F*ck Silence Read online

  A man living in a delusion at the very top of the government sets the tone for others on down. Look past Spicer feeding Trump’s narcissism; there are other examples that pertain to government policy. Let me preface this by saying that I’m an immigration hawk. I’m for strong borders. And I’ve never minced my words when talking about the threat of terrorism. But I think there are plenty of sound data out there for me to justify my positions on those matters without misinforming the country with bad numbers.

  For instance, President Trump said during his first State of the Union address that “[a]ccording to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”16

  DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security released a report the following year, in January 2018, essentially providing the meat for that claim. It said that 402 of the 549 individuals who had been convicted of “international terrorism-related charges” in US federal courts between 9/11 and the end of 2016 were foreign-born.17 The report was clear, as Trump tweeted: “New report from DOJ & DHS shows that nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born. We have submitted to Congress a list of resources and reforms. . . . we need to keep America safe, including moving away from a random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit-based.”18

  There are a few glaring problems with this, though. One, the government’s data don’t say which of those people had been extradited to the United States to stand trial and therefore wouldn’t have been affected by immigration policy. Two, the data don’t say which individuals actually did benefit from particular immigration policies such as “chain migration.” And three, the data exclude domestic terrorism, which is sloppy considering how many more convictions there are for it than there are for international terrorism.

  Now, if you’re a cynic, this may seem like par for the course, as far as caring about the government distorting statistics. But the government itself disagrees with you. The Justice Department eventually admitted that its report “could be criticized by some readers” and “could cause some readers of the report to question its objectivity.”19 The department didn’t retract and pull it down, though—which means that the information the government itself implies is misleading still forms the backbone of one of the Trump administration’s most prominent stances. That’s wrong, and it’s also a pretty disgusting way to blanketly smear immigrants as risks to our communities’ safety.

  So here’s the pattern: Trump lies when he sleeps. He lies when he wakes. He lies when it snows. He lies when it rains. He lies on a Monday. He lies every Friday. He lies when he eats. He lies when he tweets. He lies standing up, sitting down, and on his back. He lies to you and me. He’ll lie again at the count of three. Oftentimes it’s so shameless that the lie can be called out just by searching what he himself said on the record or tweeted on an earlier date in the not-too-distant past.

  “The Fake News is saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, ‘No Conditions.’ That is an incorrect statement (as usual!),” he tweeted in September 2019.20 But Vice President Mike Pence said in June, “The president of the United States has made it clear we’re prepared to talk to Iran without preconditions.”21 One of Trump’s spokesmen, Hogan Gidley, said a couple of months later in August, “Well, listen, [Trump] has been clear that he wants to have conversations with the leaders of Iran without, you know, preconditions. He’s been very clear about that.”22 The week before Trump’s tweet, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said, “Now the President has made clear he is happy to take a meeting with no preconditions,”23 and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “The President has made very clear he is prepared to meet with no preconditions.”24 And, of course, Trump himself said he’d meet with the leadership of Iran without preconditions. Twice: once in July 2018, when he said, “No preconditions. No. If they want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want. Anytime they want. It’s good for the country, good for them, good for us, and good for the world. No preconditions. If they want to meet, I’ll meet.”; the other time in June 2019, when he said, “You want to talk? Good. Otherwise you can have a bad economy for the next three years. . . . no preconditions.”25

  There’s little to add to this. It has nothing to do with Trump being mischaracterized. It has nothing to with “fake news.” It’s an off-the-charts rewriting of history, and the stakes are no less than negotiating with an adversary that aspires to possess nuclear weapons. That is why it matters that Trump is a serial liar—because he will, by definition, lie about anything.

  I say this with tough love; anyone who appreciates democracy has to oppose this type of behavior categorically. Our society is complex, and a lot of reasonable answers to the problems it faces probably land somewhere in the gray area. Tolerating or not tolerating the nation’s chief executive habitually lying and creating a culture of lying inside the government is firmly a matter of black and white. We must denounce it together. If we don’t, we will allow our nation’s leaders and their supporters to base the legitimacy of facts on whether or not those facts support their goals. That’s a tool that tyrants have always used to justify their actions—and to appreciate the seriousness of this, please do use your imagination.

  Donald Trump has the nuclear launch codes. Think about it.

  Chapter 2

  The Constitution Breaker

  Donald Trump has never shown much respect for the rules of any game he’s played: politics, real estate, even golf, at which he’s a notorious cheat.1 He doesn’t enter a situation and ask what he’s permitted to do. He enters and does whatever he feels like doing. Having a complete lack of respect for institutions and their guardrails is about the least traditionally conservative instinct a person can have. But Trump isn’t really a conservative. There ain’t a core idea in his body. Instead, he’s all about “making deals” just to say he did and getting people to think he’s a genius for doing so. You generally need at least a handshake in the business world for each piece of work. But not in the world of being president.

  The US presidency has become arguably the world’s most powerful job, way more powerful than the Framers intended it to be. Some of its powers are inherently yuge, such as being “commander in chief” of the armed forces—which today make up the mightiest military of any nation on Earth. Presidents make treaties. Presidents fill the federal courts. Presidents, by design, are largely responsible for determining the course of the country. But as the government has grown, they’ve taken even fuller control of the wheel. They have a lot of latitude to implement vague laws that Congress sends to them, which is partly how we’ve ended up with the monstrosity of a bureaucracy that barely anyone but the people who staff it in greater Washington, DC, like. And presidents have a mystique about them that other powerful government officers, such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, lack.

  Trump apparently caught wind of that mystique and has exploited it for all it’s worth. You’re kidding yourself if you think his campaign slogan was genuinely “Make America great again.” It was really “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.” This is a person so in love with control and his own fame that he once said, “When you’re a star, [women] let you do it. You can do anything: Grab ’em by the pussy, you can do anything.” Fourteen years later, in his current job, he said the Constitution has for him an “Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President,” including obstructing justice.2 When you’re a star, you can do anything; when you’re president, you have the right to do whatever you want. The line you can draw from that first quotation to the next is dead straight: a man who thinks the rules don’t apply to him does whatever he wants to do in private life and then does whatever he wants to do in public life as well. Could it be any easier to spot a person who thinks he’s above the law—including the Constitution of the United States of America?

  The Constitution makes it pretty clear what presidents c
an and cannot do. That Article II Trump mentioned: it says that the president gets a fixed salary during his term, “and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument”—meaning a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office—“from the United States, or any of them.” It also says that he has the power to grant pardons “for Offenses against the United States.” He has the power to fill cabinet posts created by law, but “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” It’s his job to update Congress about the “State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient”—but it’s Congress’s role to pass those measures if it thinks they’re a good idea. (That’s in Article I, as well as in Schoolhouse Rock!)*

  President Trump has gone beyond or abused these powers on so many occasions it’d make your head spin.

  He’s in violation of the emoluments language every time taxpayer dollars are spent at a Trump-owned property. The president may have resigned his titles in his private businesses, but he hasn’t divested himself. So when government officials shell out money at, say, the Trump International Hotel, just a ten-minute drive from the White House, it benefits the Trump Organization—and, by association, Trump the man. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) researches this in detail and updates its findings periodically. Here’s an update from August 2019:

  Trump administration officials are especially loyal patrons of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. In total, CREW has recorded 193 officials who have visited this single property. These visits give other hotel patrons—who include lobbyists, corporate executives and foreign officials—an exclusive perk: The chance to mingle with the President and other high-level administration officials. The President’s D.C. hotel offers paying customers access to powerful officials as well as patronage that puts money directly in the President’s pocket. These are valuable commodities that no other luxury hotel in D.C. can offer its clients.

  Many of these visits take place en masse, with Trump administration officials flocking to the hotel for an event or party, giving hotel patrons valuable access to many officials at once. Both former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury Tony Sayegh held going away parties at President Trump’s D.C. hotel this year. Sanders’ party brought 35 administration officials to the hotel, including Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, among others. (My emphasis.)3

  Let’s jump next to the pardon power. Trump has totally undermined the spirit of this incredible authority: a merciful spirit, not a self-interested one. And he’s used it to flout the law entirely. In 2017, Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted by a federal judge of criminal contempt of court for refusing to comply with an order to stop racially profiling Latinos to try to find illegal immigrants.4 But Trump pardoned him for that very offense a couple of months later.5 That right there is going around the judicial system completely. You had a judge say to someone under a court order, “I told you to stop doing this thing that takes away people’s constitutional rights, and I’m going to enforce it.” Then the president steps in and says, “No, you’re not.” The pardon power isn’t there to stop courts from enforcing the Constitution. How utterly stupid would it be if it was? And how useless would the courts become?

  (Lest anyone mistake Arpaio’s crime for an exception to an otherwise sterling character, this is the same guy who entrapped an eighteen-year-old man in a faux assassination plot, threw him into jail for four years, and then had to pay him $1.1 million in taxpayer dollars for wrongful arrest. The department had already had to pay “more than $43 million in lawsuit settlements and expenses to the families of jail abuse victims during Arpaio’s tenure as sheriff.”6 He once called his “tent city” jail a “concentration camp.”7)

  Then there’s the way Trump uses pardons as though they’re carrots on a stick. It’s next-level abuse of power. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election documented examples of Trump and his counsel Rudy Giuliani openly discussing the possibility of pardoning his subordinates, all while Trump provided them moral support to resist cooperating with the government. The evidence is a combination of public statements and sworn testimony—hardly Washington hearsay.

  First up is Paul Manafort, the Trump presidential campaign’s chairman. “With respect to Manafort,” Mueller wrote, “there is evidence that the President’s actions had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government. The President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to ‘flip’ and cooperate with the government.”8

  Second is Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer. “After the FBI searched Cohen’s home and office in April 2018, the President publicly asserted that Cohen would not ‘flip’ and privately passed messages of support to him. Cohen also discussed pardons with the President’s personal counsel and believed that if he stayed on message, he would get a pardon or the President would do ‘something else’ to make the investigation end.”9

  It’s not as though the Mueller investigation was a one-off example of Trump dangling pardons. In April 2019, three people briefed about a conversation between the president and the person he was about to appoint acting secretary of homeland security, Kevin McAleenan, told the New York Times that Trump had urged McAleenan to close the southwest border to migrants and said that he would pardon him if the move landed him in legal trouble.10 Then there was this humdinger in August, reported by the Washington Post:

  President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

  He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.11

  Again, I know that these are reports from the Times and the Post, and a lot of the people I hope to convince of Trump’s unfitness for office recoil at the very mention of the Times and the Post. But you have to look at this stuff in the aggregate: what Trump himself and his lawyer said about Manafort and Cohen, what the Times reported based on information from several sources, what the Post reported five months later with a similar level of detail. Taken together, it’s convincing evidence that Trump believes the pardon power’s purpose is to get underlings to break the laws for him. Now, you have to be a fucking moron to think this is how the legal system works. Or a mob boss who happens to be president.

  A mob boss type needs lackeys around him to carry out his dirty work. Some of those people he can install himself, such as the people in the presidential office directly underneath him, with no approval process but the one he sets up. But the people who are in charge of the various components of the operation—well, they need the advice and consent of the US Senate, in this case. Don’t misunderstand: Trump has surrounded himself with some eminently qualified public servants, who have helped keep the country from going further off track than it already has. I’m thinking of people such as retired marine general Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary whose experience, intelligence, and reason were gigantic benefits to the United States’ decision-making on military affairs. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, is another one. Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence; Gina Haspel, the CIA director: these people are the adults in the room, and the Senate confirmed them—because they’re quality public servants and deserved the gigs.

  But the number of those adults is shrinking. Mattis, Haley, and Coats were g
one well before Trump even finished his first term. In many cases, their departures were about the aides being at odds with the president. People such as Sean Hannity can bark “Deep state!” until their tinfoil hats fall off, but if I’m asked to trust a group of people including Coats, who was our ambassador to Germany and a respected senator, and Haspel, who has more than three decades of intelligence experience, and Haley, who was praised by Republicans and former U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson, a Democrat and once New Mexico’s governor; or a group led by Trump, who likes listening to dictators more than his own experts, well, I’m taking the Coats-Haspel-Haley group. No wonder their kind is so difficult to keep around.

  Instead of draining the swamp, Trump is responsible for an ongoing brain drain in some of the most important parts of the federal government. And as I said, he prefers it this way. It gives him more opportunities to put dodos whose biggest credentials are flattery and submissiveness into cabinet-level jobs. But the Senate isn’t a cinch to approve these kinds of people even if his party controls it. So Trump couldn’t do it without circumventing the Senate’s “advice and consent role.” The way he’s done it is by placing temps in the vacant positions indefinitely, which skirts federal law. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (FVRA) was enacted to solve the problem of staffing empty, Senate-confirmable positions in a pinch, when doing it via the normal route—the constitutional one—would take too much time. Of course, the assumption was that the president and the Senate would be on the same page about filling the jobs in due course and in good faith. That’s not the case with this president.