Homeland Security Shifted $10 Million From FEMA For Immigrant Crackdown, Senator Says
Nick Visser, HuffPost September 12, 2018
Homeland Security shifted $10 million from FEMA for crackdown on immigration
The Trump administration transferred nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency earlier this year to fund immigrant detention and deportation efforts, according to a document released Tuesday by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore).
The lawmaker first shared the documents with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, saying that the Department of Homeland Security requested the money “just as hurricane season [was] starting” and as it was attempting to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the midst of its new “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The controversial crackdown resulted in the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents, hundreds of whom have yet to be reunited.
“This is a scandal. At the start of hurricane season — when American citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still suffering from FEMA’s inadequate recovery efforts — the administration transferred millions of dollars away from FEMA,” Merkley said in a statement to HuffPost. “And for what? To implement their profoundly misguided ‘zero tolerance’ policy. It wasn’t enough to rip thousands of children out of the arms of their parents — the administration chose to partly pay for this horrific program by taking away from the ability to respond to damage from this year’s upcoming and potentially devastating hurricane season.”
The document’s release comes just days before Hurricane Florence, a powerful Category 4 storm, is expected to make landfall in the Carolinas’. Millions of people are currently evacuating or hunkering down.
“$10 million comes out of FEMA when we’re facing a hurricane season knowing what’s happened last year,” Merkley told Maddow on Tuesday. “And look what we’ve had since, a hurricane just barely miss Hawaii. … Now we have this hurricane, Florence, bearing down on the Carolinas.”
DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton late Tuesday called the senator’s appearance a “sorry attempt to push a false agenda,” saying the administration was instead “focused on assisting millions on the East Coast facing a catastrophic disaster.”
“The money in question — transferred to ICE from FEMA’s routine operating expenses — could not have been used for hurricane response due to appropriation limitations,” Houlton wrote on Twitter. “DHS/FEMA stand fiscally and operationally ready to support current and future response and recovery needs.”
The document released by Merkley, which was supplied to HuffPost, states that more than $2.3 million from a total of about $9.8 million had been diverted from FEMA’s “response and recovery” budget. Other funding was transferred from regional operations, mitigation efforts, preparedness and protection, and mission support budgets.
The amount transferred is less than 1 percent of FEMA’s budget for the fiscal year, according to the document, which also notes that the agency’s “mission impact” would be minimized as FEMA would only be required to “curtail training, travel, public engagement sessions, IT security support and infrastructure maintenance, and IT investments.”
The Department of Homeland Security has the authority to move a limited amount of money around within its budget. In the past, Congress had limited DHS from shuffling more than $5 million from one approved program to another through the process known as “reprogramming.”
A coalition of human rights groups penned a letter on June 27 asking the Senate Committee on Appropriations to oppose attempts by DHS to up the amount of funding for immigrant detention, accusing the department of “dramatically overspending its appropriated budget in ways both morally reprehensible and fiscally irresponsible.”
The $10 million of additional funds that DHS aims to use to expand immigrant detention amounts to less than 1 percent of the ICE budget for locking up immigrants, which tops $1.4 billion.
Here’s what would happen if the Sahara was covered in solar and wind farms
Luke Dormehl, Digital September 11, 2018
With swirling dust storms, barely any rain, and daytime temperatures reaching up to 104-degrees Fahrenheit, the Sahara desert is one of the world’s least hospitable environments. But the 3.6 million square mile stretch also represents a whole lot of untapped prime real estate — which a new study suggests could be used for housing the biggest solar and wind farms in the world. As it turns out, not only would covering the entire area in solar and wind farms more than meet the world’s energy demands, it would also transform the local climate. According to a team of international researchers, this could more than double local rainfall and result in a moderate “greening” of the region. What’s not to like?
“The Sahara is quite dry and its surface is covered with little vegetation,” Yan Li, a postdoctoral researcher in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, told Digital Trends. “The additional rainfall and vegetation would certainly provide a much-needed relief to this dry, bare desert.”
In their study, the researchers simulated the effects of covering the entire area with these solar and wind farms. They concluded that wind farms would generate, on average, around three terawatts of power and 79 terawatts through solar farms. This is significantly more than the 18 terawatts that made up the 2017 global energy demand.
This climate modeling study is one of the first times that researchers have modeled the effects of wind and solar installation, along with the ways that vegetation changes with heat and precipitation. The reasons for the changes in climate are complex, but they are related to effects like wind farms’ turbine blades pulling warm air down to the desert’s surface, along with solar farms increasing surface reflectiveness.
Of course, building this many solar and wind farms probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But it may not need to. As noted, doing this would produce far more energy than we currently require. It also wouldn’t take this major an intervention to get the beneficial effects on local precipitation and vegetation. When the researchers conducted experiments for farms of smaller scales, their results suggested that covering only the northwest quadrant of the Sahara would have almost the same climate benefits as covering the entire thing.
Trump administration rushes to lease federal lands
Alexander Nazaryan September 11, 2018
White House rushes to lease federal lands
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP (2), Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Department of Interior is quietly preparing to offer hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for leasing to energy companies, a move critics have charged is being undertaken with minimal public input and little consideration for ecological and cultural preservation.
According to data compiled by environmental groups, the Bureau of Land Management will put 2.9 million acres up for potential leasing in the next four months. Because the land in question — in states including New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona — lacks designation as a national park or monument, it can be used for commercial purposes such as mining for minerals and drilling for oil and gas. Supporters say that bolstering the extractive industries will ensure energy independence for the United States, though shifting energy preferences and falling oil prices appear to undermine that assertion.
The Bureau of Land Management is part of the Department of the Interior, which is today headed by Ryan Zinke, a Montana native who has styled himself a rugged conservationist, even as he maintains close ties to private enterprise. Many of his closest advisers at Interior have ties to the oil and gas industry, either as lobbyists or executives. His top deputy, for example, is David L. Bernhardt, a veteran Republican operative who has also lobbied on behalf of California agribusiness.
Leasing land was a common practice before Trump. What’s different now, detractors say, is that the Bureau of Land Management is moving with uncommon speed to make improper determinations without allowing public to comment. That has led, these critics say, to widespread damage to the environment of the American West.
“We can’t just get it back,” says Nada Culver, a leader in the Wilderness Society’s land-use division. “Mistakes are made when you’re rushing.”
The Obama administration offered plenty of land to energy and mineral prospectors, but it did so in far more considered fashion. In 2016, the Obama administration put 1.9 million acres up for leasing, down from a high of 6.1 million acres offered in 2012. In its first year, the Trump administration offered 11.9 acres, the vast majority of them in Alaska. In the end, only 792,000 acres were leased, which represented just 7 percent of the offerings. In 2016, conversely, the Obama administration offered a much smaller total number of acres (1.9 million), but sold a far greater share: 47 percent, or 921,240. That suggests the Obama administration was more judicious in determining lands that would be desirable to industry.
Those numbers, however, do not tell the full story. Less important than the amount of land offered, conservationists say, is where those parcels are located, as well as their significance as either natural resources or cultural landmarks. In this, too, the Obama administration appears to have been significantly more successful than its successor. In 2012, for example, only 17 percent of the parcels offered by the Obama administration were “protested” by the public (those figures are for fiscal years, where as the compilation of acres offered is for calendar years; the two correlate closely, if not exactly). Conversely, of the parcels offered in 2017, a full 88 percent were contested, suggesting the Trump administration has been largely indiscriminate in the land it is offering.
An even higher percentage of lands could be contested this year, given how close they are to protected areas in some of the country’s most rugged, cherished regions. The greatest share of offerings are in Wyoming, where about 1.1 million acres are being offered for lease. There were also 721,705 acres offered in Nevada, 329,826 in Utah and 230,944 in Colorado, along with smaller parcels in New Mexico, Montana and Arizona. Some of these are near national monuments and national parks, including Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.
Many of the lands also represent habitat of the sage grouse, a bird whose native habitat is the high desert of the West. The sage grouse’s numbers have been drastically diminished by commercial and residential development.
President Obama considered protecting the grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Similar protection for the spotted owl in 1990 had laid waste to many a logger’s plans. Instead, in 2015, his Interior Department struck a deal with Western states. The sage grouse remained off the endangered species list, but there were 98 separate plans across the region to protect the bird —and, just as importantly, the landscape it lived on.
Zinke ordered those plans reviewed in the fall of 2018, indicating that he was preparing to offer some of the land set aside for sage grouse to energy or mineral-extraction companies. It’s unlikely that Zinke had personal animosity towards the bird. Rather, the sage grouse stands in the way of greater development of open lands across the West.
Aware that leasing land across the West could prove highly unpopular, the bureau canceled a 30-day comment period on any proposed lease, and the time to appeal a proposed lease already in the works was reduced to a mere 10 days. During the Obama administration, the total time for both comment and appeal had been 60 days.
“Were operating under a new guidance that has radically cut out opportunities for public input,” says Culver of the Wilderness Society.
Not only that, but Interior officials who worked in parks and national monuments were pressured to make land available for leasing, even when it was clear that studding that land with oil derricks and mining equipment would destroy the landscape and drive away the millions of tourists, both foreign and domestic, who came to see it each year.
“Why in the world, for a short-term gain, would you jeopardize those places by doing something stupid?” wonders Walt Dabney, who served as a park ranger for many decades and is now retired and living in Utah. He says that Moab, Utah, where he lives, is full of tourists and that French and Mandarin are commonly heard in local stores. The tourists bring millions to the local economy, and they “don’t boom-bust like the oil and gas business.”
Energy-related development will drive them away, according to Dabney, who says he’s not against energy. He is only against doing things quickly, and without consideration.
Among those challenging the Bureau of Land Management lease offerings is Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, a group whose members lean red — and green. Its president, David Jenkins, has called for 117,000 acres across five states to be set aside by Interior. “It certainly makes no sense to lock up these important public resources,” Jenkins said, since the “oil and gas industry has shown no interest in them,” a reference to the tepid response to 2017’s offerings. The fear, of course, is that the non-Alaska offerings of 2018 will be more enthusiastically received.
Legislators and conservationists have had little recourse but to prepare for the next round of BLM offerings. The two Democratic U.S. Senators from New Mexico, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, have introduced legislation that would prevent leasing within 10 miles of of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Previous administration had informally honored such a buffer; the Trump administration does not.
Udall, ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Department of the Interior’s budget, told Yahoo News, “It is the height of folly to take this ‘drill everywhere all the time’ approach at a time when domestic production from public lands is already at near record levels and U.S. action on climate change is stalling. The Trump administration’s corporate giveaways won’t lead to more energy security — they’ll just lead to more litigation, since the communities and tribes were not consulted. The American people have a right to comment on the management of their lands, and they will fight back against attempts to exploit these special places that belong to all of us.
The Department of Interior says such concerns are unfounded. “Congress specifically requires regular lease opportunities for energy and mineral production on federal lands,” department spokesperson Heather Swift told Yahoo News. “President Trump promised the American people that he would restore the balance of multiple use of federal lands, make America energy dominant, and generate economic growth. Federal lands play a huge part of that.”
The leasing of public lands represents “real money that will go to state governments for education, roads and public safety,” she added.
But because the funds from leased lands are shared between states and the federal government, and because the Trump administration has so far struggled to lease lands, those proceeds are not likely to be especially great. For example, of the 900 lots in Alaska offered by the Department of Interior in 2017, only seven found a leasor.
In all, Alaska received nearly $580,000. That is about a fifth of what the American taxpayer pays for each of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.
Wildfire that closed key California highway explodes in size
Associated Press September 9, 2018
SHASTA-TRINITY NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. (AP) — A roaring wildfire that shut down a stretch of a major interstate near the California-Oregon border exploded in size as crews on Saturday scrambled to prevent flames from reaching rural communities.
The blaze in California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest was burning out of control after chewing through 58 square miles (150 square kilometers) of timber and brush since Wednesday.
Aircraft were temporarily prevented from making water and retardant drops because heavy smoke was trapped under cloud cover, making for limited visibility for pilots. Firefighters working in rugged terrain were contending with hot temperatures and gusty winds.
Authorities announced Friday that a 45-mile (72-kilometer) section of Interstate 5 north of Redding would remain closed at least until Sunday.
The fire has destroyed thousands of trees — some 70 feet (20 meters) tall — that could fall onto the highway that traverses the entire West Coast from Mexico to Canada and serves as a main artery for commerce.
Truckers and other motorists were forced to take circuitous local routes that added hours to travel times.
Interstate 5 became a ghost road after fire turned hills on either side into walls of flame. Drivers fled in terror and several big-rigs burned.
Nearly 300 homes were considered threatened, but the blaze was not burning near any large towns, fire spokesman Brandon Vacarro said.
Meanwhile crews near California’s border with Nevada gained minimal containment of another wildfire that closed highways on the edge of the Sierra Nevada.
A previous fire this year near Redding and another in the Mendocino area — the two largest blazes in the state this year — destroyed or damaged 8,800 homes and 329 businesses.
The Mendocino fire was expected to be fully contained by Sunday, more than six weeks after it started.
Climate Change Could Completely Transform Earth’s Ecosystems
By Olivia Rosane September 1, 2018
Lake Atescatempa in Guatemala has dried up due to drought and high temperatures. MARVIN RECINOS / AFP / Getty Images
Fifty two million years ago, crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet covered Manhattan. Earth’s ecosystems have changed dramatically as the climate has shifted, and now scientists are trying to determine how they might respond to the current era of human-caused climate change.
Forty-two scientists contributed to a study published in Science Friday that examined how land-based plants had responded to temperature changes of four to seven degrees Celsius since the height of the ice age in order to predict how land-based ecosystems might respond to similar temperature changes predicted for the future.
They found that, if we do not act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the earth’s entire terrestrial biome is 75 percent likely to change completely, impacting biodiversity and making life difficult for anyone whose livelihood is based around an ecosystem as it exists now.
“Having this kind of change occur at such a massive scale in such a short period of time is going to create unprecedented challenges for natural-resource management,” study author and U.S. Geological Survey climate scientist Stephen Jackson told The Atlantic.
The researchers looked at 594 examples of ecosystem change over time to get an understanding of what sorts of changes we could expect from unmitigated global warming.
“Five miles from where I sit is the middle of the Sonoran Desert and Saguaro National Park,” Jackson told The Atlantic from his desk in Tucson, Arizona. “Today, there’s big saguaro cacti, mesquite trees, ironwood trees. If we were to roll back the calendar 20,000 years, and we went to the same place, we would find a woodland of evergreen trees.”
Jackson gave another example of how the area around Washington, DC has changed from boreal forest like that found today in Canada to hardwood forest, featuring species like oak.
But while the period the researchers studied spanned around 21,000 years, similar temperature changes could occur within the next 100, and the speed of change could have a major impact.
“If you’re a wildlife manager and your ecosystem changes, if you’re a forest manager trying to respond to wildfires, if you’re a water manager who is responsible for converting rainfall estimates into reservoir levels,” Jackson told The Atlantic, “then the old rules are not necessarily going to apply.”
Another study, published Thursday in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, looked at how the individual species within ecosystems might respond to these dramatic temperature changes.
The study, led by the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, looked to the past to see how plants and animals had responded to changes in their environment over the past million years.
“From fossils and other biological ‘archives,’ we have access to a nearly limitless number of case studies throughout Earth’s history. This provides us with valuable knowledge of how climate changes of various rates, magnitudes and types can affect biodiversity,” Jackson, who also co-authored the second study, said in a University of Copenhagen press release.
Scientists had previously believed species would simply migrate in response to changing climates, but the historical examples reviewed for this study showed they often adapted over time by changing their behavior or body color or shape.
However, researchers were concerned the pace of current climate change might be too fast for evolution to keep up.
“We know animals and plants have prevented extinction by adapt or migrate in the past. However, the models we use today to predict future climate change, foresee magnitudes and rates of change, which have been exceptionally rare in the last million years,” co-author Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) said in the university release.
Rodriquez-Sanchez said more research was needed to predict how species might respond to current climate change, but hoped the past examples of successful adaptation could help policy makers craft effective conservation decisions.
Stunning Victory for Indigenous Nations as Canada Halts Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion
By Lorraine Chow August 30, 2018
Pipeline intended to cross Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Robert McGouey / Getty Images
A Canadian court “quashed” approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on Thursday, a major setback for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government agreed to purchase the controversial project from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion Canadian dollars (U.S. $3.5 billion) in May.
It’s a stunning victory for Indigenous groups and environmentalists opposed to the project, which is designed to nearly triple the amount of tar sands transported from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia.
The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the National Energy Board’s review—as explained by the Canadian Press—”was so flawed that the federal government could not rely on it as a basis for its decision to approve the expansion.”
The project has been at the center of widespread protests from environmental groups and First Nations ever since November 2016, when Trudeau approved a $7.4 billion expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline that would increase the transport of Alberta tar sands oil from the current 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day and increase tanker traffic nearly seven-fold through the Burrard Inlet.
Specifically, the court said it was an “unjustifiable failure” that the National Energy Board did not consider the environmental impacts of the increased tanker traffic.
The court additionally concluded that the government “fell well short” with properly consulting with the Indigenous groups involved in the case, including the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish on British Columbia’s south coast.
The ruling will force the National Energy Board to redo its review of the pipeline and the government to restart consultations with the Indigenous groups. It also means that the construction that has already began in central Alberta must cease.
In effect, the court has halted the 1,150-kilometer project indefinitely and it will remain in “legal limbo until the energy regulator and the government reassess their approvals to satisfy the court’s demands,” CBCwrote about today’s decision.
Notably, the decision was made the same day Kinder Morgan’s shareholders voted to approve the $4.5 billion sale to Canada, which means the country owns a proposed pipeline project that could be subject to years of further review, the publication pointed out.
The court’s judgment could be appealed a final time to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Minister of Finance Bill Morneau said that the government has received the ruling and will review the decision.
Largest offshore wind farm opens off England’s coast
It can power nearly 600,000 homes.
By Mallory Locklear September 7, 2018
The largest offshore wind farm to date has officially opened off of the Cumbrian coast in the Irish Sea and it has the ability to power 590,000 homes. The 659-megawatt Walney Extension takes up an area roughly the size of 20,000 soccer pitches and is made of 87 wind turbines. “The UK is the global leader in offshore wind and Walney Extension showcases the industry’s incredible success story,” said Matthew Wright, the UK managing director at Ørsted, the Danish company that developed the wind farm. “The project, completed on time and within budget, also marks another important step towards Ørsted’s vision of a world that runs entirely on green energy.”
While Walney Extension may currently be the largest offshore wind farm in the world, it won’t be for long. A number of other larger projects are in the works including ScottishPower’s East Anglia One and Ørsted’s Hornsea Projects One and Two. East Anglia One and Hornsea Project One, which have capacities of 714 megawatts and 1,200 megawatts, respectively, are both scheduled to be operational in 2020. The 1,400-megawatt Hornsea Project Two is scheduled to be operational by 2022 and will be capable of powering 1.8 million homes.
Bob Woodward’s Reporting Shows Trump’s Very Good Brain Is Trapped in the 1980s
Most of Donald Trump’s “knowledge” is just fragments of reality that have been fermenting, completely unexamined.
By Jack Holmes September 5, 2018
Getty ImagesTed Thai.
As the President of the United States flails about wildly in response to a new book on his White House, desperately insisting that he has never called his own attorney general “mentally retarded,” there’s somehow a school of thought that there’s nothing much to see here. We already knew Donald Trump was a vindictive know-nothing, the thinking goes. We knew members of his staff work to prevent him from wreaking even more havoc on the world. But in addition to the revelations about how senior staffers literally steal documents off Trump’s desk to stop him from unleashing chaos on a whim, there are further insights into how the president’s brain works.
Surprise, surprise: it doesn’t work all that well. Axios also got its hands on a copy of Bob Woodward’s Fear:
“Several times [chief economic adviser Gary] Cohn just asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views [on trade]?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That doesn’t mean they’re right,’ Cohn said. ‘I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.'”
This is a stunning reminder that what constitutes Donald Trump’s knowledge is mostly just fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. They have been fermenting there ever since, continually filtering through his kaleidoscopic reasoning faculties as he dispenses crank observations at cocktail parties, never to be altered or removed because the governing forces of his psyche are almighty stubbornness and delusional ego. The president’s views on trade are his views because they’ve been his views for 30 years. They’re right because they’re his views and always have been. For Christ’s sake, this is trade. No wonder he’s said climate change is a Chinese hoax.
Getty ImagesChip Somodevilla.
This is what happens when you elect a man as president who is completely incurious about the world, who lacks sophisticated critical reasoning skills on issues beyond an ability to avoid consequences for his own behavior, and whose conception of America is so tainted by poisonous nostalgia and his ego-driven need to occupy a certain place in it that he struggles to perceive reality as it is.
He also just doesn’t believe in reality. He’s also incredibly lazy.
Trump to Tom Bossert, the president’s adviser for homeland security, cyber security and counterterrorism, who asked Trump if he had a minute: “I want to watch the Masters. … You and your cyber … are going to get me in a war — with all your cyber shit.”
Jesus Christ almighty, the man thought that once you get elected the job basically involves watching TV coverage about how great you are. Plenty of time for golf, too. And there’s even golf on the teevee!
It’s easy to take a more passive approach when you genuinely don’t care about what happens to people you’re not related to—which is what longtime Trump chronicler Tim O’Brien highlighted in Bloomberg this morning:
Trump – about to be on the receiving end of a potentially damaging book written by a Washington insider with bipartisan, established credentials – is utterly calm on the recording. And he’s calm, despite daily temper tantrums over media coverage, because he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.
This plays out in larger and more troubling ways as well, according to Woodward’s book, and history may judge most of Trump’s White House team and political party harshly for enabling the president’s radical solipsism. After Trump criticizes the U.S.’s military commitment to South Korea, one White House adviser asks Trump what he would “need in the region to sleep well at night.”
“I wouldn’t need a [expletive] thing,” Trump replies. “And I’d sleep like a baby.”
He knows nothing about anything and cares less. That’s just as true if the thing is a person. It’s even debatable whether he’d bat an eye if the kid who shares his name is thrown in the slammer. Meanwhile, he’s retweeting his chief of staff and Secretary of Defense as they boldly deny ever calling him “unhinged,” an “idiot,” or having the mental sophistication of a “sixth-grader.” It’s all about him, and anything in the world can be contorted, however implausibly, to keep the air in his heaving balloon of an ego. It’s all as it seems, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying.
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. September 5, 2018
The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.
Trump blasts critical op-ed from anonymous senior official
Zeke Miller and Catherine Lucey, Associated Press, September 5, 2018
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a striking anonymous broadside, a senior Trump administration official wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on Wednesday claiming to be part of a group of people “working diligently from within” to impede President Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” and ill-conceived parts of his agenda.
Trump said it was a “gutless editorial” and “really a disgrace,” and his press secretary called on the official to resign.
Later, Trump tweeted: “TREASON?”
The writer, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump but not from the left, said, “Many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” The newspaper described the author of the column only as a senior official in the Trump administration.
“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” the author continued. “We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”
A defiant Trump, appearing at an unrelated event at the White House, lashed out at the Times for publishing the op-ed.
“They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them,” he said of the newspaper. The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from its news department.
The essay immediately triggered a wild guessing game as to the author’s identity on social media, in newsrooms and inside the West Wing, where officials were blindsided by its publication.
And in a blistering statement, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the author of choosing to “deceive” the president by remaining in the administration.
“He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people,” she said. “The coward should do the right thing and resign.”
Sanders also called on the Times to “issue an apology” for publishing the piece, calling it a “pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed.”
A “House of Cards”-style plot twist in an already over-the-top administration, Trump allies and political insiders scrambled late Wednesday to unmask the writer.
The text was pulled apart for clues: The writer is identified as an “administration official”; does that mean a person who works outside the White House? The references to Russia and the late Sen. John McCain — do they suggest someone working in national security? Does the writing style sound like someone who worked at a think tank? In a tweet, the Times used the pronoun “he” to refer to the writer; does that rule out all women?
The newspaper later said the tweet referring to “he” had been “drafted by someone who is not aware of the author’s identity, including the gender, so the use of ‘he’ was an error.”
Hotly debated on Twitter was the author’s use of the word “lodestar,” which pops up frequently in speeches by Vice President Mike Pence. Could the anonymous figure be someone in Pence’s orbit? Others argued that the word “lodestar” could have been included to throw people off.
Showing her trademark ability to attract attention, former administration official Omarosa Manigault Newman tweeted that clues about the writer’s identity were in her recently released tell-all book, offering a page number: 330. The reality star writes on that page: “many in this silent army are in his party, his administration, and even in his own family.”
The anonymous author wrote in the Times that where Trump has had successes, they have come “despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.”
The assertions in the column were largely in line with complaints about Trump’s behavior that have repeatedly been raised by various administration officials, often speaking on condition of anonymity. And they were published a day after the release of details from an explosive new book by longtime journalist Bob Woodward that laid bare concerns among the highest echelon of Trump aides about the president’s judgment.
The writer of the Times op-ed said Trump aides are aware of the president’s faults and “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”
The writer also alleged “there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment” because of the “instability” witnessed in the president. The 25th Amendment allows the vice president to take over if the commander in chief is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It requires that the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet back relieving the president.
The writer added: “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”