Vatican says Pope John Paul II was aware of misconduct allegations against ex-cardinal McCarrick nearly 2 decades before his removal
InternationalNov 11. 2020Cardinal Theodore McCarrick gave a news conference outside the Archdiocesan Pastoral Center in Hyattsville, Md., regarding the allegations of misconduct. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Sarah L. Voisin
By The Washington Post · Chico Harlan, Michelle Boorstein, Sarah Pulliam Bailey · NATIONAL, WORLD, COURTSLAW, RELIGION, EUROPE ROME – An unprecedented Vatican internal investigation has found that Pope John Paul II knew about and overlooked sexual misconduct claims against Theodore McCarrick, instead choosing to facilitate the rise of an American prelate who would be defrocked and disgraced two decades later.
The report amounts to a stunning play-by-play of the kind of system failure the Catholic Church normally keeps under wraps, describing how McCarrick amassed power and prestige in the face of rumors, and sometimes written evidence, about his sexual misconduct with seminarians, priests and teen boys.
The report devotes a good deal of attention to John Paul II and the pivotal years of McCarrick’s rise, but it also portrays Pope Benedict XVI as trying to handle the cardinal quietly and out of the public spotlight, and Pope Francis as assuming his successors had made the right judgments. It shows how American bishops sanitized reports of what they knew and all but ensured warnings would arrive at the Vatican unsubstantiated or dismissible. In Rome, church leaders found every rationale for believing a “good pastor” over a victim.
For a church that has grappled for a generation with its sexual abuse crisis, the report – 449 pages, and two years in the making – goes further than any previous effort in naming names and providing details of a coverup. Such assessments have been long requested by victims of abuse, but they are nonetheless fraught for the church, because revelations have the potential to recolor the reputations of major figures within the faith, including John Paul II, who was named a saint in 2014.
“By virtue of the simple fact that this investigation had to be conducted and this report had to be written, my heart hurts for all who will be shocked, saddened, scandalized and angered by the revelations contained therein,” Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, wrote in a statement Tuesday.
The report shows that John Paul II was told in a 1999 letter that McCarrick shared a bed with young seminarians over whom he had authority. But, apparently swayed by a letter from McCarrick himself denying that he’d ever had “sexual relations with any person,” the pope then gave McCarrick the biggest break of his career: an appointment as archbishop of Washington. That came after McCarrick had been passed up for other major postings because of the accusations against him.
“Pope John Paul II became ‘convinced of the truth’ of McCarrick’s denial,” the report said.
At the time, the church considered sex by priests with other adult men as sinful, but not anywhere as grave as abuse of a minor. And church leaders had not fully internalized the idea that adult seminarians could be victims of far more powerful clerics in charge of their careers.
The report appears to limit the culpability of Pope Francis, who greenlighted the investigation in 2018. The report says that Francis, before 2017, had heard “only that there had been allegations and rumors related to immoral conduct with adults,” and was under the impression the allegations had been “reviewed and rejected by John Paul II.”
The report also delves into the decision-making of Benedict XVI, during whose tenure, from 2005 until 2013, the church seemed conflicted about how to handle McCarrick. The Holy See, acting on new details from a priest, requested McCarrick’s “spontaneous” withdrawal as archbishop of Washington in 2006, after he reached the standard retirement age of 75. But the Vatican was also indecisive after receiving two memos from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, in 2006 and 2008, that aired “concerns that a scandal could result given that the information” was in wide circulation.
Viganò suggested a canonical inquiry. His superiors were concerned as well and presented the matter to Benedict.
But rather than levy overt penalties, the decision was made “to appeal to McCarrick’s conscience and ecclesial spirit,” requesting that he keep a low profile and reduce travel in the church’s name.
McCarrick largely ignored the request.
By that time, he had earned clout as a formidable church fundraiser, giving money not just to charities but also directly to other clerics – including the ones in the Vatican who would have been involved in assessing the misconduct claims against him.
According to the report, there was no evidence “that McCarrick’s gift-giving and donations impacted significant decisions made by the Holy See regarding McCarrick during any period.”
Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of the abuse-tracking site BishopAccountability, said in a statement that the report was “impressive” – “the most significant document on the abuse crisis to come from the Church.” She said the report’s greatest failure was giving Francis a pass, under the premise that he hadn’t been properly informed or knew only that there’d been rumors.
“Plausible deniability must end for popes and bishops,” she said. “They are responsible for reading the abuse files and for correcting the negligent or complicit acts of their predecessors.”
By the 1990s, there was growing evidence pointing to McCarrick’s misconduct: A handful of seminarians confided in a New Jersey bishop, describing how McCarrick would devise ways to share a bed with them; sometimes, the encounters involved explicit sexual activity, according to the testimony of one victim described in the report. Anonymous letters were also sent to various prelates, including Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, saying that McCarrick had a “proclivity for young boys.”
The church initially did little to dig deeper. The Vatican’s then-ambassador to the United States “destroyed” his copies of the letter. And O’Connor, in several sympathetic notes, alerted McCarrick of the letter-writing, saying, “This stuff drives me crazy. I hate to send it to you, but would want you to do the same for me.”
But by 1999, O’Connor was concerned enough that he wrote a lengthy letter to John Paul II’s personal secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, describing “grave fears” about what might happen were McCarrick, then the archbishop of Newark, to receive a promotion. The letter, citing information from “impeccable authorities,” said McCarrick would share a bed with seminarians; O’Connor attached the anonymous letters as well.
But higher-ups at the Vatican found reasons to be dismissive. One prelate reasoned that the events seem to have occurred long in the past. Another said it could be just be rumors.
By the time McCarrick wrote his own entreaty to the pope’s office, the Vatican, at the request of John Paul II, had also sought input from four U.S. bishops, asking what they knew. The report released Tuesday said three of the four bishops “provided inaccurate and incomplete information to the Holy See.” Bishop Edward Hughes, who had received several explicit accounts from McCarrick’s adult victims, wrote that “I have no direct, factual information concerning any moral weakness shown by Archbishop McCarrick, either in the past or in the present.”
“There are only two instances where I have known of any allegations against the Archbishop,” Hughes wrote. “Both allegations came from priests who were guilty of their own moral lapses.”
Hughes died in 2012.
The report, in something of an explanation of why John Paul II might have believed McCarrick, describes how the pontiff and the then-bishop, though ideologically different, developed a fondness for each other after sharing time on overseas trips. Priests in Communist Poland were sometimes subject to smear campaigns, something else that could have influenced John Paul II’s handling of McCarrick.
“McCarrick successfully deceived the pope,” said George Weigel, a John Paul II biographer.
It was not until 2018 that McCarrick was officially removed from public ministry, after the New York archdiocese publicly revealed a credible allegation of abuse against a minor that dated back to the 1970s. At the same time, two New Jersey dioceses revealed they had reached settlements with adult victims.
The diocese of Metuchen, McCarrick’s first bishop posting, on Tuesday released a statement saying it had launched its own internal investigation, to provide the research to the Vatican report investigators. The statement said Metuchen found seven people who alleged abuse by McCarrick when they were adults. After submitting the report to Rome, the diocese wrote, four additional claims of abuse against minors came in.
Robert Ciolek, a former priest – and now lawyer – who reached a 2005 settlement with the church related to McCarrick’s sexual misconduct, on Tuesday said he was grateful to the report authors but disappointed to see how little Vatican leaders had dug into misconduct allegations at the time.
“They were not interested in further probing. Even if it was just abuse of authority, they’re considering [McCarrick] for one of the most powerful positions in the church. Shouldn’t they do due diligence? Like, let’s go explore beach house, maybe there was sexual activity? That is what they seem to ignore, not want to deal with,” he told The Washington Post.
Ciolek said the report made clear that church leaders “were blind to” the idea that abuse of power was a problem. Even though this was another era, Ciolek said, when the fallout of such abuse wasn’t as societally understood, “shouldn’t it have been significant for the Church? Who is supposed to be the moral leader?”
As Arizona count ticks on, volunteers race to make sure ballots are not rejected
InternationalNov 11. 2020About 4,000 mail ballots in Arizona still needed to have voter signatures verified as of Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Caitlin O’Hara
By The Washington Post · Hannah Knowles · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW
TOLLESON, Ariz. – It took her three tries to get the right door, and then no one answered. Maria Hernández started walking back to her car to find the next person on her list at risk of losing his or her vote.
Biden supporters celebrate on Sunday in Phoenix. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Caitlin O’Hara
Then a woman came out of the house. It was the voter’s mom. Hernández explained that her daughter needed to call the county by Tuesday to confirm that the signature on her ballot’s envelope was hers.
“It’ll take her, like, one minute,” Hernández said, offering her own phone number for any questions. The woman agreed to remind her daughter.
“Biden is so close,” Hernández said as she left.
Days after President-elect Joe Biden was declared the victor in the White House race, the vote in Arizona remains too close to call and the margin is narrowing.
Maria Hernández works as a volunteer with the Arizona Democratic Party to cure ballots. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The WashingtonPost by Caitlin O’Hara
Biden leads President Donald Trump by less than 15,000 votes statewide, with about 60,000 ballots still listed as uncounted on Tuesday by the secretary of state. That includes more than 20,000 ballots ready for tallying, tens of thousands of provisional ballots left to process and about 4,200 mail ballots with signatures that need to be verified.
Tuesday at 5 p.m. is the deadline for most voters to straighten out any problems with signatures on mail ballots and provide the proper identification for provisional ballots, and party volunteers have been scrambling to make sure each vote that has been flagged for problems gets fixed, or “cured.”
During this year’s primaries, more than 534,000 mail ballots were rejected across 23 states because of missed deadlines or voter mistakes, according to a tally by The Washington Post, raising fears among voting rights advocates that the surge in mail voting this year could lead to large numbers of ballots that get tossed for errors.
Most Arizonans had already voted by mail before this year, however, and the rush to cure to ballots is not new. So the parties were prepared, said Steven Slugocki, the chair of Maricopa County’s Democratic Party.
Hundreds of Democratic volunteers have been texting, calling and door-knocking since Election Day in Maricopa, where most of the state’s population lives, Slugocki said. The ballot-curing is more important for tight local races than for the presidential contest, he said, given Biden’s current lead. But he was cautious.
“This is just being prepared and making sure that we have every vote, because it could make a difference,” he said.
A 2019 law gave Arizona voters five business days after an election to verify a signature that is flagged for not matching what the government has on file from voter registration forms, previous ballots and motor-vehicle records. For most counties, that means voters can “cure” their ballots through Tuesday.
In Maricopa County, as many as 31 election staffers are working to verify voters’ signatures depending on the day, said Megan Gilbertson, a spokeswoman for county’s elections department. On Monday evening, the county reported more than 13,500 mail ballots left to process and 2,300 still needing verification.
Then there are provisional ballots, which voters cast when they show up on Election Day without the proper ID or in other circumstances requiring follow-up. Twenty-five staffers are working on provisional ballots, Gilbertson said, and there were 8,200 left to verify Tuesday.
In the 2018 election, only about 300 ballots in Maricopa were ultimately rejected for signature mismatch, while about 1,800 had no signature. The county mails letters, emails, makes phone calls and even texts voters trying to get in touch about questionable signatures, Gilbertson said.
But with 2.6 million registered voters spread across 9,200 square miles – an area larger than some states – it’s up to others to knock on doors.
The Arizona GOP did not respond to inquiries about any last-minute efforts to help cure ballots, though some Republican leaders have been urging people to check the status of their early ballots. On social media, the party has been more focused on court fights.
A Trump campaign lawsuit says “up to thousands” of voters in Maricopa could have lost their ability to vote in certain races because poll workers gave them faulty instructions, while the Arizona secretary of state says the suit is “grasping at straws.” County officials say less than 200 votes are at stake.
Groups on the left, meanwhile, have been organizing to take advantage of the ballot-curing window. The state Democratic Party offered virtual trainings and gathered volunteers for masked, socially distant canvassing shifts. Pro-Biden Latino organizers urged Spanish speakers to sign up, especially in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
Hernández, a 28-year-old Phoenix native who now lives in Los Angeles, headed Monday to the suburbs and farmland where her Spanish skills came in handy. She said she arrived in the Phoenix area several weeks ago to get out the vote in her hometown as an organizer with Unite Here Local 11.
The effort was personal for her. The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, she said she has fought for years against the immigration policies of Trump and his allies. She remembers feeling joy in 2016 when Maricopa County ousted Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his sweeps targeting the undocumented – and horror when Trump prevailed later in the night.
“Arizona can be different,” she said, as the state was on track to elect a Democratic president and a Democratic senator. “Arizona can be welcoming. It can be, you know, a place where me and people like my family don’t have to be scared all the time.”
She had some successes Monday, such as the voter who had been meaning to call the county about her signature and did it there on the spot. The whole process took minutes, just as Hernández had promised.
“Congratulations!” she said on the doorstep as they hung up together. “Your ballot was just counted!”
Then she went back to her car, thinking of the home with the Biden-Harris sign in the window where no one answered. She would double back.
By The Washington Post · Missy Ryan, Dan Lamothe · NATIONAL, NATIONAL-SECURITY WASHINGTON – The top policy official at the Defense Department resigned suddenly Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump abruptly fired his defense secretary, compounding uncertainty at the Pentagon during a sensitive transition period.
James Anderson, who served as acting undersecretary of defense for policy, informed colleagues of his immediate departure just hours after Christopher Miller, an intelligence official, started his first full day as acting defense secretary, according to several officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
Trump fired Mark Esper, his fourth defense secretary, and installed Miller on Monday, as the president and his allies contest the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Esper’s departure had been expected since June, when the Pentagon chief broke with Trump over the president’s desire to use active-duty troops to address protests related to race and police violence.
The turmoil came as the Trump administration blocked the incoming administration from the expected transition of government, as Trump refuses to concede after losing the election to former vice president Joe Biden. Three defense officials said that the Defense Department was awaiting approval from the General Services Administration to begin the transition.
Anderson, a retired Marine Corps intelligence officer, was confirmed in 2018 to be the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for plans and strategy but, because of the high turnover and numerous vacancies at the senior levels of the Pentagon during the Trump administration, has served in the top policy job on an interim basis since earlier this year.
The undersecretary for policy, among the Pentagon’s most senior positions, is responsible for crafting decisions about defense strategy, the employment of American forces and the options the Pentagon provides to the White House on military matters. He or she also interacts with senior foreign officials.
It was not immediately clear who would take Anderson’s place. Among those expected to be in the running is Anthony Tata, a retired Army general who was previously nominated to become undersecretary for policy but whose nomination was put on hold this summer because of resistance on Capitol Hill.
Tata encountered opposition from Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee for a series of tweets that included calling former president Barack Obama a “terrorist leader,” describing Islam as a violent religion and suggesting that former CIA director John Brennan attempted to order the assassination of Trump. Tata, who was subsequently appointed as Anderson’s deputy on an interim basis, later said he misspoke in the social media posts.
Defense News reported that Tata, a former Fox News commentator who was advanced for the job by the White House rather than Esper, had been temporarily appointed to Anderson’s position. Anderson’s departure was first reported by Politico.
Tata left the military in 2009 after an Army inspector general found he had several extramarital affairs in violation of military rules.
His appointment could mark a further blow for morale in the Pentagon’s policy shop, where officials have been faced with leadership turmoil and the vicissitudes of Trump’s foreign and defense policy. Trump has often made decisions affecting the military on the fly, overturning Pentagon plans on Twitter.
It was not clear what the priorities of Miller, a former Special Forces soldier and longtime counterterrorism official who is little known outside Washington policy circles, will be during his tenure as acting defense secretary, or how he will handle the tensions surrounding the election.
While Biden’s victory was projected on Saturday, Trump has yet to concede and is supporting an array of legal challenges to the result. Defense leaders have so far remained silent about the election’s outcome.
The 20 most important presidential norms Trump broke – and how Biden can restore them
InternationalNov 11. 2020President Donald Trump at a rally in Goodyear, Ariz., in October. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · David Montgomery · NATIONAL, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE, HISTORY At a frenetic and freewheeling rally in Macon, Ga., in mid-October, with less than three weeks to go before the election, President Donald Trump turned introspective. He reflected on what sets him apart from every other president in American history: his refusal to be presidential.
“I always said, it’s much easier to be ‘presidential’ than to do what I do. … I’m more presidential if I wanted to be, but I got to get things done,” he said. “I don’t have enough time. … I can be more presidential than any president in our history – with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln when he wore the hat. That was tough to beat.”
Trump supporters and Proud Boys in September in Portland, Ore. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Paula Bronstein
What does it mean to be presidential? Article II of the Constitution describes the office in just a handful of paragraphs. To a remarkable extent, the presidency is shaped by unwritten traditions and expectations that historians and political scientists call “norms” – what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of American democracy.
Violating presidential norms doesn’t equate to breaking the law. Can Trump steer taxpayer money to his businesses? Can he call for the investigation of his political rivals? Can he fire people in oversight positions and replace them with loyalists? Yes – technically – he can. But should he?
One of the things Trump has forced presidential scholars to realize “is the extent to which shamelessness in a president is really empowering,” says Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who teaches at Harvard Law School. The current presidency also reveals “the extent to which the whole system before Trump was built on a basic assumption about a range of reasonableness among presidents, a range of willingness to play within the system, a range of at least a modicum of understanding of political and normative constraints.”
Goldsmith and others argue that Trump’s steamrolling of norms could do lasting damage to both the stature of the presidency and the institutions of democracy if reforms aren’t devised to bolster the fragile tissue of these shared understandings.
President Donald Trump during the final presidential debate in October in Nashville. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
And yet, Trump’s transgressions have been a source of his populist power. His delight in breaking norms – and the establishment’s shock at his antics – provides proof to his supporters that he is doing something right. Sean Spicer, the president’s first press secretary, says that Trump’s style has allowed him “to actually get things done.” Spicer cites trade policy and the 2017 tax cut as examples. “You can argue that it’s not the most presidential thing to tweet at Angela Merkel about, you know, the percent of GDP that Germany pays to meet their NATO obligation. But it’s worked. … There are some things in which his disruptive nature has really moved policy forward,” Spicer says. “And there’s some areas where it’s probably not been so helpful.”
“While some on the Left or even in the media might say that the President has been one to break ‘norms,’ I would argue just the opposite,” White House spokesman Judd Deere wrote in an email. “President Trump has been the person who has returned power to the American people, not the Washington elite, and preserved our history and institutions, while others have tried to tear them down.”
In a sense, the election was a referendum on Trump’s norm-breaking. Now, as Trump shatters yet another norm by refusing to accept the result of the vote count, the office’s structural weakness, one that allows chief executives to act in ways the framers of the Constitution never imagined, has been exposed. There are calls from Congress and from outside government to recast some norms as laws, and to craft other reforms. America must decide what it means to be presidential.
Here are the 20 most important norms that Trump has ignored or undermined. Also included: why norms are important, other presidents who’ve broken norms, and whether we can restore norms once they’re broken.
1. Personally profiting from official business
Since Jimmy Carter, most presidents have used blind trusts or other means to separate themselves from active control or ownership of assets to assure the public that they would not make decisions out of financial self-interest. (Barack Obama did not set up a blind trust. His money was in mutual funds, Treasury bills and the like.)
Trump correctly pointed out that presidents are exempt from conflict-of-interest rules placed on federal officials, so he did not have to distance himself from his businesses. Yet the norm has been for presidents to act as if the rules applied to them. Trump turned over day-to-day management of his empire to his sons but insisted on staying informed and maintaining ownership. He had visited his properties more than 280 times as of late October, according to a Washington Post tally, thus raising their profile and drawing political, business and foreign customers seeking to curry favor with the administration. The Secret Service and other government agencies have paid at least $2.5 million for rooms and other expenses at Trump properties, and his campaign and fundraising committee have paid $5.6 million more in fees for events, according to Post reporting.
“The president not only holding on to his businesses, but very explicitly advancing them while president … is a whole set of norms that has been kind of thrown out the window,” says Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The idea that you can’t use government for your own personal financial gain is crucial for people to believe that government is working in their interest.”
2. Not releasing tax returns
The tax-release tradition began after Richard Nixon’s tax scandal in 1973, when he famously declared, “I’m not a crook.” Nixon released several years of returns in 1974, months before resigning amid the separate Watergate scandal. His successor, Gerald Ford, released years of summary tax data, including income, major deductions and taxes paid. Starting with Jimmy Carter, every president has released full tax returns – until President Trump. He has maintained that he can’t release his returns because they are under audit, even though that is not an obstacle to releasing them.
In Trump’s case, tax returns would show if he has personal financial connections to foreign nations, the extent to which he has paid his fair share of taxes and given to charity, and the extent to which he might benefit personally from tax policies he supports, according to Duke law professor Neil S. Siegel in a 2018 piece for the Indiana Law Journal, “Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, and President Donald Trump.” “These norms and conventions, although not ‘in’ the Constitution, play a pivotal role in sustaining the Constitution,” Siegel wrote.
3. Refusing oversight
This past spring, President Trump fired or removed five inspectors general: the internal watchdogs for the intelligence community, the Defense Department, Health and Human Services, the Transportation Department and the State Department.
In some cases, the dismissals appeared to be retaliation for actions that angered Trump or his allies. When he fired intelligence inspector general Michael Atkinson, Trump mentioned his displeasure with Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint about the Ukraine phone call that led to Trump’s impeachment. The ouster of Christi Grimm, the acting inspector general for Health and Human Services, came a month after she issued a report finding “severe shortages” of coronavirus testing kits and “widespread shortages” of protective equipment like masks.
The job of inspector general was a post-Watergate reform, created in 1978 across the government as a quasi-independent check on waste, fraud and abuse. Never has a president terminated so many inspectors general in the middle of his term. (Ronald Reagan dismissed holdovers from the previous administration on his first day in office, but rehired several; Barack Obama fired one.)
“President Trump’s spate of inspector general removals this spring is alarming, and every American should be concerned about the state of federal government oversight,” David C. Williams, a former inspector general for six agencies under four presidents, wrote in The Post. “But the problem with Trump’s actions is not simply removing the watchdogs – it’s also the chilling effect left on those who remain and the fact that the president is replacing some of the ousted officials with thinly credentialed political loyalists.”
4. Interfering in Department of Justice investigations
Since at least the 1970s, administrations have generally taken care to insulate the Department of Justice from presidential meddling and limit White House communications about investigative details.
Not the Trump administration. Early on in his term, he tried to browbeat Attorney General Jeff Sessions into reversing his recusal from the Russia investigation. He asked FBI Director James Comey not to pursue a case against Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, according to Comey’s congressional testimony, which Trump denied. He criticized the cases prosecutors built against both Flynn and Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and former informal political adviser. He asked White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller III, then pressured McGahn to lie about having been asked, according to the Mueller report.
Trump has frequently called for the investigation and prosecution of Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama and other members of the previous administration.
“The norm of not attempting to influence traditional law enforcement functions, either in favor of one’s personal or political friends or against one’s personal political enemies – Trump has utterly departed from that norm,” says David Kris, co-founder of Culper Partners consultants, who served in the Justice Department under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “This is not normal and it is not safe.”
5. Abusing appointment power
President Trump has flouted the constitutional appointments process to fashion a government reliant on acting officials who have not been confirmed by the Senate. He is the first president since before Ronald Reagan to have more acting than confirmed Cabinet secretaries, according to Anne Joseph O’Connell, writing earlier this year in the Columbia Law Review.
Presidents of both parties, including Trump, have found it difficult to get officials confirmed in the face of Senate filibusters or inaction. But partisanship alone can’t explain Trump’s record. Of the top 757 positions requiring confirmation, Trump has not nominated anyone for 133 slots, according to research by The Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service.
Instead, Trump has stretched federal vacancy rules to delegate authority to unconfirmed loyalists across the government. This allows him to fire officials who displease him without having to go through the hassle of a Senate confirmation. “I sort of like ‘acting,’ ” Trump told reporters in 2019. “It gives me more flexibility.”
But the approach has consequences. In August, the Government Accountability Office found that Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Ken Cuccinelli, the acting DHS deputy, are serving unlawfully in their roles. The Trump administration rejected the finding. In September, a federal judge ordered the removal of William Perry Pendley, who had been effectively serving as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management for more than a year.
“The President cannot shelter unconstitutional ‘temporary’ appointments for the duration of his presidency through a matryoshka doll of delegated authorities,” U.S. District Judge Brian Morris wrote in his order, referring to Russian nesting dolls. Pendley responded by offering reporters the novel logic that he couldn’t be ousted – since he was never formally appointed.
6. Insulting allies while cozying up to authoritarians
To hear President Trump tell it, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is “very dishonest.” French President Emmanuel Macron is “foolish” with low approval ratings. A telephone call with then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was “the worst call by far.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s rejection of Trump’s idea to buy Greenland was “nasty.” Theresa May made “a mess” with her handling of Brexit when she was Britain’s prime minister. Trump is also the first U.S. president since NATO’s founding to abdicate moral leadership of the treaty organization, and his punitive trade policies have further antagonized allies.
Meanwhile, Trump has shown an affinity for strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. He has spoken glowingly of the “love letters” he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a tough guy who deserves respect.” He congratulated Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for the “unbelievable job” he was doing on his country’s drug problem, despite reports of thousands of extrajudicial killings.
A president will need to deal with a variety of world leaders – but there’s always an end goal in mind, says Nancy McEldowney, former director of the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. “The very last thing you ever do is grant an Oval Office meeting, or a presidential meeting, or a summit-level meeting, which conveys legitimacy,” McEldowney said, referring to Trump’s one-on-ones with Kim, Duterte and others. “He seems to rush to embrace these leaders without getting anything in return.”
7. Coarsening presidential discourse
President Trump has communicated more unfiltered words to the public than any other chief executive – not just through Twitter, but via rambling rally speeches and impromptu jousts with reporters. This stream of presidential consciousness is like “a fireside rant, but one that has no beginning and no end,” Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in their book “Unmaking the Presidency.”
Trump’s rhetoric is unprecedented not just in volume, but in character, according to scholars of presidential speech. His name-calling, personal insults and public swearing have almost ceased to shock. He periodically invokes violent imagery, promising protesters that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and praising a congressman for having body-slammed a reporter.
Trump “uses language like a dangerous demagogue and not like a president, and he’s very successful with it,” says Jennifer Mercieca, historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” “He outrages his base and provokes them on a minute-by-minute, hourly basis. He outrages his opposition. It keeps all of us attentive to his message, and so he’s been able to dominate and control the public sphere.”
8. Politicizing the military
President Trump has trampled the line between politics and the military from the second week of his presidency, when he chose the Pentagon room dedicated to the most highly decorated military heroes as the setting to sign his controversial order barring refugees and blocking travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. In 2018, his campaign soundtrack blared when he arrived to address troops in Iraq and Germany, using his talks to attack Democrats and autograph Make America Great Again hats for uniformed service members. He regularly refers to “my generals” and “my military.”
Just before the 2018 midterm elections, he deployed thousands of troops to the southern border, and in the past two years, when Congress didn’t appropriate sufficient funds for the border wall, he used the defense budget as a piggy bank, redirecting nearly $10 billion from the Pentagon to pay for the wall. As protests for racial justice broke out across the country, he threatened to deploy active-duty troops to confront demonstrators. After police cleared protesters across from the White House, he led Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley through Lafayette Square for a photo op. Milley later apologized in a graduation speech: “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
Trump is not the first president to ensnare the military in politics, but “President Trump has aggravated and accelerated this trend by (breaching) so many of the norms about the way a president will behave towards the American military,” says Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “That has potentially really damaging effects for the country, and not just for the relationship between our public and our military, but for the relationship between our military and our foreign policy goals.”
9. Attacking judges
Past presidents have signaled displeasure with court rulings, but they have not challenged the legal system’s legitimacy as Trump has.
Trump reacted angrily to a series of legal setbacks involving his 2017 attempts to impose a travel ban from Muslim countries. On Twitter he called a federal judge in Seattle a “so-called judge” whose ruling “essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country.”
In 2018 he slammed “an Obama judge” for blocking his asylum policy at the Mexico border, prompting Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. to issue a rare rebuke: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Trump quickly replied on Twitter: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
In a lecture before the American Law Institute last year, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman surveyed the damage of Trump’s verbal attacks on judges: “We are witnessing a chief executive who criticizes virtually every judicial decision that doesn’t go his way and denigrates judges who rule against him, sometimes in very personal terms. He seems to view the courts and the justice system as obstacles to be attacked and undermined, not as a coequal branch to be respected. … This is not normal.”
10. Politicizing diplomacy and foreign policy
All diplomacy carries a whiff of politics – Republican foreign policy is different from Democratic foreign policy – but President Trump has put a uniquely electoral stamp on foreign affairs. In June 2019, Trump asked China’s Xi Jinping to help with his re-election prospects by buying more soybeans and wheat, according to a memoir by former national security adviser John Bolton. (Trump has dismissed Bolton’s recollections as “pure fiction.”)
A year earlier, at a dinner for top donors at Trump’s hotel in Washington, a business executive with interests in Ukraine informed the president that the American ambassador to that country was disloyal. “Get rid of her!” Trump can be heard responding in a video recording released later. The ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, was perceived as an impediment to powerful actors with interests in Ukraine who later also claimed to be willing to provide dirt on Trump’s potential campaign opponent, Joe Biden. Yovanovitch was removed in April 2019. A few months later, in the infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked Zelensky for help in gathering information on alleged misdeeds by Biden and Biden’s son Hunter.
This past August, undoubtedly with Trump’s blessing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought foreign duties directly into the political sphere with a speech for the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem, where he was on an official trip. Less than a month before the 2020 presidential election, after urging by Trump, Pompeo said the department would try to release a batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails.
While “every president has their own slant, their own style and their own policy preferences,” says Nancy McEldowney, the State Department veteran, “Trump has politicized not just the content of the policy, but the conduct of the diplomacy, to such an extreme extent.”
11. Undermining intelligence agencies
President Trump called the intelligence chiefs who served under Barack Obama “dirty cops” and “sleazebags,” while he has continued to feud with the agencies and his own appointed directors. He bristled at their conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in support of his campaign and tried to do the same in 2020. At a 2018 Helsinki summit, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin told him “it’s not Russia.” When intelligence officials testified counter to his views on Iran and North Korea, Trump tweeted that they were “extremely passive and naive.” He added, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” In 2019, he called the FBI “badly broken”; this year, he said the FBI was letting members of the far-left antifa movement “get away with ‘murder.'”
Unsatisfied with his own appointed director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, Trump nominated a replacement in 2019, John Ratcliffe, saying “the intelligence agencies have run amok.” This fall, Ratcliffe said that, at Trump’s request, he was declassifying documents related to the 2016 campaign – which Trump quickly used to press his false case that the Democrats were responsible for the Russia probe. Trump tweeted that he has authorized declassifying all documents to expose “the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax.” Now his lawyers are fighting to keep the documents from being released. In September, when his appointed FBI director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that the Russians were at it again – while downplaying the threat of ballot fraud and antifa – Trump told reporters, “I did not like his answers.”
“When you pound the Justice Department and pound the intelligence community as being corrupt, incompetent, making up stories about what they do, it’s enormously demoralizing for those institutions,” says Jack Goldsmith, the former Justice Department official. “It reduces the legitimacy of those institutions in the eyes of the country.”
12. Publicizing lists of potential Supreme Court picks
President Trump took the novel approach of releasing lists of potential picks for the Supreme Court. As the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee in 2016, he issued the first version of the list with the names of 11 conservative figures. This was a masterful tactic by a candidate whose conservative bona fides were still somewhat in question, as it had the desired effect of convincing conservatives and evangelicals that Trump would not disappoint them in filling the seat left vacant after Antonin Scalia’s death. Trump expanded the list that fall, and it helped him win the election. He added to it twice more as a sitting president, publicizing each iteration.
This was a giant step toward cementing the idea that the court is political, with the meaning of the Constitution in question, depending on whether Democratic justices or Republican justices are in control. SCOTUSblog has noted that Trump’s tweet promising the latest update to the list came in June, shortly after the Supreme Court handed him two stinging defeats on immigration and LGBTQ rights.
September’s additions notably included a half-dozen women – a constituency Trump needed for re-election – and a few conservative senators he may have wanted to flatter. Outside conservative groups played a huge role in curation, but the strategy was all Trump: “When it came to making the list public and the politics of it,” former White House counsel Donald McGahn told “Fox News Sunday” in October, “that was 100 percent the president.”
13. Making far more false or misleading claims than any previous president
Through Aug. 27, the sum was 22,247, to be exact, according to The Post Fact Checker’s database. The most repeated claim: “Within three short years, we built the strongest economy in the history of the world,” which Trump has declared 407 times. Other favorites: “My job was made harder by phony witch hunts, by ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ nonsense” (236 times). And: “We’ve done a lot: the largest tax cuts ever” (232 times). He also says things like “I was honored as the Man of the Year in Michigan at a big event,” which never happened (11 times). And: “My father came from Germany” (five times); his father was born in the Bronx. “Did you know I was No. 1 one on Facebook?” he boasted in April at a press briefing on the coronavirus response. (Actually, at the time, Barack Obama had nearly twice as many Facebook fans, and actor Vin Diesel nearly four times.)
“If the president is repeatedly seen to lie about matters big and small, it presents an enormous problem for the United States in the world,” says Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center watchdog group. “What does the world think when the president says something? When they know he says whatever he wants to say, regardless of whether it’s true or not?”
14. Abusing the pardon power
George H.W. Bush was criticized for pardoning Iran-contra figures, Bill Clinton for pardoning a fugitive financier, and George W. Bush for commuting the sentence of an official in a case related to the leak of an undercover CIA agent’s identity. But President Trump’s 44 pardons and commutations have been especially self-serving. All but five of the people who received clemency through early February had connections to the White House or resonance with Trump’s political base, according to a Washington Post investigation. He has rarely followed the normal process of vetting pardons through the Justice Department.
He’s also the first president who has mused publicly about pardoning himself. “No other president has, like Trump, used pardons systematically to serve political and personal goals,” write Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, lawyers who served in the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively, in their book of proposed norms reforms, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”
Recipients of Trump pardons or commutations have included former sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, a hard-line anti-immigrant Trump supporter; conservative activist and writer Dinesh D’Souza; former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich; junk-bond king Michael Milken; disgraced New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik; and former media mogul Conrad Black, who wrote a flattering biography of Trump. Trump appears to be the first modern president to have pardoned people convicted of murder, in the cases of two soldiers sentenced for war crimes.
Most notoriously, in July, against the recommendation of the Justice Department, Trump commuted the sentence of friend and ally Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying about his efforts to learn about hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted in response: “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”
15. Using government resources for partisan ends
From his first full day in office, when President Trump ordered the National Park Service to produce photographic evidence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Barack Obama’s (it wasn’t), he has used the levers of government to score personal or political points. When federal meteorologists in Alabama publicly contradicted his false forecast of a hurricane’s path in 2019, he pressured officials in the Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue a statement undercutting the meteorologists and justifying his Sharpie-scrawled weather chart. He attacked political enemies during official presidential addresses, such as his speech to the 2017 Boy Scouts’ National Scout Jamboree that was so partisan that the head of the Scouts later apologized.
Ethics watchdogs say this behavior reached a crescendo during the Republican National Convention in August, when the White House served as a backdrop for days of campaign activity. Trump presided over a naturalization ceremony and issued a pardon in the White House, with both events replayed during the convention program. From a stage before the White House portico, Trump’s 70-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination was a scathing attack on Democrats followed by fireworks that spelled the word “TRUMP” over the Mall.
The president is exempt from the Hatch Act, which bars political activity by government officials while at work, but, says Trevor Potter, the former FEC chairman, “The norm is that you try to separate the White House from your political activity. … The Hatch Act doesn’t apply to the president, but it applied to all those people who had to help him put that together at the White House.”
White House officials told The Post at the time that it was mainly campaign staff who executed the events, in compliance with the Hatch Act; government officials were working on their own time. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said of the Hatch Act to Politico: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.”
16. Making racialized appeals and attacks
No president in the modern era has relied so heavily on racialized appeals to his base. In 2019, President Trump tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” (even though three of them were born in the United States). It was one of several examples over the years of Trump suggesting that citizens of color or naturalized immigrants are less American than White people.
After Joe Biden picked Sen. Kamala Harris to be his running mate, Trump echoed the racist birther theory he once employed against Barack Obama to suggest that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, might not be eligible to serve as vice president. He called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate.” Complaining that children “have been fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism,” he called in September for a “pro-American” curriculum in schools, and he sought to ban anti-racism training in federal agencies. That month, in the first presidential debate, he asked the far-right group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
17. Dividing the nation in times of crisis
During national crises, presidents are expected to hold the country’s hand and pull us together, if only for a little while. Think of Franklin Roosevelt after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Ronald Reagan after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, or Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for the pastor killed in the 2015 Charleston, S.C., church massacre.
President Trump has declined to do this. Instead, he drew lines. He saw “very fine people, on both sides” after a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville turned deadly in 2017. He called racial justice protesters “thugs.” As the coronavirus pandemic was killing more than four times as many Americans as died in the Vietnam War – and counting – he attacked Democratic governors for their pandemic response. Speaking at Mount Rushmore ahead of Independence Day in what the White House billed as an official presidential address – not a campaign event – Trump veered quickly into a dystopian description of a nation split between a “left-wing cultural revolution” and those “strong and proud” Americans who “will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try,” wrote former defense secretary Jim Mattis in the Atlantic in June, after Trump called for troops to respond to protests. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”
18. Contradicting scientists
Norms guiding the presidency are meant to ensure that decisions on policy aren’t arbitrary or overly political, and that the best expert guidance is heeded. President Trump’s rejection of these customs has been on display during the coronavirus pandemic. His fancy with the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine pressured the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency approval for the drug’s use in covid-19 treatments – which the FDA later withdrew when the drug’s risks became evident.
Trump contradicted top scientists on the Coronavirus Task Force over guidance on wearing masks and avoiding large crowds – including the president’s own rallies – while political appointees inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tried to block critical reports that suggested the pandemic was not under control. Instead of relying on infectious-disease experts like Anthony Fauci, Trump appeared to favor doctors who were skeptical of masks and expanded testing.
Promising a vaccine at “warp speed,” Trump was furious when the FDA imposed tough safety standards that all but ensured a vaccine would not be available before Election Day. He attacked his own appointed scientific directors for plotting against him: “New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day,” Trump tweeted, tagging FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn in the tweet. “Just another political hit job!”
19. Derailing the tradition of presidential debates
Presidential debates are not always illuminating, with candidates resorting to talking points and the occasional well-rehearsed zinger. But the first 2020 presidential debate was an unprecedented cacophonous fiasco, largely because President Trump ignored the agreed-upon rules and interrupted Joe Biden 71 times in 90 minutes. “I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” moderator Chris Wallace told the New York Times afterward. “I guess I didn’t realize … that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.”
“This is the first time we’ve faced anything that existed like last night,” Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said following the first debate, and he vowed reforms. After the second debate was canceled because Trump refused to participate in a virtual event, the final debate featured a microphone mute button to cut down on interruptions.
20. Undermining faith in the 2020 election results
Every incumbent president in American history has accepted the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power. No sitting president in modern memory has gone into an election predicting fraud and illegitimate results. President Trump is the radical exception. In the months leading up to the election, he repeatedly forecast a rigged debacle and speculated that the winner may never be known.
In September, he told reporters: “We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be.” When asked whether he would commit to a “peaceful transition of power,” he responded, “We’re going to have to see what happens.”
“No other president has ever said anything like that, because this is an active, ongoing attempt to undermine confidence in our election system,” says former FEC chairman Trevor Potter. “Trump is trying to convince a significant piece of this country – his supporters – that if he loses, it was stolen. That is a tactic of authoritarian leadership. … And that is, in my knowledge of American history, completely unprecedented, at least in the last hundred years.”
In the days after the election, Trump has seemed determined to do still more damage on this front. As Joe Biden began to overtake him in key states, Trump told reporters: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” On Saturday, hours after media outlets called the election for Biden, Trump tweeted: “I WON THE ELECTION, GOT 71,000,000 LEGAL VOTES.” He still refuses to concede. This presidency, it seems, will be abnormal to the end.
– – –
WHY ARE NORMS IMPORTANT?
The framers of the Constitution had a general idea of the type of people who would be president and how those people would act. The job’s description has been fleshed out over the centuries by the practices of each chief executive and the reaction of the public and the other branches to those practices.
The most important norms reinforce values, such as preventing self-dealing and making decisions less arbitrary, wrote Daphna Renan in a 2018 Harvard Law Review piece. The system has evolved this way for many reasons. In some areas, it may be against the constitutional separation of powers for Congress to legislate a presidential norm. Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz, who has also written on presidential norms, says that “in many cases, you actually don’t want to solidify things as much as you would by writing them down. You want to leave a little bit of play in the joints.”
“If you try to legislate too much, you can really screw up the necessary speed, agility, adaptability and so forth of government,” says David Kris, a former Justice Department official. “There is (also) danger in too little regulation in the sense that norms are more easily violated perhaps than laws.”
Times of polarization – exactly like today, writes Renan – are when norms are most in peril.
– – –
OTHER PRESIDENTIAL NORM-BREAKERS
– Thomas Jefferson: The Constitution requires the president to report to Congress on the state of the union. After George Washington and John Adams delivered oral presentations, Jefferson changed the norm to a written report. Giving a speech, he wrote in 1801, was inconvenient and would interfere with Congress’s ability to respond thoughtfully.
– Andrew Johnson: The Founders feared the prospect of a demagogue in the White House and frowned upon the notion of a president making direct appeals to the unruly passions of the people. Johnson broke this norm and used popular rhetoric to reach the masses. His subsequent impeachment in 1868 was partly connected to this breach.
– Woodrow Wilson: He restored the original norm – and broke Jefferson’s model – by reporting on the state of the union in speeches to Congress, starting in 1913. Most presidents since have followed his lead. Building on Johnson’s populism and Theodore Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” view of the presidency, Wilson also used speeches to firmly establish the norm of the so-called rhetorical presidency, where appealing directly to the people is seen as key to the job and a source of modern presidential power.
– Franklin Roosevelt: Frustrated with the Supreme Court after it knocked down some New Deal legislation, FDR concocted a bill in 1937 to try to add justices to the court. The norm against meddling with the court was so strong that his own Democratic Party in Congress rejected the plan. FDR successfully flouted another norm: that presidents should serve no more than two terms. After FDR’s three re-elections, the two-term norm was hardened into the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1951.
– Richard Nixon: He violated norms in ways that were more shocking than illegal. He launched a secret war in Cambodia, ordered wiretapping and tax audits of reporters and other perceived foes, cut corners on his own taxes, and attempted to evade congressional oversight. A raft of post-Watergate reforms reinforced norms of transparency and ethics, and also created new ones: Presidents started voluntarily releasing tax returns, steps were taken to insulate the FBI and the Justice Department from the White House, and internal watchdogs were created – all of which President Trump has challenged.
– – –
CAN WE RESTORE BROKEN NORMS?
With Trump’s presidency coming to an end, it’s tempting to assume that respect for these soft guardrails of democracy will naturally be restored and reinvigorated – that even a narrow repudiation of Trump at the polls will be taken as proof by future presidents that norm-breaking is not a winning strategy.
But that’s a naive faith. More likely, future presidents will assess how some of the latitude seized by Trump could be useful. “My guess is it’s somewhere between what it used to be and what Trump has done,” says Trevor Potter, the former FEC chairman and head of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “They will do things that are convenient for them. … Because once these lines have moved this way, it is very hard to move them back.”
The only way to counter normative drift is to stiffen the guardrails. “It’s going to take deliberate effort to return our system to one where democratic traditions predominate as they have in the past,” says Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “One of the things we have learned is that there may be a need to codify a whole lot of things that maybe people thought were laws or rules but were, in fact, just traditions, because it never occurred to most of us that anybody would want to systematically flout the kinds of practices that protect a strong democracy.”
In their book “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, lawyers who served in the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively, propose more than 50 changes to bolster norms, focusing on protections against abuses of power for personal or political gain, interference with the Justice Department and other areas. House Democrats recently assembled a package of reforms, including restrictions on the president’s pardon power, protections for inspectors general, and tougher rules against presidents enriching themselves or using government resources for political or personal ends.
But reforming norms is a delicate business. Not all norms can be reduced to statute – nor should they be. Part of the genius of the American system is that norms fill in subtle spaces around laws and provide essential flexibility for the presidency to evolve.
The norm of restraint – of not doing something, even if it’s technically legal and you have the power – is endangered not just in the White House, but on Capitol Hill and across Washington. It’s the most vital norm of all – and the hardest to preserve.
France ready to spend more amid record surge in unemployment
InternationalNov 11. 2020Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, pauses during the Mouvement des entreprises de France business conference in Paris on Aug. 27, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Cyril Marcilhacy. /Photo by: Cyril Marcilhacy — Bloomberg Location: Paris, France
By Syndication The Washington Post, Bloomberg · William Horobin
France is prepared to further ramp up spending to support any firm, from mom-and-pop shops to its national flag carrier, as rising unemployment and a resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic cast a longer shadow over the economy.
Finance Minister Minister Bruno Le Maire pledged that if needed the state will pump more public money into Air France and expand funding for smaller companies. The government will also consider targeted measures for shopkeepers in a response to an outcry over the government’s second lockdown.
Le Maire’s comments came just hours before fresh data underscored the urgency of the situation. France’s unemployment rate jumped by a record to 9% in the third quarter. That’s the highest level in two years.
“There is no limit to supporting shopkeepers and the economy because the worst thing would be tens of thousands of companies closing, having people unemployed and losing skills,” the finance minister said as he fielding questions from entrepreneurs for over 90 minutes on live television Monday evening.
France is entering a critical phase in its fight to contain a resurgence of the virus that’s putting pressure on intensive care units already nearing capacity. Later this week, authorities will assess whether to adjust lockdown measures that have been in force since Oct. 30 and are currently expected to remain in place until Dec. 1.
For the second lockdown, the government has massively increased its so-called solidarity fund, which provides direct support for companies forced to close, or in sectors where incomes have collapsed. For November alone, it’s expected to disburse 6 billion euros ($7.1 billion) — matching the total outlay made since March.
Le Maire said he could further boost that fund as part of a review of the 100 billion-euro stimulus program the government launched in September to support the economy in coming years.
“If it is necessary to supplement the recovery program with new support measures like the solidarity fund, we will do it because our policy is to continue to protect until the virus has disappeared,” Le Maire said.
He said the 7 billion euros of aid the state has already provided to Air France will not be enough because air transport has not recovered.
For smaller businesses, the government will examine measures to help clothing and toy shops that struggle to sell stocks they built in preparation for the end of the year. The state is also ready to raise tax breaks for landlords that cancel rents in November, Le Maire said.
In some better news for France, industrial figures on Tuesday showed output rose more than forecast in September. Production increased in all sectors, although levels are still well below 2019 and the second lockdown is starting to weigh on the auto sector.
India’s Modi facing tough battle in first vote since pandemic
InternationalNov 10. 2020A boy carries a cardboard cut-out of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi after a Bharatiya Janata Party election rally in Gaya, Bihar, India, on Oct. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Prashanth Vishwanathan.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Bibhudatta Pradhan · WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, which is in coalition with the ruling alliance in Bihar, is fighting a tough battle to retain control of the eastern state as vote counting began Tuesday.
The vote tally has been slowed down considerably because of Covid-19 protocols in place, and no clear verdict had emerged by late Tuesday afternoon. Trends show the ruling coalition, that includes Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, pulling ahead in some 127 seats. The opposition grouping, led by the charismatic 31-year-old politician Tejashwi Yadav was leading in 106 seats in the 243-member state assembly. Most exit polls have shown citizens rejecting the ruling coalition in favor of the opposition alliance.
About 25% of the votes polled have been counted so far, according to Election Commission officials in New Delhi. It’s not immediately clear when a final vote count will be available.
Bihar is India’s poorest state, but with a population larger than any nation in the European Union it sends 40 lawmakers to federal parliament, giving it outsize political importance. Losing the state amid soaring unemployment and an economy experiencing the sharpest dive in decades will be a setback for Modi, who invested a lot of political capital in the campaign.
The state is currently governed by Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) party who has ruled for three straight terms. But in the face of an anti-incumbency wave Modi was the main campaigner, addressing more than a dozen rallies across the province despite pandemic restrictions. His Bharatiya Janata Party entered an alliance with Kumar’s party after the last elections in 2015.
A loss is likely to turn attention to Modi’s policies — including setting in motion the world’s strictest virus lockdown — and embolden the opposition to question his handling of India’s pandemic. The stay-at-home order and the job losses it triggered led to an exodus of poor migrant workers, over 1.5 million from Bihar alone, from India’s big cities. With more than 8.5 million cases, India’s virus infections trail only the U.S.
The spotlight is now on Yadav, the youthful leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal party and the chief ministerial candidate of the opposition alliance. A one-time cricketer and the son of a former chief minister, Yadav sought to win over younger voters with the promise of a million government jobs. Bihar’s unemployment rate has climbed to 12% — almost double that of the national average of 6.7% — since the lockdown.
“A loss will also put pressure on the center to concentrate more on populist policies that give a fillip to job creation,” said Ajay Bodke, CEO for portfolio management services at Prabhudas Lilladher. “With a massive shortfall in tax revenues and divestment proceeds due to economic slowdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic, the government needs to expedite structural reforms hobbling medium-term growth which are bound to create backlash among sections of society.”
The BJP has been facing tougher-than-expected battles in the state polls that have followed Modi’s sweeping victory to a second term in office in May 2019. Its alliance in Maharashtra, India’s wealthiest state, fell apart soon after polls there last year. It lost power in Rajasthan and Jharkhand and had to cobble together a new coalition in the northern Haryana state.
By The Washington Post · Jason Samenow, Andrew Freedman · NATIONAL, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT
WASHINGTON – The White House removed the official in charge of the federal program that produces the U.S. government’s definitive reports on climate change, three people familiar with the situation said.
The official, Michael Kuperberg, a climate scientist who had been executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) since July 2015, was told Friday evening to return to his previous position as a scientist at the Energy Department. He had been expected to stay on through the production of the fifth edition of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment.
The climate assessment examines the present-day harms that climate change is having on the United States and makes projections about future damage down to the local level from greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
The USGCRP is a program Congress created to help coordinate the climate science programs of 13 federal agencies. The program works to “advance understanding of the changing Earth system” and facilitates the production of the National Climate Assessment and other reports.
Kuperberg directed that office through the release of the fourth edition of the climate assessment, which detailed the potentially dire consequences for Americans should the country take little action to cut emissions and prepare for climate change’s effects, such as sea-level rise, droughts and hotter, longer-lasting heat waves.
The report, produced by federal and outside scientists, angered the White House, since President Trump has consistently downplayed the seriousness of the climate threat and the scientific consensus that human activities are playing the dominant role in warming the planet.
Kuperberg’s removal was confirmed by a current federal official and a former White House official, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter. It was also confirmed by Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois who was director of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and is a friend of Kuperberg’s.
“Mike called me on Saturday and said he was just notified that he was let go, that his detail was over and that he should go back to the Department of Energy,” Wuebbles said.
The former White House official described Kuperberg as “shocked” by his removal. “He was extremely dedicated,” the official said. “He did a very good job of figuring out how to walk that political line. He had no idea it was coming.”
Kuperberg did not reply to requests for comment.
His dismissal comes just as Betsy Weatherhead, a mainstream climate scientist, takes over as the federal coordinator of the next assessment which is just getting underway. Weatherhead will work with the USGCRP but be formally located within the U.S. Geological Survey. While the bulk of the work on the report will take place under Joe Biden’s administration, government officials are starting to select which scientists will participate in writing it now, with the first deadline for author nominations coming up on Saturday.
Removing Kuperberg could allow the White House to insert someone whose climate science views more closely align with Trump’s. That may be exactly what’s about to happen, according to Myron Ebell, a climate change contrarian at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is close to the administration.
Ebell said in an interview that the job will most likely go to David Legates, a meteorologist from the University of Delaware who was recently appointed to be the deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for environmental observation and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While that is a senior position at NOAA reporting directly to the acting administrator, Legates does not have a role in the climate assessment process while serving in that capacity.
“It makes sense if they want to take the national assessment in a direction that relies on science rather than junk science, science fiction and speculation,” Ebell, who has long been critical of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, said of a potential Legates move to the climate research program. Legates has argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and promoted the benefits of burning fossil fuels for energy.
Even if he were to hold the climate research job for just the remaining few months of Trump’s term, Ebell said he could help select the authors of the next assessment and influence its final content that way.
Once the assessment’s authors are selected, it can be difficult to change them as the process moves along, Ebell said, regardless of the administration in office at the time.
However, he cautioned that he heard that the personnel change would be announced Monday, and said the delay could indicate there’s a ‘glitch’ in the appointment.
The USGCRP has traditionally stayed insulated from political influences, instead serving as a coordinating office and funding agency for carrying out the major report and providing other climate science information useful to the public and policymakers.
Kuperberg’s removal “seems quite consistent with decisions at NOAA and elsewhere,” said Kathy Jacobs, who is director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona and ran the Third National Climate Assessment. “[It’s] a last-minute attempt to remove people who may not be perceived as supporting the president’s agenda.”
It also occurs against the backdrop of the removal of several government officials at the White House’s request, including a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the director of the National Nuclear Security Administration and Monday’s firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Wuebbles and Jacobs said they did not understand why the administration would dismiss Kuperberg now.
“I can only speculate they want to see if they can manipulate the Fifth National Climate Assessment before the next administration comes in,” Wuebbles said. “Why they want to do that, I don’t understand.”
Jacobs said any damage done by removing Kuperberg could be reversed by the Biden administration.
“I would be more concerned if Trump had won the election,” she said. “If USGCRP is rudderless for a few months, I don’t consider that a devastating situation. The question is: What are they going to do in the interim?”
Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Kuperberg’s removal at this time is “troubling.”
“I think people underestimate how important USGCRP is,” she said, emphasizing that it plays a role in coordinating reports for the international community, as well. “It does not send a good signal internationally,” she said, especially considering the United States is set to rejoin the Paris climate accords under Biden.
Biden behaves as the incoming president, even as Trump balks at giving up power
InternationalNov 10. 2020President-elect Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman.
By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey, Sean Sullivan · NATIONAL, POLITICS
WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden sought to project the authority of an incoming president Monday as he dealt with matters domestic and international, even as the defeated incumbent continued to balk at turning over the reins.
Biden and Harris take part in a virtual coronavirus briefing at the Queen in Wilmington. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman.
Biden began taking calls from foreign leaders, speaking Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He also was weighing whom to appoint to top White House positions, with several of his longtime advisers expected to take senior roles. And he turned his attention to the coronavirus, dispatching a key aide to brief Senate Democrats this week and making a strong pitch to Americans of every ideology to follow public health recommendations.
Biden urged Americans to wear masks, at one point holding one up during a speech in Wilmington, and sought to depoliticize the act of putting one on.
“We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months,” said Biden, who wore a mask routinely during the campaign and was mocked by President Donald Trump for doing so. “Not Democrat or Republican lives, American lives.”
Speaking on the day when the number of U.S. coronavirus cases soared past 10 million – the daily count has hit more than 100,000 recently – Biden sought to impart urgency about adopting actions to curb the spread, even as he acknowledged that he had little power other than rhetoric to change behavior.
“The challenge before us right now is still immense and growing, and although we are not in office yet, I’m just laying out what we expect to do and hope can be done,” said Biden, speaking from the Queen, a Wilmington theater, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris at his side.
The effort to bend the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 238,000 Americans, was part of Biden’s attempt to push as hard as he can at the notion that he will inevitably become president on Jan. 20, regardless of Trump’s sentiments.
But so far his transition lacks the latitude usually given to an incoming president by a conceding defeated leader.
Trump has continued to insist that he won the election, despite trailing Biden 279 electoral votes to 214. Biden leads in two states that have not been formally projected – Arizona and Georgia – while Trump leads in two others, North Carolina and Alaska.
“What President-elect Biden has to do is act like a winner, because he won,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who noted that Biden’s victory in the popular vote and the expected tally in the electoral college are by unusually large margins. Still, given Trump’s recalcitrance, Brinkley said, it behooves Biden to be visible.
“You don’t want to be in quarantine or hiding mode,” he said. “Every day you have to move forward with the transition without being distracted by Trump’s antics.”
The president’s team has taken legal action to invalidate some ballots and question counting in several states, and his allies and advisers continue to insist – without proof – that Democrats cheated to clear a path for Biden’s election. The political appointee heading the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has so far declined to sign off on paperwork that would allow the Biden team to kick-start its transition with access to government offices and money to finance its effort.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the president’s allies were walking in lockstep behind him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Monday that the president is “100% within his rights” to take legal action to try to overturn the results.
“This process will reach its resolution. Our system will resolve any recounts” or lawsuits, McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor.
McConnell on Monday did not congratulate Biden. His remarks came shortly after he met with Attorney General William Barr on Monday afternoon. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting.
Biden’s team has welcomed support from Republican senators willing to break with Trump and bolster the legitimacy of the election via congratulatory statements.
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., congratulated Biden on Monday, calling him the “next president.”
A more nuanced statement came from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who last week won a fifth term. She congratulated Biden on his “apparent victory” but also said Trump should be “afforded the opportunity” to challenge the outcome of the election.
Collins, who is known to have a good relationship with Biden after they served in the Senate together for years, spoke with the Democrat last week, according to a Republican aide, who was not authorized to discuss private conversations and so spoke on the condition of anonymity.
More than 30 Republican former members of Congress released a statement calling on the nation to accept the outcome of the presidential election and denouncing Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for GOP lawmakers to follow the lead of former president George W. Bush, who congratulated Biden in a statement Sunday.
“There has been no evidence of any significant or widespread voter fraud,” Schumer said. “Joe Biden won this election fair and square.”
Biden’s biggest task Monday was to grapple with the spiraling spread of the coronavirus. He named 13 top physicians and public health experts to a coronavirus advisory committee as his first official act as president-elect, a move meant to demonstrate his commitment to a science-based approach to containing the outbreak.
“This group will advise on detailed plans, built on a bedrock of science, and then keep compassion, empathy and care for every American at its core,” Biden said Monday, adding that the members will look at ways to increase access to rapid testing, determine how to hire a “corps” of contact tracers and prioritize how to get vaccines to the most at-risk Americans.
Vivek Murthy, the co-chair of Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, was invited by Schumer to brief Senate Democrats at their caucus lunch Tuesday, according to a senior Democratic aide. The briefing will be held via phone, like all other Democratic lunches have been recently.
Despite Monday’s news that Pfizer’s vaccine has proved to be more than 90% effective at protecting people compared with a placebo – a mark higher than many experts had predicted – Biden sought to lower expectations about how quickly it could be approved and distributed, a departure from Trump’s insistence that a vaccine would be widely available soon.
“The expectation is the FDA will run a process of rigorous reviews and approval,” said Biden. “The process must also be grounded in science and fully transparent so the American people can have every confidence that any approved vaccine is safe and effective.”
He added another note of caution, saying, “It’s clear that this vaccine, even if approved, will not be widely available for many months yet to come.”
Biden’s conversation Monday with Trudeau was the first time he has been known to talk to a foreign leader since he claimed victory Saturday.
“We’ve worked with each other before, and we’re ready to pick up on that work and tackle the challenges and opportunities facing our two countries – including climate change and COVID-19,” Trudeau said in a message posted on social media. “. . . President-elect @JoeBiden and I agreed to keep in touch and work closely together.”
Topics included trade, energy, the NATO alliance and racial justice, Trudeau said.
Behind the scenes, Biden was also working to finalize his senior White House team.
Biden in the past has blown past deadlines on important matters; he extended his decision on whether to run for president beyond his initial deadline and similarly took extra weeks when selecting a running mate, finally picking Harris after a drawn-out process.
The calendar is also conspiring against the unveiling of a long list of staff members, with Biden expected to honor Veterans Day on Wednesday.
But for his staff, the decisions carry some urgency. The final paychecks from the campaign will come soon, according to one staff member, though health care coverage may extend through the end of the year. Some key staff members are expected to move as early as this week to the Biden transition team.
Several longtime aides on the campaign are widely expected to be headed into the White House as influential advisers.
Two of those most frequently mentioned are Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, longtime Biden advisers who are well-positioned to land influential positions inside the White House, according to people with knowledge of the internal dynamics. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount private conversations.
Both men played significant roles in Biden’s campaign, helping direct strategy, operations and major decisions, and are considered two of his closest confidants.
Should Biden tap them for top roles, the decision would be among the first concrete signs that he will continue to rely, at least in part, on the old guard of strategists who have guided him for years. Another oft-mentioned name is Ron Klain, who is seen by many in the Biden orbit as a potential White House chief of staff.
At the same time, Biden has vowed to staff an administration that looks like the country, and he is coming under pressure to ensure that his team is diverse. Donilon, Ricchetti and Klain are all White men.
The people with knowledge of the internal dynamics stressed that the situation was fluid and final decisions had not yet been made.
Donilon was the chief strategist for Biden’s campaign and was the lead architect at the staff level on major speeches, including Biden’s October address in Gettysburg, Pa.
Ricchetti served as campaign chairman and was Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president. Before joining Biden’s staff, Ricchetti helmed a public affairs and lobbying firm.
“The Biden-Harris transition has not made any personnel decisions at this time,” said transition spokesman Cameron French.
The top staffers whom Biden trusts cut significantly different profiles than members of Trump’s team, many of whom gained their White House jobs via television appearances.
In contrast, most of the aides who populate Biden’s inner circle are famously camera-shy and largely avoid efforts to take credit for decisions.
Some staff not going to the White House immediately will help set up a presidential inaugural committee that will oversee the Jan. 20 transfer of power and associated festivities.
The pandemic raises the possibility that the traditional ceremonies, which draw thousands of supporters to the Mall, may have to be reimagined. The people with internal knowledge said it was possible that Rufus Gifford might chair the inaugural committee, though they were not aware of any final decisions. Gifford served as deputy campaign manager and has been a longtime party fundraiser whom President Barack Obama tapped as ambassador to Denmark.
Holding the event safely amid the pandemic will be difficult, some Biden allies acknowledge, but they have said it’s important to preserve some sense of grandeur given Trump’s refusal to concede.
“It’s easier to scale back than scale up,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who chairs the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” He said that a “full-scale inauguration” is being planned.
By The Washington Post · Gerry Shih, Eva Dou · WORLD, TECHNOLOGY, ASIA-PACIFIC TAIPEI, Taiwan – With President-elect Joe Biden’s triumph, governments around the world around are bracing for a potentially dramatic reversal in the U.S. approach toward allies, foes and issues from trade to climate change.
In China? Not so much.
The Chinese government held off from immediately commenting on the election result on Sunday, but many Chinese analysts say that four years and one bruising showdown with the Trump administration have left a profound impression that the world’s two leading powers have ineluctably become rivals, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. While Biden could ease off Beijing in certain respects after Inauguration Day, many Chinese have adopted a fatalistic view of the post-Trump world: U.S.-China relations are likely to be fraught for four more years, if not a generation.
Part of the pessimism stems from Chinese expectations that Biden could pressure Beijing more effectively than President Donald Trump by galvanizing U.S. allies and criticizing its human rights record – a strategy Biden and his advisers have touted on the campaign trail. But a larger challenge, Chinese analysts say, is a growing, bipartisan alarm in Washington about China’s rising strength, particularly in technology.
“There will actually be more tension over human rights, Hong Kong, Xinjiang,” said Shen Dingli, director of American Studies at Fudan University, listing areas where China expects Biden to adopt a tougher line than Trump, who did not emphasize upholding human rights or liberal values as part of his foreign policy.
Shen and other analysts said China could seize the opportunity to quickly offer friendly gestures to Biden. Beijing would be happy to work on areas of potential collaboration, such as countering the coronavirus pandemic, bringing the United States back into a climate accord or patching up a nuclear agreement with Iran, Shen said.
“But overall, Biden will try to do what Trump couldn’t – suppress China – because the distance between China and the U.S. is drawing closer every year and no leader, Democratic or Republican, will ever accept China overtaking America,” he said. “Pressure will be higher still come 2024.”
China’s Foreign Ministry, which has avoided expressing favor for either candidate, did not comment on Biden’s victory as of Sunday afternoon in Beijing.
But as the Democrat led the vote count in recent days, a senior ministry official hinted that China was eager to turn a new page. The next U.S. administration should “meet halfway” with Beijing on matters of disagreement and collaborate whenever possible, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said in remarks that some state media outlets framed as a desire to move past the bitterness of the Trump years.
“Bull Piano,” a blog on WeChat that is associated with the official Xinhua News Agency but does not represent government positions, noted Sunday that Biden has called Russia a “threat” but China a “competitor.”
“We must not have illusions,” the unnamed writer said. “I hope we can return to a relatively rational track, but one thing is certain: Things will never be the same again. This world is not the world of before.”
During his term, Trump exposed China’s vulnerabilities by erecting tariffs on China’s key export industry and denying sales of cutting-edge technology such as semiconductors to Huawei and other corporate players. In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping repeatedly urged his country to patch up its vulnerabilities, shockproof the economy, and worry less about fluctuations in U.S. policies toward China and focus more on “doing our own things well.”
In recent months, a slew of far-reaching policies has reflected China’s preparations for future flare-ups with competitors like the United States. The ruling Communist Party rolled out development plans to become “self-sufficient” in advanced fields like computer chips and to rely less on selling products to other countries. Some of the policy motivations were long-standing, Chinese experts say: Beijing has long tried to overhaul the economy to become more dependent on domestic consumption.
But the blueprints were undeniably shaped by Trump’s attacks.
“Changes in U.S.-China relations increased the necessity of these policies,” said Mei Xinyu, a researcher who advises the Commerce Ministry. Mei said he was not “overly hopeful” that Biden would cancel Trump’s tariffs and said Chinese companies should be ready to live under the assumption of a “high-tariff environment.”
Biden and his advisers have said many of Trump’s policies on China, including tariffs, are ineffective and should be reconsidered. Biden has also accused China of stealing intellectual property and pledged to invest in American workers and technology to compete with China, but it’s not clear if he would use tools like Trump’s sanctions against Chinese technology companies.
Some Chinese are troubled by the pervasive gloominess. Ren Yi, a Harvard-educated independent writer in Beijing, said there was a growing trend among Chinese academics, bureaucrats and ordinary people to assume the two countries are destined for conflict.
Ren, who writes one of the country’s most popular political columns on WeChat, said he has tried to tell readers that a Democratic administration would likely focus on domestic issues, and most Americans are not preoccupied with China. But “mainstream Chinese have become disillusioned with America,” he said. “The trade war was a catalyst. Then came (Trump’s sanctions on) Huawei, TikTok, the use of American power against us, the dispute over the Hong Kong movement.”
If there is room for optimism in Beijing, it is that Biden is a relatively known quantity, and Chinese analysts expect he would adhere to norms in diplomacy and negotiation. Although he called Xi a “thug” during a February debate, Biden has also talked up his extensive foreign policy record and experience meeting Chinese leaders. Xi, during a 2013 meeting in Beijing, called Biden “my old friend.”
Victor Gao, a professor at China’s Soochow University and a former Foreign Ministry official, said he believed Beijing looked forward to somebody who was not Trump. “Trump is a man without decency,” he said. “China will be happy to deal with a president who is a man of decency.”
Xin Qiang, a professor at Fudan University who studies the United States and Taiwan, said some aspects of the bilateral relationship, like technological competition with the United States, have been “changed forever.” But Xin predicted normalcy to return on sensitive issues like Taiwan. Biden is likely to support the island’s democracy, which China claims as its territory, but avoid risky actions that could provoke military conflict, he said.
In recent months, China has expressed displeasure with the warming ties between the Trump administration and Taiwan by dispatching fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace and airing propaganda warning bluntly of war. The Trump administration has supported Taiwan by selling advanced weaponry and dispatching senior officials to visit.
Biden “will be restrained and not as radical as President Trump,” Xin said. He served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “and has great expertise,” Xin said. “He knows the red line, the bottom line” of China.
But Xin and other experts acknowledge concerns about the future. A Pew Research Center poll this year showed U.S. sentiment toward China dropping to all-time lows, Xin said, and Chinese are already aware that “China-bashing could become worse” with the rise of a younger generation of U.S. politicians who may seek the presidency in 2024.
“I think there are considerable American forces who embrace trying to suppress China’s rise,” said Mei, the Commerce Ministry-affiliated researcher. “We are willing to improve relations with the United States, but we must not overlook the existence of these forces.”
He summed up the mood in Beijing.
When it comes to U.S. relations, Mei said, “prepare for the worst, and strive for the best.”
By The Washington Post · Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW Attorney General William Barr on Monday gave federal prosecutors approval to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified and indicated he had already done so “in specific instances” – a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy that quickly drew criticism for fueling unfounded claims of massive election fraud pushed by President Donald Trump and other conservatives.
The two-page memo comes as the Trump campaign and its allies have urged the department to investigate their claims, despite little evidence that such fraud exists. Justice Department officials had previously confirmed they were looking into allegations in Nevada, and had referred other information out of Michigan to the FBI.
In his memo, circulated two days after results showed former vice president Joe Biden had defeated Trump, Barr seemed to take aim at previous guidance from the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch that said prosecutors should not – in most instances – take overt steps in voter fraud or related investigations until after election results are in and certified. The guidance was designed to ensure that voters and state and local election officials, rather than the federal government, decide the results.
But Barr wrote that the previous directive was never “a hard and fast rule,” and that a “passive and delayed enforcement approach can result in situations in which election misconduct cannot realistically be rectified.” He also noted that concern about the Justice Department influencing an election were reduced once voters had finished casting ballots.
“Given this, and given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances,” Barr wrote.
Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration who is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the memo amounts to “scaremongering” that will allow officials to send letters or take other public steps that might suggest there is voter fraud in a particular state, when in fact there is none.
“This is totally predictable. It’s DOJ scare tactics again. It’s the same show we’ve seen before,” Gupta said. “Barr is probably doing this because Trump is demanding that he do something, but the voters decided this election, and overwhelmingly voted for Biden.”
Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman during the Obama administration, said, “There’s no justification for doing this now.”
“The best case scenario is that Barr did this to appease Trump and add credibility to his allegations of voter fraud,” Miller said. “The worst case scenario is that DOJ is planning to intervene in some way and try to throw the election to the president. Neither one is good, but one is much, much worse than the other.”
Barr’s move came a day after the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to him urging an investigation into possible impropriety in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., sent a letter to Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray asking them to investigate claims made by a postal worker in Erie, Pa., that there was mishandling of mail-in ballots by postal supervisors there.
“I urge you to investigate these claims as soon as possible,” wrote Graham. “It is imperative that the American people have confidence in the 2020 election and all other elections. The expansion of voting by mail has placed the post office at the center of the election and we must ensure that the entire postal system operates with integrity.”
A Justice Department official said it is reviewing Graham’s letter. The official said Barr had not been asked to send the memo by the White House.
Barr’s directive was heavily caveated, and did not offer new evidence of substantive election fraud. He did not identify the “specific instances” in which he had authorized prosecutors to examine allegations of vote tabulation irregularities, and he noted pointedly, “Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the Department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election.”
Barr also limited the cases that prosecutors might be able to open under the new guidance to irregularities that “if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”
“Any investigation of claims of irregularities that, if true, would clearly not impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State should normally be deferred until after the election certification process is completed,” Barr wrote.
Before Monday, the department had taken only modest steps to investigate fraud, despite significant pressure from the Trump campaign and its allies.
Last week, for example, lawyers for the Trump campaign sent a letter to Barr alleging voter fraud in Nevada, where they claimed to have identified more than 3,000 people who voted improperly because there was some evidence to suggest they moved out of state. But state officials soon pushed back on that claim, saying some of those voters might have been serving in the military. A Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at that time that the department was “looking into” the matter, but declined to comment further.
Similarly, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week said she had sent claims to the Justice Department about election workers in Michigan being told to backdate certain ballots, though she conceded the allegations were not fully vetted. A Justice Department official said the information McDaniel provided has been referred to the FBI, though the FBI declined to say what – if anything – it was doing.
Before Monday, the Justice Department had issued just one public statement on Trump’s broad allegations of fraud. Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, told reporters, “The Department of Justice pursues all actionable information it receives and, as is always the case, encourages anyone who suspects a federal crime to report it to their local FBI office.”
The Justice Department had reaffirmed its long-standing policy of not taking overt steps on possible election fraud before results are certified as recently as December 2017, when it issued a guide telling prosecutors “not to conduct overt investigations, including interviews with individual voters, until after the outcome of the election allegedly affected by the fraud is certified.” But more recently, department also issued guidance offering prosecutors more leeway, particularly when misconduct by federal employees, such as postal workers, might be at issue.
In Monday’s directive, Barr seemed to defer to his subordinates, telling those to whom the memo was addressed, “You are the most senior leaders in the United States Department of Justice and I trust you to exercise great care and judgment in addressing allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities. While serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”
The directive was sent to U.S. attorneys throughout the country, as well as the heads of the Justice Department’s criminal division, civil rights division, national security division and the FBI director.
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick gave a news conference outside the Archdiocesan Pastoral Center in Hyattsville, Md., regarding the allegations of misconduct. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Sarah L. Voisin 
About 4,000 mail ballots in Arizona still needed to have voter signatures verified as of Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Caitlin O’Hara 
President Donald Trump at a rally in Goodyear, Ariz., in October. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 
Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, pauses during the Mouvement des entreprises de France business conference in Paris on Aug. 27, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Cyril Marcilhacy. /Photo by: Cyril Marcilhacy — Bloomberg Location: Paris, France 
A boy carries a cardboard cut-out of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi after a Bharatiya Janata Party election rally in Gaya, Bihar, India, on Oct. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Prashanth Vishwanathan. 
President-elect Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman. 
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