The Continuing Collapse of the Death Penalty

New York Times ledare från den 27 december om hur antalet dödsdomar och verkställda dödsstraff i USA fortsätter att falla. Under 2016 utfärdades 30 dödsdomar i hela landet. Det är det lägsta antalet sedan 1976, då Högsta domstolen godkände att dödsstraff återinfördes. Om utvecklingen fortsätter kommer dödsstraff i USA snart ha förpassats till historiens skräphög. Det kan troligen inte ens en president Trump förhindra.

Piece by piece, the death penalty continues to fall apart. Last week, the Florida Supreme Court invalidated between 150 and 200 death sentences — nearly half of all those in the state — because they were imposed under a law the United States Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in January.

The law, which required judges and not juries to make the factual findings necessary to sentence someone to die, violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a jury trial. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for an 8-to-1 majority.

The Florida decision is the most recent sign, in a year full of them, that the morally abhorrent practice of capital punishment is sliding into the dustbin of American history — where it should have been long ago.

Juries around the country imposed 30 death sentences in 2016, a 40 percent drop from last year and fewer than at any time since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that opposes capital punishment. Twenty people were executed this year, the lowest number in a quarter-century.

The practice is not only increasingly rare, it is concentrated in an extremely narrow slice of the country. Only five states carried out executions in 2016, the report found, and only five imposed more than one death sentence. California sentenced nine people to die, the most of any state, but no one has been put to death there since 2006.

Public support for the death penalty keeps dropping, too — falling below 50 percent for the first time in more than four decades, according to a Pew Research survey. Support falls even further when respondents are given the alternative of a long prison term like life without parole. Though voters in California, Nebraska and Oklahoma last month preserved the death penalty, the overall trend is toward growing discomfort with state-sanctioned killing.

The total abolition of capital punishment, however, will depend on the Supreme Court’s reading of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. So far, only one current member of the court, Justice Stephen Breyer, a regular critic of the death penalty, has expressed openness to examining this question. This month Justice Breyer took aim at the practice again, in a dissent from the court’s decision not to hear an appeal from a death-row inmate in Florida.

Pointing to the facts of several recent cases that had come before the court, Justice Breyer asked whether the death penalty itself — plagued by arbitrariness, racism, decades-long delays and faulty execution-drug protocols — violates the Eighth Amendment. The people who end up being executed, he wrote, “are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but, rather, are individuals chosen at random, on the basis, perhaps of geography, perhaps of the views of individual prosecutors, or still worse on the basis of race.”

Meanwhile the court is making matters worse with its erratic decisions in recent last-minute death-penalty appeals. Who lives and who dies is arbitrary.

Justice Breyer is asking the right questions. It is up to a majority of his colleagues to listen closely and bring the only just result: the permanent abolition of capital punishment in America.

Allvarligt storbråk om ny chef för Stockholms tingsrätt

Publicerad 14 december. Uppdaterad längst ner 15 december.

Det har blåst upp till en superstrid om tillsättningen av ny högsta chef för Stockholms tingsrätt. I ena hörnet står den avgående chefen för tingsrätten, Stefan Strömberg, tillsammans med Domstolsverkets generaldirektör, Martin Holmgren. I andra hörnet står den många gånger omstridda Domarnämnden, vars enda uppgift är att för regeringen föreslå nya domare till landets domstolar. I centrum för striden står den ytterst kontroversiella toppjuristen, Gudrun Antemar, som idag är chef för Förvaltningsrätten i Stockholm och som Domarnämnden vill att regeringen ska utse.

Mitt i striden har nu också det kvinnliga nätverket för jurister - Hilda - hamnat, genom att tre av dess medlemmar även är ledamöter av Domarnämnden: Anne Ramberg, generalsekreterare i Advokatsamfundet, Kerstin Skarp, vice riksåklagare och just Gudrun Antemar, som är personlig ersättare i nämnden. Hon deltog dock av naturliga skäl inte i Domarnämndens val.

Den avgående chef för tingsrätten, Stefan Strömberg, är inte nådig i sin kritik. I ett mail till nämndens ordförande Thomas Rolén skriver Strömberg: ”Det är dyster att behöva konstatera att Ni inte håller måttet!”

Faksimil från DN

Thomas Rolén är för övrigt president i kammarrätten i Stockholm. Han har tidigare fått utstå lika skarp som allvarlig kritik för den svenska polisens omorganisation och som han utredde. Nu senast levererad i SVTs Veckans brott.

Det kvinnliga juristnätverket Hilda bildades för tio år sedan av Anne Ramberg och har idag ett 40-tal medlemmar. Alla är mycket högt uppsatta jurister, advokater eller myndighetschefer. Där märks till exempel justitieråden i Högsta domstolen Agneta Bäcklund och Marie Heidenborg, samt justitiekansler Anna Skarhed.

För sex år sedan riktade Riksrevisionen allvarlig kritik mot att fem av Domarnämndens ledamöter samtidigt var medlemmar i nätverket Hilda. Den gången skrev Leif Holmkvist i tidningen Fokus: ”Rättvisans gudinnor har råkat i klammeri med Riksrevisionen, som ser med oblida ögon på att Hilda har tagit makten över utnämningen av den blinda rättvisans garant, domarkåren. Inte illa marscherat av blott fyraåriga Hilda.”

Det hör kanske till saken att bara några månader efter Riksrevisionens kritik den gången blev Gudrun Antemar riksrevisor.

Det är Dagens Nyheter som idag avslöjar den infekterade striden mellan några av landets allra högsta och mest framstående jurister. Avslöjandet har fått Anne Ramberg att gå i taket: ”Om avsikten är att skada Gudrun Antemar, då kan man – även med trubbiga vapen kortsiktigt lyckas. På sikt är jag dock övertygad att Gudrun Antemar kommer bli en utmärkt efterträdare till Stefan Strömberg som lagman för Stockholms tingsrätt”, skrev Ramberg i ett upprört inlägg på sin egen blogg bara några timmar efter att Dagens Nyheter publicerat artikeln om striden.

Redan 2013 sökte Antemar jobbet som chef för tingsrätten i Stockholm, men fick den gången se sig slagen av både just Stefan Strömberg, som fick jobbet och Martin Holmgren som senare blev chef för Domstolsverket.

Holmgren som också sitter i Domarnämnden, men utan rösträtt, tog det ovanliga steget att skicka in ett särskilt yttrande till nämnden. I det skriver han att Domstolsverket ”vid flera tillfällen under 2015 och 2016 tagit emot klagomål från olika enskilda personer som är eller har varit anställda vid Förvaltningsrätten och i sin anställning haft nära kopplingar till lagman Gudrun Antemar.”

                                         Faksimil från DN

Holmgrens särskilda yttrande till Domarnämnden avfärdar nätverket Hildas grundare, Anne Ramberg med ”Han är en utomordentligt erfaren domstolschef, men som på för mig okända grunder uppenbarligen inte tycker om Gudrun Antemar.”

Att Gudrun Antemar är kontroversiell är närmast ett understatement. Hela hennes juristkarriär har kantats av kritik, skandaler och klagomål från personal i hennes närhet.

I februari 2010 då Antemar var chef för Ekobrottsmyndigheten for till exempel några ur det chefsgarnityret till Miami Beach och Washington DC till en kostnad av 50 000 kronor per person. Det hette då i efterhand att resan hjälpte myndigheten förstå att man behövde ”smalna av sin verksamhet”.

Gudrun Antemar är också känd för att vara ombytlig när det gäller jobben. Några år i Svea hovrätt, tre år på Justitiedepartementet, tre år hos Stockholms tingsrätt, fyra år hos Riksåklagaren, och så vidare.

Striden om chefsposten vid Sveriges största och kanske viktigaste tingsrätt med 280 anställda och 375 nämndemän vittnar samtidigt om något annat. Den domare som en gång gjort bort sig på ett eller annat sätt blir utfryst i de breda lagren av domare och höga jurister, som i Antemars fall med den allvarliga kritiken från hennes egen personal.

Men det visar också tydligt hur liten kretsen är av höga jurister som vandrar mellan rättssystemets olika grenar. Det är bara alltför många domare och jurister som ständigt vandrar mellan domstolsväsendet, Justitiedepartementet, Riksåklagaren, Justitiekanslern, Justitieombudsmannen, och så vidare.

Det föder och göder en kultur där alla känner alla och alla umgås med varandra, för att nu inte påstå att de kliar varandras ryggar. Juristkotteriet pekar till och med för regeringen ut vilka som bör bli domare.

Då ligger allvarlig vänskapskorruption i farans riktning. Vi såg det helt tydligt i fallet Catrine da Costa, då gamla domare medvetet satt och ljög i det så kallade skadeståndsmålet, för att skydda en gammal kollega som fortfarande är i livet.

Vi ser det nu när Advokatsamfundets generalsekreterare, Anne Ramberg, i ett upprört blogginlägg raljerar över den allvarliga kritik som riktats mot hennes kompis i nätverket Hilda, Gudrun Antemar, som än en gång vill byta jobb och bli chef för Stockholms tingsrätt.

UPPDATERING: Regeringen har nu utsett Gudrun Antemar till lagman i Stockholms tingsrätt.

Länk till regeringens pressmeddelande: http://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2016/12/ny-lagman-i-stockholms-tingsratt

Länk till Dagens Nyheters artikel 14 december: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/intern-kritik-mot-utnamningen-av-stockholms-tingsratts-nya-chef

Länk till Domarnämnden: http://www.domstol.se/Om-Sveriges-Domstolar/Domarnamnden

Julian Assanges egna ord ger inget nytt

Julian Assanges statement från igår ger egentligen inget nytt i det påstådda brottmålet. Det är skrivet i 120 punkter över 19 sidor, men handlar mest om USAs jakt på WikiLeaks.
https://justice4assange.com/Assange-Testimony.html

Han hänvisar bland annat till rader av tidningsartiklar, men utan länkar eller dateringar, vilket gör det svårt att värdera materialet. Men där finns ett par intressanta passager om kontakter mellan svenska och amerikanska myndigheter för att "överlämna" Assange till USA. 

I de delar som omfattar förundersökningen skriver han i 20 punkter sin egen version, som på alla sätt följer vad han sa i det första förhöret 2010 och som finns i häktningspromemorian och som läckte ut snart därefter. 
http://stadsholmen.blogspot.se/…/fallet-assange-lackta-sven…

Men i den delen finns dock ett mindre sakfel. Assanges andra hångelmöte med "SW" skedde i parken utanför Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, inte utanför Nationalmuseum som Julian Assange skriver. Men park som park och hångel som hångel.

Hur som helst fortsätter den skamlösa rättsrötan, nu på sitt sjunde år. Hade Julian Assange varit Kalle Karlsson hade chefsåklagare Eva Finnés beslut om att lägga ner fallet stått fast. Men när advokat Claes Borgström sprang iväg till Marianne Ny öppnades fallet på nytt.

Den juridiska hörnstenen om likhet inför lagen gällde inte här.
Men trots allt lär JA aldrig kunna lämna Ecuadors ambassad, även när den svenska utredningen läggs ner, därför att då grips han av brittiska myndigheter och överlämnas till USA. Om han inte smugglas ut från London...

Carl Bildt - Washington Post: It’s the end of the West as we know it

By Carl Bildt November 15 at 3:13 PM

Carl Bildt is a former prime minister of Sweden and a contributing columnist for The Post.

It is only with effort that the leaders of Europe have managed to compose themselves after the U.S. election, torn between pure shock over the result and the necessity of preserving what can be preserved of the West and the Atlantic relationship.

If you listen to what Donald Trump has been saying during and before his campaign, this is the end of the West as we know it.

For more than half a century, this story of phenomenal success has been built on a commitment to freedom and democracy, free trade, solid alliances and reliable friendships.

But all of this has been either attacked or questioned by Trump. And no part of the success of the West has been more important than the success of Europe under the protection of and in a strong relationship with the United States.

We should not forget that this has been profoundly in the interest of the United States as well. Twice in the past century it was dragged into wars as Europe plunged into acrimony and conflict. A peaceful, free and prosperous Europe has been a key strategic U.S. interest.

There has been a recognition that this aim is best furthered by the process of European integration centered on the European Union. A Europe that starts fracturing will be a less stable and, in the longer perspective, also a more dangerous Europe.

When Trump receives the jubilant British anti-Europe campaigner Nigel Farage before seeing other foreign politicians, he is sending the worst possible signal to Europe. By design or by default, he transmits a signal of support to those dark forces in various countries trying to undo what generations of U.S. and European statesmen have worked to achieve.

But the list of European concerns certainly doesn’t end there. It also includes his talk of abrogating the Paris global climate agreement, undermining the Iran deal, questioning important free-trade agreements — signature achievements and goals of the past few years that are suddenly up in the air. That there is deep apprehension around the capitals of Europe is hardly surprising.

Now the raw populism of the campaign will have to be turned into U.S. policy, and E.U. leaders will naturally be keen to see if this process will moderate some or all of these campaign promises. Appointments will be very closely watched.

And then there must be direct talks.

In April 2009, a newly elected President Obama came to a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, and a special E.U.-U.S. summit in Prague before proceeding to an important speech in Ankara, Turkey. It was a jubilant new start for transtlantic links.

Now there will be a new start of a very different sort.

European Council President Donald Tusk has invited Trump to a special E.U.-U.S. summit; there is the G20 meeting in Germany in late spring, and an extra NATO summit looks to be necessary as well. But it is very much an open question whether the air will have cleared sufficiently on the core issues of concern before such a meeting..

Security issues are bound to loom large. While Trump seems to have a benevolent view of Russia, he simultaneously is a hawk on defense spending in Europe.

Defense spending is on the increase in key parts of Europe, with most countries in the north and east having reached or aiming at 2 percent of gross domestic product. But it is how these sums are actually spent that matters, and it is here that both NATO and the European Union must do better.

And when it is often said that the United States accounts for 70 percent of the defense spending of the NATO countries, we should not forget that U.S. spending is global, with the explicit aim to have 60 percent of its air and naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region.

According to Vladimir Putin, there is now an agreement with the president-elect to start “active joint efforts” to normalize relations with Russia. Well, Europe certainly has nothing against good relations with Russia, but they have to be based on rolling back aggression against Ukraine, ceasing silent cyber-operations and respecting the rules agreed upon between nations.

If the United States starts to waver on these issues and caves in on them to the Kremlin, it will undoubtedly encourage a process of destabilization that is most unlikely to be limited to Europe. There might well be other powers that would be tempted by the American president suddenly tolerating smash-and-grab raids of the sort Putin has been doing.

There seems to be more geoeconomics than geopolitics in Trump’s thinking. It’s a question of making good business deals. If so, he should see the imperative of trade deals on the free-trade terms of the West, rather than allow a world dominated by the rules-free mercantilist approach of a China that will always give priority to its own gains. A transtlantic agreement would be of the utmost importance in this respect.

Henry Kissinger noted shortly before the election that “for the first time since the end of the Second World War, the future relationship of America to the world is not fully settled.” From the European point of view, that is a big understatement.

Read more here:

Constanze Stelzenmüller: Is Angela Merkel the leader of the free world now? Not quite.

Anne Applebaum: Is America still the leader of the free world?

Robert D. Kaplan: On foreign policy, Donald Trump is no realist

Jackson Diehl: The two immediate tests for Trump’s foreign policy

David Ignatius: What President Trump’s foreign policy will look like

How Donald Trump broke the old rules of politics — and won the White House

Som något av en motvikt till allt svenskt gnäll och all förfäran över att Donald Trump vann presidentvalet väljer jag att republicera en artikel från Washington Post. Det amerikanska folket har gjort sitt val och en hel värld utanför tycks vara förfärad och förstenad. Men kanske är valet mera ett utslag av en mer eller mindre global revolt där människor i land efter land blivit mera nationalistiska och ser alltmera till sitt eget. Mer än till det allmänna, till allas bästa. Och helt utleda på traditionella politiker och deras piruetter. Vi såg det i Storbritannien, och vi har sett det här hemma, för att nu bara ta några få exempel. Och kanske står Frankrike på tur i nästa presidentval. Donald Trump bröt mot alla politikens gyllene regler - han gick sin egen väg och han vann.

By Marc Fisher November 9 at 4:43 AM

Donald Trump ran against himself and won. The Manhattan billionaire who for decades boasted of his playboy lifestyle, stiffed contractors and vendors, hired illegal immigrants, eschewed churchgoing, embraced liberal causes, and counted Hillary and Bill Clinton as friends and allies pulled off one of the most brazen pivots in American history, selling himself to American voters as a populist hero who understood their frustrations and guaranteed a blizzard of wins.

Trump did it the way he’d said he would for more than 30 years: He ignored the rules of modern politics and spoke to Americans in plain, even coarse, everyday language, without massaging his words through the data-driven machinery of consultants, focus groups and TV commercials. He scoffed at ideologies, preaching a tough, blunt pragmatism fueled by unbridled, unashamed ego. He told people what they wanted to hear: that a rapidly changing and splintering society could be forced back to a nostalgia-drenched sense of community and purpose, that long-lost jobs could be retrieved, that a pre-globalized economy could be restored.

Trump ran against the elites and won. Never mind that he was born rich, flaunted his wealth and lived like a king. He defined the election as a people’s uprising against all the institutions that had let them down and sneered at them — the politicians and the parties, the Washington establishment, the news media, Hollywood, academia, all of the affluent, highly educated sectors of society that had done well during the time when middle-class families were losing their bearings. He swore he would turn Washington upside down, that he would “drain the swamp,” and the crowds so loved the image that they would shout the words before he even opened his mouth to say them.

Trump ran against the old rules that governed how people talked about politics, and he won there too. Political experts from both parties chortled over Trump’s failure to get with the program and build a data-driven, modern campaign based on focus-group-tested TV commercials and microanalysis of voting behavior, but Trump trusted his gut and believed that his message and style would connect with how Americans now absorb the news.

VIEW GRAPHIC 

More than any other major political figure in the digital era, Trump saw how social media had segregated the nation into almost wholly separate ideological and cultural camps, each with its own attitudes and its own narratives. He saw how Facebook and Twitter had blurred the line between public and private. He took advantage of that shift in culture and turned himself into a human vent, blasting the country with a stream of frustration and anger that many people had either kept to themselves or spewed about only anonymously.

[How Donald Trump won: An oral history of 2016]

The shift in how people relate to one another online dovetailed almost perfectly with Trump’s personal style — his impulsiveness, his quickness to hit back when criticized, his tendency to lash out at perceived enemies. The result was a new campaign rhetoric, a marketing breakthrough that dramatically altered the emotions and expectations of the presidential race.

Trump won because he understood that his celebrity would protect him from the far stricter standards to which politicians are normally held — one bad gaffe, and you’re done. He won because he understood that his outrageous behavior and intemperate comments only cemented his reputation as a decisive truthteller who gets things done. And he won because he had spent almost 40 years cultivating an image as a guy who was so rich, so enamored of himself, so audacious, and so unpredictable that he could be trusted to act without regard to the powers that be.

“I think he has such an ego, he couldn’t stand to fail,” Mary Vesley, 74, a Trump voter in Mechanicsville, Va., outside of Richmond, said Tuesday.

[Donald Trump just blew up the electoral map]

Trump ran against a barrage of accusations that he’d groped women, a near-daily drumbeat of stories about his boorish behavior and nasty insults, and he won there, too. The day after The Washington Post revealed video showing Trump explaining to TV host Billy Bush how he would grab women by the crotch, a Trump supporter in Syracuse, N.Y., Shannon Barns, said that the video had only deepened her belief that he should be president. “This just put a human face on the guy for me,” she said. “I was worried that he was a billionaire and didn’t know about the lives of people like me. This showed me that he’s a man. You know in your heart every man talks like that.”

These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump VIEW GRAPHIC 

Trump called himself a “blue-collar billionaire,” and although he had lived a fairly isolated life, working and sleeping in Trump Tower, with no close friends and few trusted advisers, he believed that he had so completely won the hearts of many Americans that, as he put it, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Rejected by the elites from the very start of his career as a real estate developer in Manhattan in the 1970s, Trump had a lifetime of resentments that he had reacted to with searing attacks against his enemies and often-successful revenge plays against those who believed they were better than he. The big real estate developer families in New York had long sneered at Trump as a brash, nasty, nouveau riche intruder on a business that took pride in doing things quietly and diplomatically. The banks treated him like an out-of-control adolescent who needed to be reined in and taught a lesson. The politicians humored him, then scrambled to be by his side to catch some of his reflected fame.

Trump beat them all back, again and again, by appealing to the people, his customers, his admirers. Whether he was succeeding at building skyscrapers and casinos, or failing by going through six corporate bankruptcies, he turned again and again to show business and the media to make his case for himself to regular Americans.

[Considering what America’s choice of Donald Trump really means]

From his years of appearances on network sitcoms and WrestleMania to his 14-season run as the decisive, tough-talking CEO on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” Trump cultivated an image among middle-class Americans as a straight-shooting billionaire who had the bucks and the brass to stand up to anyone.

From the moment he rode down the escalator of Trump Tower to his beloved pink marble lobby in the summer of 2015, presenting himself to the nation as the antidote to the ideologies and allegiances of both parties — pitting himself against Republicans and Democrats alike for their cozy ties to Wall Street, Hollywood and the rest of the moneyed class — Trump claimed that his path to victory was elementary.

All he had to do, he said, was connect directly to the pains, fears and frustrations of a nation that had been smacked around by globalization, terrorism, rapid demographic change, and a technological revolution that enriched and enraptured the kids with the stratospheric SAT scores, but left millions of Americans watching their jobs fall victim to the latest apps, overseas outsourcing, robots, and a stunning shift in the nature of commerce and community.

Trump easily dispatched 16 Republican primary opponents, dismissing one after another with just the right insult — “Low-energy Jeb” for the once-reluctant Bush brother who started out as the race’s favorite; “Little Marco” for Sen. Rubio, the diminutive Floridian who always seemed to be trying too hard.

[They were sure Trump would be the next president]

Trump relished the idea of running against Hillary Clinton, who he saw as a feisty and strong figure who was incapable of connecting with middle-class voters and who was beholden to exactly the power bases he planned to run against. He successfully took Clinton’s decades-long reputation as a shape-shifting politician whose excessively legalistic language and guarded public persona and twisted it into a searing, angry portrait of an outright criminal, “Crooked Hillary.”

Clinton’s hesitant handling of the slow-moving political train wreck over her use of a private email server when she was supposed to be using only government-supplied computers became a bonanza of an opportunity for Trump to hurl his well-honed insults. Then, when FBI director James B. Comey announced this summer that Clinton had not done anything criminal but had been “extremely careless,” and again last month when Comey shocked the country by announcing that he had reopened the emails investigation, Trump was able to ratchet up his attacks. Chants of “Lock her up!” escalated to far more severe punishments. Comey’s announcement two days before the vote that the FBI had cleared Clinton seemed to come far too late to make any difference.

As it turned out, Trump won in exactly the way he’d planned to — outperforming Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee four years ago, in places where Romney came off as a rich, distanced, aloof figure who didn’t get how middle- and working-class people were suffering. And Clinton, in Trump’s view, ran exactly the campaign he had hoped she would, focused mainly on attacking him rather than offering an alternative vision to the nation’s middle class.

[The crowd yelled ‘Lock her up!’ Then Trump thanked Clinton for ‘service to our country.’]

Trump, according to exit poll data, earned the votes of 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women. And he appeared to be consolidating the GOP coalition, bringing Republicans home in the final weeks of the campaign. The exit polls indicated that he had won 88 percent of Republican votes and 78 percent of ballots cast by white evangelicals.

Clinton’s strength seemed limited to the most narrow definition of the Democratic Party — nonwhites and college-educated whites. Even though college graduates made up fully half the electorate, and Clinton did even better among that group than President Obama did four years ago, Trump’s margin among people with little or no college was a massive 39 points, a big boost over Romney’s 25-point margin four years ago.

Trump voters seemed drawn to him more because of how he positioned himself against the elites than because of his policy message. Even his most prominent position, his oft-repeated call to build a wall against Mexican immigrants, seemed not to be a priority shared by his own supporters: Exit poll data showed that a majority of voters opposed the wall idea, about 7 in 10 voters said most illegal immigrants should get a chance to become legal residents, and only a quarter of voters agreed with Trump’s call to deport everyone who is in the country illegally.

[How Donald Trump did it, in 5 images]

Trump organized his campaign the way he had run his businesses — rejecting modern notions about a decentralized hierarchy and sticking instead to his tight circle of loyal advisers. He chose people he knew would stand by him no matter what, rather than people with extensive experience in campaigns.

When Trump launched his campaign last year, he selected as his manager a young New Hampshire-based operative, Corey Lewandowski, who rarely made demands of Trump, but instead catered to the candidate’s instincts and tempers. Lewandowski, combative with reporters and intensely defensive of his boss, remained loyal even after he was removed in June.

Under pressure from the Republican Party, whose leaders were eager to corral Trump into a more predictable campaign, Trump eventually replaced him with veteran GOP aide Paul Manafort, whose experience could be traced back to Gerald R. Ford’s 1976 campaign and Bob Dole’s 1996 bid. Yet even Manafort found it difficult to corral Trump and keep him on script.

When Manafort was forced to step down, Trump brought in a third team, one that he told friends would “let Trump be Trump.” Campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon, who came aboard from the hard-right Breitbart news site, and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tried to both harden Trump’s harshly anti-establishment message and soften his rhetoric to draw in suburban women.

Bannon saw Trump as the American equivalent of Britain’s vote earlier this year to leave the European Union — another unexpected popular uprising against the elites. Bannon believed that a Trump victory would not be the upset that the media and the political parties thought it would be, but rather as part of a worldwide revolt against globalization, the hegemony of the technology utopianists, and the arrogance of the overeducated.

Bannon brought Nigel Farage, the far right champion of Britain’s Brexit campaign, to a Trump rally and repeatedly told Trump that his candidacy was part of something bigger, a worldwide movement against elites in finance, media and politics.

Bannon pushed Trump to frame Clinton as a candidate who was not just wrong for the working class but was a “corrupt” and scheming “globalist.” Trump’s closing two-minute ad did not mention the words “Republican” or “Democrat,” but portrayed Clinton huddling with bankers and financial power brokers — many of them Jewish, which led many Jewish organizations and political leaders to accuse the Trump campaign of deploying anti-Semitic tropes.

Whether Bannon or others in the campaign will follow Trump to the White House is not yet known. Trump’s inner circle of executives and assistants consists mainly of people who have been with him for decades, and he has added few new people to that circle through the years. “Most of my friendships are business related because those are the only people I meet,” Trump said in an interview this spring. “I mean, I think I have a lot of friends, but they’re not friends like perhaps other people have friends, where they’re together all the time and they go out to dinner all the time. . . . I have good enemies, too, which is okay.”

Trump’s father, New York real estate developer Fred Trump, instructed his boy from a young age to devote his life to becoming a very big something. There was nothing worse, the father said, than being a “nothing.” Donald Trump took his father’s total commitment to work, his mother’s love of showmanship, and his mentor, New York lawyer Roy Cohn’s hyperaggressive approach to making deals and settling scores, and combined them into a public persona that celebrated money and ego.

Trump believed that through creative use of media, he could build an image that would inspire ordinary people to want to be like him. He believed that if he crafted that image well enough, he could become rich and powerful and ultimately rise to the highest office in the land. On Tuesday, he reached that final step in his half-century-long ascent.

What he will do with it, even he does not know. Asked earlier this year if he has spent much time preparing to actually be president, Trump admitted that his focus had been solely on the campaign. “I’m all about the hunt and the chase,” he said. “When I get something I really wanted, I sometimes lose interest in it.”

Trump has 73 days until his inauguration.

Robert Costa, Rosalind S. Helderman and Michael Kranish contributed to this report.

Read more:

The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.

A trauamtic campaign produces a shocking ending, with Trump victorious

Here are 76 of Donald Trump’s many campaign promises 

• Share on FacebookShar 
• Share on TwitterTwee
• Share via Em

Marc Fisher, a senior editor, writes about most anything. He’s been The Post’s enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, and he’s covered politics, education, pop culture, and much else in three decades on the Metro, Style, National and Foreign desks.

  Follow @mffisher

Carl Bildt: What a Trump presidency would wreak on Europe and the Middle East

Carl Bildts senaste krönika i Washington Post, publicerad idag. 

Observers in Europe are following America’s election campaigns with disbelief, a good portion of dismay and distinctly growing apprehension.

Campaigns are, of course, campaigns, and any seasoned politician or observer of politics knows that the relationship between the words of campaign and the deeds of office isn’t always straight.

That explains the muted reactions to Hillary Clinton’s oscillations on trade policy. But it’s starting to creep in that she might have boxed herself in on the issues to such an extent that a retreat will hardly be possible.

The global economy is not in stellar shape, global trade growth is sluggish and there is a silent war over whether the West or China will set the rules for the games to come. Much will depend on whether the Obama administration will manage to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal ratified, but if this fails and we are confronted with either a hesitant Clinton or a Donald Trump hostile to trade agreements, things could easily start to go wrong.

But for all the questions on Clinton’s vacillations on trade, the policies of a possible Trump administration spark something bordering on outright fear.

Some American friends tend to say that the United States is a country with strong institutions, constitutional separation of powers and clear limits on what a president can actually do.

Yes, but primarily on domestic issues.

Foreign-policy issues are a different matter. A stalwart Republican friend of mine, with vast experience on foreign policy and security issues, said, “I know the power of the Oval Office, and that man must never ever be allowed in there.” Whoever sits in the Oval Office is the commander in chief of the world’s mightiest military arsenal and can single-handedly take the country’s foreign policy in very different directions.

It’s fair to say that my friend’s feelings are widely shared across the world. Well, at least throughout the democratic West.

Some are starting, with reluctance, to consider what a Trump administration might actually mean. If disaster strikes, what are we supposed to expect on Jan. 20?

Trump’s trade policies are certainly scary, but apprehensions concerning these pale in comparison to the potential geopolitical consequences of him entering the Oval Office.

Trump has evidently already looked into the soul of Vladimir Putin and concluded that he is a strong leader and a good man, and that anyhow all this talk about democracy and respecting rules isn’t anything for real men of their caliber.

A good guess is that as president, he will try to achieve some super-Yalta deal with the Kremlin, saying that “Make Russia Great Again” is an honorable goal, concluding that might is better than right and agreeing that the quarreling Europeans in Brussels, or wherever, need not be taken too much into account.

Whatever the content of such an approach, Trump risks creating a new instability in Europe. And with the United Kingdom going into a frenzy on what to do after the Brexit vote, we are already in a somewhat fragile situation. Without a common framework, the risk is that different countries will go in different directions, leaving an opportunity for the Kremlin to seize, make its moves and destabilize Europe even more.

What will happen then is anyone’s guess. Trump in the Oval Office might swing from appeasement to aggressiveness in seconds, or he might just walk away from it all, leaving the Kremlin to start to pick up pieces here and there. Either way, it would be very dangerous.

And then there is, of course, the Middle East.

Here the risk is obvious: Trump will provide a powerful boost to a Daesh that at the moment is starting to come under pressure — from its own failings more than from the efforts of others. But moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would move sentiments among disenchanted Arab youth in the direction of militancy in a way hardly any other step could.

Few strategic mistakes would be as profoundly grave as stoking a war between Islam and the West. But Trump’s own words indicates that this is what he, by design or by default, would actually do. While Trump can try building his walls around the United States, Europe is in a different situation. Beyond geographic proximity to the Middle East, Islam forms a part of our societies; any profound confrontation along these lines risks having profound effects across large parts of Europe.

The uncomfortable fact is that in the Middle East, a gradual but determined effort to overcome divisions, heal wounds, reform economies and build functioning and legitimate states throughout the region is the only possible way forward to avoid a combined Daesh/al-Qaeda 2.0 challenging us a decade from now.

A Trump presidency risks smashing any such strategy into smithereens.

No responsible European politician is coming out in public taking sides in the United States’ political affairs. That’s the way it should be between nations — we respect each other’s democratic choices. But in the chancelleries of the democracies of Europe, there is no doubt whatsoever what they fear.

Europe is already confronted with the revisionism in the East and the implosions and explosions in the South — but now there is a lingering feeling that the most dangerous developments could actually come from the West.

Jan Helin bär Aftonbladets hatt på Sveriges Television

Det stormar på Aktuellts redaktion på Sveriges Television. Bakgrunden är i korthet att redaktionen kritiserats mycket hårt efter att man i förra veckan valde att sända en debatt i studion, där en företrädare för tidningen Nya Tider deltog. Tidningen anses vara både pronazistisk och sprida antisemitiska uppfattningar. Förra veckans debatt sändes efter bråket om Nya Tiders medverkan på Bokmässan i Göteborg.

Igår kväll möttes programdirektören, Jan Helin och SVTs Jan Josefsson i studion. Den nya debatten sändes efter att Helin i en kulturartikel i Dagens Nyheter ansett att de som kritiserat Aktuellt för att man släppte fram Nya Tiders företrädare haft rätt i sin kritik. Till hans ställningstagande fogades följande mening:

”Det är ett flagrant exempel på när journalistiken abdikerar från sin roll som sanningssökare, gömmer sig bakom en tunn fernissa av opartiskhet och via en skur av obelagda påståenden i debatten mot sin goda vilja förs in i osaklighetens svarta hål."

I samband med ett redaktionsmöte på Aktuellt i måndags ska Jan Helin ha framfört samma uppfattning. Men i Aktuellts studio igår kväll påstod Helin att han aldrig sagt något sådant.

Först pudlar program direktören i Dagens Nyheter och ger kritikerna rätt. Därefter pudlar han en gång till i Aktuellt och förnekar att han på redaktionsmötet sagt att personer likt företrädare för Nya Tider inte ska ges utrymme i Aktuellt.

Jan Helin avslutar sin artikel i Dagens Nyheter på följande sätt och resonerar kring hur Aktuellt istället borde ha agerat:

”Vi borde därför ha belyst Nya Tider som publikation, granskat vilka intressen som ligger bakom den och kopplingarna till antidemokratiska, extremistiska rörelser. En sådan research hade utgjort ett utmärkt faktaunderlag för en saklig intervju med Vávra Suk. Vi hade på så sätt låtit tittaren skapa sig en uppfattning om det var rätt eller fel av Bokmässan att ge dem en plattform.”

Men med sin DN-artikel och resonemangen i Aktuelltstudion har programdirektören vid Sveriges Television enbart skapat problem. Han har först och främst placerat redaktionens integritet på ett sluttande plan, som riskerar leda till framtida räddhågsenhet. Sedan bör han noga akta sig för att i en kulturartikel i Dagens Nyheter kritisera en redaktion som han på pappret är näst högsta hönset för. Sådant sköter man internt. Och vad hans tilltag får för konsekvenser för redaktionens framtida resonemang kring redaktionell integritet, yttrandefrihet, opartiskhet och saklighet vet vi än så länge ingenting om.

Det är nu tyvärr tydligt att Jan Helin agerat med sin gamla hatt som chefredaktör på Aftonbladet på huvudet. Där kunde han styra och ställa som han ville med skilda publiceringar, inklusive efter diverse politiska överväganden.

Men det kan han inte göra som programdirektör på Sveriges Television, för där gäller helt andra lagar och regler för programverksamheten. Programdirektören måste således skaffa sig en ny hatt som passar för det nya jobbet.

Dessutom har Jan Helin påtagit sig rollen som en sorts grindvakt och censor för vad människor ska tillåtas se eller inte se i nyhets-tv. Och då blir det särskilt allvarligt, därför att programreglerna och sändningstillståndet räcker betydligt längre än Jan Helins nosande näsa för vad som för dagen är politiskt gångbart.

Det hade varit betydligt bättre om Helin hade ställt sig bakom och försvarat redaktionens beslut om publicering. Helt enkelt därför att när solen går upp spricker trollen. Och tidningen Nya Tider och dess företrädare tillhör trollen.