, Mr. President, I know there are people urging you to take what she called the namby-pamby approach, and she was the one who stiffened his spine. Now, the president and his people will tell you that he never went wobbly, although there’s some evidence that perhaps he did, but she was the one who said, I will help you make this happen. Let’s not back down. We’ve come too far. Trying to get some form of universal access to health care was something that the Democrats had been trying to do for the better part of a century, and they were so close, and she was not going to let him give up at that moment.

DAVIES: So the Democrats lost control of Congress in 2010. That made Nancy Pelosi now minority leader. And then in 2016, Donald Trump surprises everyone by winning the presidential election. She’s got a new president she’ll have to deal with. So how did she manage dealing with him? What approach did she take?

BALL: Well, you have to remember that, first of all, nobody, including Donald Trump, expected him to win that election in 2016. So it was quite a jolt to everybody in politics, Nancy Pelosi included. And, also, nobody knew what to expect from him as president because he had said so many conflicting things in order to get elected, had had so many different personas from sort of conservative Republican to liberal New York Democrat. And he’d sold himself simultaneously as this fighter for the right and also as this deal-maker. And, in fact, people – a lot of people who voted for him saw him as more moderate than Hillary Clinton, someone who would be able to work across the aisle.

So being the results-oriented, operational person that she is, Nancy Pelosi did not spend a lot of time recovering from the shock of Donald Trump’s election. She immediately started to think about, how can I deal with him? And they got on the phone, and he said some very nice things to her. And her very first thought, though, was, I have to protect the Affordable Care Act, because she knew that with Republicans, the only thing that had stopped Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act before was that President Obama would’ve vetoed it. But now that they had the majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency, it was a very real possibility. So she immediately kicked into high gear trying to ensure that the Affordable Care Act would not be repealed. And that was her very first priority.

DAVIES: In 2018, the Democrats retook Congress with a new wave of enthusiasm and a new wave of women running for office and being elected to Congress. This presented a challenge for Nancy Pelosi. I mean, there were a lot of new people in Congress who didn’t know her as well, and she and the other two top leaders in Congress were all in their 70s and there was a rebellion of sorts. What convinced her she should stay on? How did she deal with this?

BALL: She said after the 2016 election that if Hillary Clinton had won, she might have stepped down, she might have retired because there would be a woman at the table. Being the only woman leader – top leader of either party in Congress or the White House, she has spent most of her career being the only woman at the table when the president meets with the top leaders of Congress, and she believes that that’s really important. So some people don’t believe she actually would’ve stepped down. She certainly has a long record of refusing to step down, even after a loss. But she did say that she would’ve considered that and that she stayed in large part because she believed there needed to be a woman at that negotiating table.

And then also, just her capabilities as a negotiator, seeing what the Democrats were going to be up against with the Republicans in power in both houses of Congress and the White House, believing that they needed the most capable person in those negotiations and believing that that was her.

DAVIES: After the Democrats took control of the House in 2018 and then Pelosi would soon be speaker again, she had real leverage in dealing with Donald Trump, which didn’t happen in the first two years of his term. How did things change? There was an early meeting at which she made quite a statement.

BALL: That’s right. Shortly after that 2018 election, you remember there was this high-stakes budget negotiation going on between the two parties that ended in a government shutdown. And before that, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer went to the White House to meet with the president. And Trump, as he’s done in a few of these settings, decided to invite the press to stay and film this negotiation that they thought was going to be private. And at one point, they’re going back and forth about things like the border wall and whether the government’s going to shut down.

And Trump, sort of almost as an aside, says, well, you know, Nancy’s got a hard time right now because she doesn’t have a lot of support in her own party. He’s referring to the leadership battle that she was in to regain the speakership. And she immediately cuts him off, doesn’t let him finish and says, Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.

So she was interrupting him. She was putting him in his place. She was refusing to be sort of insulted in that way. And I think that made a big impression. But what made an even bigger impression was when she and Senator Schumer walked out of that meeting, walked out the doors of the White House. And she put on that reddish-orange coat and those round tortoiseshell sunglasses and just grinned a big grin.

And there’s an – that image of that moment sort of instantly became iconic as the epitome of the woman who could put Trump in his place. And because there was this wave of women’s political activism that started with Trump’s election and has continued ever since, because there’s so much anger on the left toward Trump and the Trump administration, I think that image immediately caught fire as sort of the fighter that Democrats needed, the figure who they felt could finally really stand up for them and stand up to Trump. And that’s been her position ever since.

DAVIES: You know, it’s interesting. You make the point a lot in the book of how results-oriented she is, you know? It isn’t – doesn’t matter whether you don’t like me or whether you make fun of me in public if we get important things done for the American people – and just tries not to get involved in all the emotional stuff that can get in the way. That said, did you ever see her lose her temper?

BALL: There’s a little-known incident that’s a perfect illustration of this from 2014. So she’s minority leader at this time. The Republicans are in control of the House. And there’s some speeches going on, as they often are, on the floor of the House. And a Republican member of Congress, Tom Marino, starts sort of taunting her. He’s saying, you know, you could’ve fixed immigration when you were in control, Madam Speaker. But you didn’t do it. And he’s insulting her intelligence. He’s insulting her capacity.

So he gets done speaking. And you can actually see, in a partial way, on, like, the C-SPAN recording of this, you can see her marching across the floor, chasing him down and wagging her finger at him. And what she’s saying is, you are an insignificant person. You’re an insignificant person. And he recounted this later sort of shocked that she – and her colleagues almost had to pull her away from him because she was so incensed by what he’d accused her of.

DAVIES: I’m wondering if you can tell us a bit about how she’s going to deal with the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. I mean, there are practical challenges. How does the House function? How can you exercise oversight over the executive branch without public hearings and staff being on sight? How do you vote? What do you see?

BALL: Yeah. Obviously, it’s a massive public policy challenge. And it’s also a massive logistical challenge. And I don’t think the Congress has figured out either part of that yet. She’s been involved in the negotiations toward these four massive bills that have already been passed, spending nearly $3 trillion to try to keep, you know, workers and businesses and the health care system afloat. And the work there is not finished. I think she regards that as a partial success. She still thinks that more needs to be done.

And in terms of the logistics, you know, the House is a very old-fashioned place. And there were some efforts to try to figure out a way for them to meet remotely or do something else. And that kind of got poleaxed bipartisanship, you could say, where the Republicans wouldn’t agree to it. And it’s become this whole highly charged political battle, as absolutely everything is these days.

So we’ll see. We have, you know, the Senate coming back this week. The House is supposed to come back in some fashion next week. And it will be a real challenge to see whether they can manage these two simultaneous problems, both the policy problem – this is a Congress that wasn’t functioning particularly well before they had to stay home and wear masks – and also the unique logistical problems of the virus.

DAVIES: Molly Ball, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

BALL: Thank you so much for having me.

 

Trump is getting trounced among a crucial constituency: The haters

POLITICO

In 2016, Donald Trump cleaned up among voters who disliked him and Hillary Clinton. This year, Biden is winning big among the comparable group

President Donald Trump is losing a critical constituency: voters who see two choices on the ballot — and hate them both.

Unlike in 2016, when a large group of voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton broke sharply for Trump, the opposite is happening now, according to public polling and private surveys conducted by Republicans and Democrats alike.

It’s a significant and often underappreciated group of voters. Of the nearly 20 percent of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump in 2016, Trump outperformed Clinton by about 17 percentage points, according to exit polls.

Four years later, that same group — including a mix of Bernie Sanders supporters, other Democrats, disaffected Republicans and independents — strongly prefers Biden, the polling shows. The former vice president leads Trump by more than 40 percentage points among that group, which accounts for nearly a quarter of registered voters, according to a Monmouth University poll last week.

Trump’s weakness with the electorate’s malcontents is a worrisome sign for Republicans. They now must not only bloody Biden but render him less palatable than an already-unpopular president. Biden has been a fixture in public life for decades — making it more difficult to alter public opinion of him — and he is viewed more favorably by voters than Clinton was in 2016.

“It’s not 2016 anymore, OK?” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican consultant based in Pennsylvania. “There’s no way Joe Biden will be as bad a candidate as Hillary Clinton.”

Trump’s campaign is now preparing to unload a barrage of negative ads on Biden, expecting to spend more than $10 million in an effort to weaken the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Trump did overcome a polling disadvantage four years ago, and the top-line margins between Trump and Biden are similar to polls from the same time in 2016. Trump is trailing Biden by about 5 percentage points nationally, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, and he is lagging in swing states — including in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. At this point in 2016, Clinton national lead was slightly larger.

Clinton was leading Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election among voters who disapproved of both politicians, too. But that margin was consistently smaller than Biden’s — less than 10 percentage points in most polls before Election Day.

In 2016, he said, “the people who decided the election were people who disliked both Clinton and Trump, and they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. This time, it’s a smaller number of people who dislike Trump and Biden, but that smaller number of voters is voting for Biden.”

Biden is better liked by voters than Clinton was at this point in the campaign four years ago. And the coronavirus pandemic — and the public attention it has commanded — has had the effect of freezing the campaign, making it more onerous for Trump to train voters’ attention on anything else.

Fauci will issue a stark warning on the risks of reopening too soon. UPDATES

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a central figure in the government’s response to the coronavirus, intends to warn the Senate on Tuesday that Americans would experience “needless suffering and death” if the country opens up too quickly.

Dr. Fauci, who has emerged as the perhaps nation’s most respected voice during the coronavirus crisis, is one of four top government doctors scheduled to testify remotely at a high-profile hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” he wrote. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Dr. Fauci was referring to a three-phase White House plan, Opening Up America Again, that lays out guidelines for state officials considering reopening their economies. Among its recommendations: states should have a “downward trajectory of positive tests” or a “downward trajectory of documented cases” of coronavirus over two weeks, while conducting robust contact tracing and “sentinel surveillance” testing of asymptomatic people in vulnerable populations, such as nursing homes.

But many states are reopening without meeting those guidelines, seeking to ease the pain as millions of working people and small-business owners are facing economic ruin while sheltering at home.

“We’re not reopening based on science,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.”

The much-feared second wave of infection may not wait until fall, many scientists say. Instead, it may become a series of wavelets occurring unpredictably across the country, writes Donald G. McNeil Jr., a Times science and health reporter.

This Is the Future of the Pandemic

Covid-19 isn’t going away soon. Two recent studies mapped out the possible shapes of its trajectory.

“Exactly how long remains to be seen,” said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.”

A single round of social distancing — closing schools and workplaces, limiting the sizes of gatherings, lockdowns of varying intensities and durations — will not be sufficient in the long term.

Dr. Lipsitch is a co-author of two recent analyses — one from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, the other from the Chan School published in Science — that describe a variety of shapes the pandemic wave might take in the coming months.

The Minnesota study describes three possibilities:

SCENARIO 1: Peaks and Valleys        SCENARIO 2:  Fall Peak                SCENARIO 3: Slow Burn                                              

Scenario No. 1 depicts an initial wave of cases — the current one — followed by a consistently bumpy ride of “peaks and valleys” that will gradually diminish over a year or two.

Scenario No. 2 supposes that the current wave will be followed by a larger “fall peak,” or perhaps a winter peak, with subsequent smaller waves thereafter, similar to what transpired during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.

Scenario No. 3 shows an intense spring peak followed by a “slow burn” with less-pronounced ups and downs.

The authors conclude that whichever reality materializes (assuming ongoing mitigation measures, as we await a vaccine), “we must be prepared for at least another 18 to 24 months of significant Covid-19 activity, with hot spots popping up periodically in diverse geographic areas.”

In the Science paper, the Harvard team — infectious-disease epidemiologist Yonatan Grad, his postdoctoral fellow Stephen Kissler, Dr. Lipsitch, his doctoral student Christine Tedijanto and their colleague Edward Goldstein — took a closer look at various scenarios by simulating the transmission dynamics using the latest Covid-19 data and data from related viruses.

One figure from the paper, foresees social distancing is turned “on” when the number of Covid-19 cases reaches a certain prevalence in the population — for instance, 35 cases per 10,000, although the thresholds would be set locally, monitored with widespread testing. It is turned “off” when cases drop to a lower threshold, perhaps 5 cases per 10,000. Because critical cases that require hospitalization lag behind the general prevalence, this strategy aims to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.

Another figure represents the corresponding, if very gradual, increase in population immunity. “The ‘herd immunity threshold’ in the model is 55 percent of the population, or the level of immunity that would be needed for the disease to stop spreading in the population without other measures,” Dr. Kissler said.

Yet another scenario takes into account not only seasonality but also a doubling of the critical-care capacity in hospitals. This, in turn, allows for social distancing to kick in at a higher threshold — say, at a prevalence of 70 cases per 10,000 — and for even longer breaks between social distancing periods.

What is clear overall is that a one-time social distancing effort will not be sufficient to control the epidemic in the long term, and that it will take a long time to reach herd immunity.

“This is because when we are successful in doing social distancing — so that we don’t overwhelm the health care system — fewer people get the infection, which is exactly the goal,” said Ms. Tedijanto. “But if infection leads to immunity, successful social distancing also means that more people remain susceptible to the disease. As a result, once we lift the social distancing measures, the virus will quite possibly spread again as easily as it did before the lockdowns.”

So, lacking a vaccine, our pandemic state of mind may persist well into 2021 or 2022 — which surprised even the experts. “We anticipated a prolonged period of social distancing would be necessary, but didn’t initially realize that it could be this long,” Dr. Kissler said.

The White House plans to ask officials — but not Trump — to wear face masks.

New guidance released to Trump administration employees will require them to wear masks when inside the West Wing, according to an internal memo released on Monday and obtained by The New York Times.

“As an additional layer of protection, we are requiring everyone who enters the West Wing to wear a mask or face covering,” read the memo, which was distributed to staff members through the White House management office.

The new guidance is an abrupt establishment of a policy after two aides working near the president — a military valet and Katie Miller, the vice president’s spokeswoman — tested positive for the coronavirus last week.

The new rules are not expected to apply to President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who for weeks have downplayed the need to wear masks, an attitude that had trickled down to staff members. The policy was first reported by The Washington Post.

The spread of the virus into the White House comes amid a potential collision between Washington residents and the area’s largest employer, the federal government. The region is not yet open for business, and cases of the virus are climbing in Washington, Maryland and Virginia.

 

Elon Musk announces that Tesla will restart production despite a county order.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said on Monday that the electric-car company was resuming production at its assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., even though it had not yet been cleared to do so by local health authorities.

“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” he announced on Twitter. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

It is one of the most prominent examples of a powerful business figure defying local health orders amid the response to the novel coronavirus. Tesla on Saturday filed suit against Alameda County, where its Fremont, Calif., factory is located, seeking an injunction against orders to stay closed. The suit alleged violations of the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

The county’s health officer has said he hopes to work out an agreement with Tesla to open the plant on May 18. The plant is Tesla’s main source of revenue and has been closed since early April. County officials have not authorized the resumption of indoor manufacturing over fears that the coronavirus could spread among large groups working in proximity.

Trump narrowly outraised Biden in April, but maintains significant cash lead.

Trump, the Republican National Committee and joint fundraising committees raised $61.7 million, officials announced Monday. Biden and the Democratic National Committee trailed closely behind with $60.5 million, officials said.

But Trump, who has been raising money for his reelection since he became president, entered May with a massive war chest of $255 million in hand, officials said.

Biden’s virtual campaign has been based out of his basement studio, where he has been appearing on video streams with voters and donors and filming video messages. Amid concerns by some donors and Democratic leaders about the scale and reach of his operation, Biden has launched a major hiring spree to build his team for the general election.

Biden calls out Trump for testing his staff while telling Americans testing isn’t necessary.

Former vice president Joe Biden launched a fresh line of attack against President Trump on Monday, criticizing the president for providing coronavirus tests to his staff while telling Americans that testing isn’t important.

“If Trump and his team understand how critical testing is to their safety — and they seem to, given their own behavior — why are they insisting that it’s unnecessary for the American people?” Biden wrote in an op-ed published in The Washington Post.

Biden returned to the theme later in the piece, writing, “Instead of once again seeking to divide us, Trump should be working to get Americans the same necessary protections he has gotten for himself.”

Last week, Trump said that testing is not necessary to safely end virus-related restrictions to life and work in the country, dismissing the advice of health experts, scientists and even some Republican allies.

He has also focused on the optics, noting that more testing would probably lead to increases in the official count of infected Americans. “In a way, by doing all of this testing we make ourselves look bad,” Trump said last week.

The president receives a daily test for the virus, as do the top aides who come in regular contact with him. Two White House aides recently tested positive for the virus, which Trump has pointed to as evidence that testing is not worthwhile.

“This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great,” Trump said Friday. “The tests are perfect, but something can happen between the test where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden — she [the aide] was tested very recently and tested negative and today I guess for some reason she tested positive.”

The United States has performed about 6 million tests in the past few months but has tested a significantly smaller percentage of the population than many other countries.

About 300,000 tests are being conducted each day throughout the country. Researchers at Harvard University have said the United States would need to conduct about 5 million tests a day by June — and 20 million a day by July — to safely return to normal life.

With no vaccine or cure, the president, governors, mayors and county executives will have to decide how many deaths would be acceptable to restore a shattered economy.

“What I cannot simply say is, ‘Well, good luck to everybody over 60 or overweight in Kansas City, Mo.,’” Mayor Quinton Lucas said.Credit…Christopher Smith for The New York Times

NY TIMES

How many deaths are acceptable to reopen the country before the coronavirus is completely eradicated? “One is too many,” President Trump insists, a politically safe formulation that any leader would instinctively articulate.

But that is not the reality of Mr. Trump’s reopen-soon approach. Nor for that matter will it be the bottom line for even those governors who want to go slower. Until there is a vaccine or a cure for the coronavirus, the macabre truth is that any plan to begin restoring public life invariably means trading away some lives. The question is how far will leaders go to keep it to a minimum.

Some of the more provocative voices on the political right say that with tens of millions of Americans out of work and businesses collapsing, some people must be sacrificed for the greater good of restoring the economy quickly. To many, that sounds unthinkable, but less inflammatory experts and policymakers also acknowledge that there are enormous costs to keeping so much of the work force idle, with many of the unemployed struggling to pay for food, shelter or medical care for other health challenges.

And so the nation’s leaders are left with the excruciating dilemma of figuring out how to balance life and livelihood on a scale unseen in generations. “Every governor in the nation is asking that,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, [above] where 2,700 have died and more than 1 million have lost jobs, said this week. “There’s no such thing as zero risk in the world in which we’re living. But we know that not taking measures to control the spread means that’s going to translate into lives lost.”

With no cure available for the coronavirus and no vaccine likely for another year or more, governors in hard-hit states are seeking ways to minimize the number of additional deaths by staging and structuring any reopening. Time and testing are key, according to public health experts. The longer a quarantine can be extended the better, they say, and the more testing made available, the easier it would be to properly calibrate a reopening and respond to any new outbreak.Pushing to restore business sooner rather than later, Mr. Trump has dismissed waiting until comprehensive testing provides a better map of where the infection has spread. Instead, the federal government’s guidelines envision “sentinel surveillance” testing of vulnerable places like nursing homes and inner-city health centers, while gradually reopening businesses, schools and other venues in stages with precautions like masks, gloves and social distancing.

All of which could mitigate future infections but would not halt them. The reason the death toll projection may be closer to 60,000 rather than the 2 million of one estimate was because society largely shut down. One recent study said that the 60,000 deaths would have been 6,000 had quarantine measures been imposed just two weeks earlier. So easing measures means the death toll will go up even with safeguards.But remaining closed is not without a cost either. In just four weeks, a staggering 22 million Americans have lost their jobs, the equivalent of the entire labor force of 23 states. The question divides not only the nation but even families. Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff, and his brother, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a prominent medical ethicist and vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, have engaged in a running quarrel about how soon society should reopen.Rahm Emanuel considers it untenable to keep most of the country closed until the virus is completely under control, while Ezekiel Emanuel maintains that the pandemic is too much of a threat to rush back to life as usual.

“There’s nothing you can do risk free. Nothing,” Rahm Emanuel said last week. “And the missing ingredient is what do you think the public can accept and what will you do to be forthright and honest?” The public, he said, understands that life comes with peril as long as measures are taken to minimize it. “If you reduce the speed limit dramatically, you’d have less deaths,” Mr. Emanuel said. “But we allow it to go to a certain level.”In a separate call, Ezekiel Emanuel[above] said: “I think Rahm is wrong on how bad it could be by letting it run around the population. I’m not for keeping the economy closed forever. Sometimes my brother paints me in a picture. But you have to do it safely. Safely doesn’t mean no deaths. I never said no Covid deaths. But you have to do it in a way that is measured, not irresponsible where you’re going to get to 2 million deaths.”Eric Winstanley laid off 35 employees at his company in Niagara Falls, N.Y.,  which makes patio awnings and boat covers. Some were family members.Credit…Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times

The trade-offs have stirred angry exchanges since the start of the lockdowns. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, who is 70, said last month that older people like himself should be ready to risk death to save the economy for their grandchildren, comments he defended on Fox News on Monday night. In a separate appearance on Fox last week, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television host, cited a study to argue that reopening schools “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality,” calling it “a trade-off some folks would consider.” After a backlash, he said he “misspoke” and expressed regret that he “confused and upset people.”

I’ve realized my comments on risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention. I misspoke. pic.twitter.com/Kq1utwiCjR
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) April 16, 2020

Some of those charged with making these decisions said far more information is required to reopen with enough confidence to constrain further spread of the virus and avoid a deadly second wave. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said his state would need to double the number of tests.

“You have to crack the back of the personal health piece before you can crack the back of the economic piece,” he said this week. Noting that 177 people in his state died the day before, he added: “The house is still on fire and the fire brigade is still out there trying to put the fire out.”

Philip D. Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, touring a medical station inside the Atlantic City Convention Center on Tuesday.Credit…Pool photo by Joe Lamberti

The situation, not surprisingly, looks different in different parts of the country. The trade-offs in Wyoming, where there have been six deaths, or in Hawaii, with 12 deaths, hardly compare to those in New Jersey, where more than 5,000 have died, or in New York, where more than 15,000 have died.

The United States has always tolerated a certain amount of preventable death. To use Rahm Emanuel’s example, Americans reduce traffic fatalities by requiring seatbelts and airbags, imposing speed limits and employing police. But until better technology is perfected, the only way to actually stop all car crashes — banning cars — is untenable, so some deaths are countenanced, a total of 38,800 in 2019.

Auto accidents are not communicable so not an apples-to-apples comparison to the coronavirus. But the ordinary flu still claims thousands of lives a year — anywhere from 12,000 in the 2011-12 season up to an estimated 61,000 in 2017-18 — which society accepts without stay-at-home orders. Those seasonal deaths, however, are spread over many months, while the coronavirus hit with catastrophic fury in a matter of weeks and would have caused even more devastation without the quarantines.

Government makes money-versus-lives trade-offs all the time. When a regulatory agency weighs a new safety rule, it measures the cost to industry or consumers against the gain by assigning a dollar value to each life that might be saved. If a new rule costs billions of dollars but would only prevent a few dozen deaths, it likely would not be adopted — even though someone would die as a result.

The idea that the government translates life to dollars and cents may sound bloodless but it is not unusual. A White House report from 2017, for instance, estimated the cost of 41,000 deaths attributed to opioid overdoses in 2015 at $431.7 billion, an average of $10.5 million per person.

By that calculation, the 60,000 deaths projected from the coronavirus would be valued at $631.8 billion — while the roughly 2 million lives theoretically saved by lockdowns would be worth about $21 trillion, or nearly eight times the $2.7 trillion in relief spending brokered by Congress and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

But James H. Stock, a Harvard economist who served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said this crisis goes beyond such ordinary calculations because a shuttered economy represents an almost existential threat to the very idea of America.

“We really have to be talking not just about our reduction in consumption in the short run but what this is going to be doing to the economy and the republic in the long run,” he said. “It’s those big issues that we’ve been afraid to talk about. A year of this and we would just see an unrecognizable transformation of what America would look like coming out of it.”Studies show that depression, drug use and suicides spike during economic hardship, including after the last recession, and the all-consuming focus of the medical system on the coronavirus in certain areas has delayed other medical care. Yet that might be offset by falling violent crime, car crashes, workplace accidents and air pollution. Vehicle collisions in California decreased by half after its stay-at-home order went into effect while murder and air pollution are each down 25 percent in New York City.Some scholars argue that reopening too quickly would actually hurt the economy, particularly if it resulted in a second wave that destroyed public confidence. A study of the 1918 influenza pandemic found that cities that closed schools and banned public gatherings earlier and kept them shut longer not only had fewer deaths but emerged better economically.Governor Murphy said resuming public life would not succeed if people did not feel certain that the virus had been contained. Indeed, 76 percent of Americans said social distancing should continue as long as needed to curb the virus even if it meant continued damage to the economy, according to a new poll by Politico and Morning Consult, while just 14 percent favored an end to restrictions to stimulate the economy even if it meant spreading the virus.

“If you opened every restaurant in New Jersey tomorrow, I don’t think anybody would show up,” Governor Murphy said. “It’s not like we’re holding back some pent-up demand. I don’t blame them — there are folks out there who are frustrated, who have cabin fever, who want to break free. So do I, by the way. But I think folks also want to have confidence that they’re not going to get sick and die.”

 

STAND BY ME

Trump and Melania escape Washington hours after learning that long-time CFO of the Trump Organization has been granted immunity in Michael Cohen probe – as prosecutors close in on the president’s inner circle

Federal prosecutors granted an immunity deal to Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, in their probe that secured a guilty plea from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, .He spoke to a grand jury investigating Michael Cohen. Weisselberg has worked for Trump for decades and now runs the company along with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. It was not immediately clear what was the extent or nature of the immunity deal he secured. But he was one of the executives who helped arrange $420,000 in payments to longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen to reimburse him for hush money he paid an adult-film star. On Thursday, David Pecker,(Left) the CEO of the company that owns the tabloid the National Enquirer, was also granted immunity in the investigation. In a practice known as “catch and kill,” Pecker allegedly helped Cohen suppress potentially damaging stories about Trump.No one knows Trump’s finances better than Weisselberg. Aside from Trump himself, Weisselberg is the longest-serving employee of the Trump Organization. He has worked for the company since the 1970s, beginning as an accountant with Fred Trump, the president’s father, and working his way up to chief financial officer. Weisselberg was named by Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis as the executive who approved the Trump Organization’s reimbursement of Cohen for the payments made to Daniels.Weisselberg handled not just the Trump Organization’s finances but also those of Trump himself. This means Weisselberg is the accountant who filed Trump’s tax returns. He also signed the checks for Trump’s fake university that was fined $25 million for defrauding students. And he was named treasurer of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which is currently under investigation by the New York attorney general for fraud. “He plays an integral part in the Trump Organization’s growth and continued financial success,” Ivanka Trump said in an emailed statement to The Wall Street Journal in 2016.

Trump’s America does not care.

 

To ensure global peace that Americans sought after being pulled into two world wars, the United States became the main provider of security in Europe and East Asia. In Europe, the U.S. security guarantee made European integration possible and provided political, economic and psychological safeguards against a return to the continent’s destructive past. In East Asia, the American guarantee ended the cycle of conflict that had embroiled Japan and China and their neighbors in almost constant warfare since the late 19th century. The security bargain had an economic dimension. The allies could spend less on defense and more on strengthening their economies and social welfare systems. The United States wanted allied economies to be strong, to counter extremism on both the left and right, and to prevent the arms races and geopolitical competitions that had led to past wars. The United States would not insist on winning every economic contest or every trade deal. The perception by the other powers that they had a reasonably fair chance to succeed economically and sometimes even to surpass the United States — as Japan, Germany and other nations did at various times — was part of the glue that held the order together.

The United States’ allies count on the American security guarantee and on access to the United States’ vast market — its prosperous consumers, financial institutions and innovative entrepreneurs. In the past, U.S. presidents were unwilling to exploit this leverage. They believed that the United States had a stake in upholding the liberal world order, even if it meant abiding by or paying lip service to international rules and institutions to provide reassurance. The alternative was a return to the great-power clashes of the past from which the United States could never hope to remain uninvolved. To avoid a world of war and chaos, the United States was, up to a point, willing to play Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians’ ropes, in the interest of reassuring and binding the democratic community together. Europeans and others may have found the United States selfish and overbearing, too eager to use force and too willing to pursue its goals unilaterally,

The United States’ allies are about to find out what real unilateralism looks like and what the real exercise of U.S. hegemony feels like, because Trump’s America does not care. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself. Trump’s policies are pure realism, devoid of ideals and sentiment, pursuing a narrow “national interest” defined strictly in terms of dollars and cents and defense against foreign attack. Trump’s world is a struggle of all-against-all. There are no relationships based on common values. There are merely transactions determined by power. It is the world that a century ago brought us two world wars. The United States’ adversaries will do well in this world, for Trump’s America does not want war. It will accommodate powers that can harm it. It will pay them the respect they crave and grant them their spheres of interest. Those that depend on the United States, meanwhile, will be treated with disdain, pushed around and used as pawns. At times they will be hostages to be traded for U.S. gain. The United States [is] willing to offer them up as sacrifices to appease aggressors.

The United States rejected this approach to the world after 1945, choosing instead to take a broad, “enlightened” view of its interests. It built and defended a world order premised on the idea that Americans would be safe only if democratic and liberal values were safe. It regarded its interests and ideals as intimately bound together, its democratic alliances as permanent. But that was a choice. The United States, with all its great power, could have gone in a different direction. Now it appears to have done so.

ROBERT KAGAN, WASHINGTON POST

The Summit Was Unprecedented, the Statement Vague and the Day Historic

In a day of personal diplomacy that began with a choreographed handshake and ended with a freewheeling news conference, President Trump deepened his wager on North Korea’s leader on Tuesday, arguing that their rapport would bring the swift demise of that country’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump, acting more salesman than statesman, used flattery, cajolery and even a slickly produced promotional video to try to make the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, a partner in peace. He also gave Mr. Kim a significant concession: no more military drills between the United States and South Korea, a change that surprised South Korea and the Pentagon.

Trump said he believed that Mr. Kim’s desire to end North Korea’s seven-decade-old confrontation with the United States was sincere.Still, a joint statement signed by the two after their meeting — the first ever between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader — was as skimpy as the summit meeting was extravagant. It called for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula but provided neither a timeline nor any details about how the North would go about giving up its weapons.The statement, which American officials negotiated intensely with the North Koreans and had hoped would be a road map to a nuclear deal, was a page and a half of diplomatic language recycled from statements negotiated by the North over the last two decades.It made no mention of Mr. Trump’s longstanding — supposedly nonnegotiable — demand that North Korea submit to complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. It made no mention of North Korea’s missiles. It did not even set a firm date for a follow-up meeting, though the president said he would invite Mr. Kim to the White House when the time was right.“This is what North Korea has wanted from the beginning, and I cannot believe that our side allowed it,” said Joseph Y. Yun, a former State Department official who has negotiated with the North.

VOX

“Kim Jong Un is desperately looking for international recognition of North Korea as a country in good standing, of his right to rule it, and of the legitimacy of his possession of nuclear weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, writes at Foreign Policy. Many pundits thought there was a very good chance the summit would never happen: that the sides were too far apart to even get to the table. The fact that Trump showed up the most pessimistic expectations is a clear win. [And the fact that the two leaders of the Unites  States and North Korea actually met and concluded talks on friendly terms has undeniably made the world a little safer–Esco] Here are some things that weren’t mentioned at any point in the statement issued after the summit: North Korean political prisoners, brutal labor camps, and the starvation crisis.There’s a reason North Korea is widely considered the most repressive country on earth. Somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 North Koreans are currently held as political prisoners by their own government, detained in brutal and vicious gulags. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans have died in these gulags over the past several decades; summary executions and systematic rape are relatively common occurrences.Thomas Buergenthal, an eminent international lawyer and Auschwitz survivor, helped prepare a chilling report on these camps last year. He told the Washington Post that “the conditions in the Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps.”Meanwhile, North Korea has devoted tremendous resources to its nuclear program and military, at the expense of the basic needs of its citizens. UNICEF estimated in January that 60,000 North Korean children were on the brink of starvation. Trump canceling US military exercises with South Korea is a big, big deal. The exercises are fairly regular — the next one is scheduled for August — and an important tool for reassuring South Korea that the US is committed to its defense. They also show North Korea that the alliance is durable and serious, thus deterring it from any kind of military probe to test American and South Korean resolve. It’s even more significant because the South Koreans didn’t know about it in advance, and still aren’t sure what it means….The irony here is that South Korean President Moon Jae-in was the driving force behind the peace talks. His diplomatic outreach to both sides — he met with both Trump and Kim multiple times before the talks to lay the groundwork — was vital to the meeting actually happening. Moon assured both sides that a deal could be struck. North Korea’s longtime strategic goal is something political scientists call “decoupling,” which means using its nuclear arsenal as a wedge to break the alliance between the United States and South Korea. Classically, decoupling is supposed to work as a kind of threat: If the North has nuclear missiles that can reach US cities, then the US breaks off the alliance because it’s not willing to put San Francisco at risk to save Seoul. What’s happening now is a bit different. Kim is dangling the carrot of denuclearization to convince Trump to make concessions against the South’s interest, pitting the allies against each other and making an alliance fracture more likely in the long term. It’s a canny maneuver by Kim, and it’s not [likely] Trump knows he’s being played.