Admit it: Trump is unfit to serve

Allt flera amerikanska kommentatorer talar nu öppet om att Trump inte kommer sitta kvar som president ens under sina fyra första år. Andra talar mer eller mindre öppet om att han bör ställas inför riksrätt. Här är den senaste krönikan i ärendet i dagens Washington Post.

By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer

Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States?

The Michael Flynn fiasco was the entirely predictable product of the indiscipline, deceit, incompetence and moral indifference that characterize Donald Trump’s approach to leadership.

Even worse, Trump’s loyalties are now in doubt. Questions about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia will not go away, even if congressional Republicans try to slow-walk a transparent investigation into what ties Trump has with Putin’s Russia — and who on his campaign did what, and when, with Russian intelligence officials and diplomats.

Party leaders should listen to those Republicans who are already pondering how history will judge their actions in this wrenching moment. Senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to know it is only a matter of time before the GOP will have to confront Trump’s unfitness. They also sense that Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser for lying about the nature of his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States raises fundamental concerns about Trump himself.

The immediate political controversy is over how Congress should investigate this. Republican leaders say attention from Congress’s intelligence committees is sufficient, and for now Democrats have agreed to this path. But many in their ranks, along with some Republicans, argue it would be better to form a bipartisan select committee that could cross jurisdictional lines and be far more open about its work.

Those pushing for the select committee have reason to fear that keeping things under wraps in the intelligence panels could be a way to bury the story for a while and buy Trump time. Letting Americans in on what went on here, and quickly, is the only way to bolster trust in this administration, if that is even possible. And let’s face the reality here: It could also hasten the end of a presidency that could do immense damage to the United States.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in the meantime, must immediately recuse himself from all decisions about all aspects of the Russia investigation by the FBI and the intelligence services. Sessions should step back not simply because he is an appointee of the president but, more importantly, because he was a central figure in the Trump campaign. He cannot possibly be a neutral arbiter, and his involvement would only heighten fears of a coverup.

In this dark moment, we can celebrate the vitality of the institutions of a free society that are pushing back against a president offering the country a remarkable combination of authoritarian inclinations and ineptitude. The courts, civil servants, citizens — collectively and individually — and, yes, an unfettered media have all checked Trump and forced inconvenient facts into the sunlight.

It is a sign of how beleaguered Trump is that his Twitter response on Wednesday morning was not to take responsibility but to assign blame. His villains are leakers and the press: “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.”

It is notable that in acknowledging that the news reports are based on “information,” Trump effectively confirmed them. At the same time, he was characteristically wrong about Russia, whose government prevents transparency and punishes those who try to foster it. There’s also this: Kremlin agents stole information from a political party in a free country. That is very different from the actions of the media’s informants inside our government who are holding our own officials accountable for their false denials and fictitious claims.

It will be said that Trump was elected and thus deserves some benefit of the doubt. Isn’t it rash to declare him unfit after so little time?

The answer is no, because the Trump we are seeing now is fully consistent with the vindictive, self-involved and scattered man we saw during the 17 months of his campaign. In one of the primary debates, Jeb Bush said of Trump: “He’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.” Rarely has a politician been so prophetic.

And this is why nearly 11 million more Americans voted against Trump than for him. His obligation was to earn the trust of the 60 percent of Americans who told exit pollsters on Election Day that they viewed him unfavorably. Instead, he has ratified their fears, and then some.

As a country, we now need to face the truth, however awkward and difficult it might be.

Hemlig USA-läcka: Toppryssar firade Trumps valseger

Högt uppsatta personer inom Kreml och den ryska regeringen firade att Donald Trump vann det amerikanska presidentvalet. Det framkom på torsdagen då de tre högsta amerikanska underrättelsecheferna förhördes i den amerikanska senaten. De tre cheferna vittnade också om att de ryska hackerintrången har pågått ända sedan 2008 och drabbat inte bara demokraterna under valkampanjen, utan också bland annat Vita huset och Pentagon.

Den främste av de amerikanske underrättelsecheferna, James Clapper, sa också att Wikileaks Julian Assange orsakat att amerikaners liv varit i fara. Det är bland de hårdaste anklagelserna mot Assange hittills och betyder nu att hans skydd på Ecuadors ambassad i London har försämrats.

James Clapper

Enligt torsdagens förhör ska Moskva ha sett att Trump vann valet som en geopolitisk seger för Kreml och i efterhand ska högt uppsatta ryssar ha gratulerat varandra. En del av gratulanterna ska också ha varit väl medvetna om de pågående hackerattackerna.

Det är amerikanska Washington Post och NBC News som var för sig tagit del av den hemliga underrättelserapport som igår överlämnades till president Obama och som Donald Trump får ta del av idag fredag. Delar av den hemliga rapporten kommer att offentliggöras nästa vecka.

Enligt rapporten har flera av de sammanlagt 17 olika amerikanska underrättelseorganisationerna också identifierat vad man kallar actors som varit involverade i att överlämna dokument som stulits från demokratiska partiets servrar till Wikileaks. Enligt rapporten finns det även stora skillnader i olika ryska underrättelseorgans ambitioner när det gäller att komma över hemligt amerikanskt material.

Den hemliga rapporten som uppges omfatta fler än 50 sidor innehåller också en katalog över ryska hackerattacker och cyberspionage mot olika delar av det amerikanska valsystemet som går hela åtta år tillbaka i tiden.

Rapporten står lindrigt talat i bjärt kontrast till Donald Trumps påstående att han är vän med president Putin och att han sagt ”att vilken 14-åring som helst” kan hacka de amerikanska systemen. Trump har också flera ånger sagt eller twittrat att han inte tror att ryssarna låg bakom intrången hos det demokratiska partiet.

Rakt motsatt sådana påståenden säger en amerikansk underrättelseperson som varit med och sammanställt den nu aktuella rapporten till Washington Post att det finns en hel del exempel och faktorer som visar att Ryssland i akt och mening försökte hjälpa Donald Trump att bli vald till USAs president.

Den högste amerikanske spionchefen, James Clapper sa vidare att hela det samlade underrättelsesamhället i USA står bakom rapporten på ett verkligt och resolut sätt. Han vände sig också indirekt mot Donald Trumps olika ”snubbor” i sammanhanget och sa att det är skillnad mellan skepticism och förklenande. Clapper gjorde också skillnad mellan spionage och rena attacker.

De ryska hackerattackerna ska från början mera ha varit avsedda att destabilisera en förväntad president Hillary Clinton, men då Trump säkrade republikanska partiets nominering förändrades och förstärktes de ryska hackerattackerna.

Assanges skydd i London kraftigt försvagat

Under senatsförhöret med de tre spioncheferna var också frågorna om Wikileaks och Julian Assange uppe flera gånger. Clapper sa för sin del att Assange orsakat att amerikaners liv varit i fara. Det var mycket länge sedan någon så högt uppsatt amerikansk tjänsteman påstått att Assange och hans Wikileaks hotat amerikanska liv. Assange har för sin del förnekat att det material som Wikileaks publicerat och/eller överlämnat till andra att publicera kom från ryska källor.

Men av vad som hittills läckt ut från den hemliga rapporten finns ingenting som direkt pekar ut Wikileaks och Julian Assange. Under förhöret sa James Clapper dock att folk i underrättelsebranschen inte har någon större respekt för Assange och pekade samtidigt på att Assange sitter fast på en ambassad i London för att undvika utvisning till Sverige.

Oavsett vad som framöver kan tänkas komma fram om hur Wikileaks kom över allt det material som så brutalt skadade den amerikanska valkampanjen, så har Julian Assanges skyddade ställning på Ecuadors Londonambassad kraftigt försämrats. Blotta misstanken räcker långt i sådana här sammanhang. Och då spelar ett eventuellt svenskt åtal mot Assange mindre roll.

Två andra faktorer väger betydligt tyngre. För det första vet vi med stor sannolikhet att det finns en amerikansk åtalsjury som undersöker misstankar om spioneri från Assanges sida. Antag sedan att det inte blir något svenskt åtal i den del av de svenska händelserna i augusti 2010 som ännu inte är preskriberad.

Det betyder i sin tur att Julian Assange ingalunda är en fri man att lämna ambassaden i London. Brittiska myndigheter skulle i sin tur naturligtvis följa en amerikansk begäran om utlämning från Storbritannien.

Till ett sådant scenario kan dessutom läggas att senare i år är det presidentval i Ecuador, då Rafael Correas tio år vid makten löper ut. Redan nu finns det envisa rykten om att vem som än blir ny president i Ecuador är det ingen som vill fortsätta hysa Assange som gäst i London. Möjligen finns det amerikanska påtryckningar i sammanhanget, vilket inte alls kan uteslutas.

Obamas eftermäle smutsas

När nu allt flera detaljer blir kända i den amerikansk-ryska hackerskandalen är det fullkomligt obegripligt att en av de absoluta centralpersonerna, president Barack Obama, inte agerade kraftfullt redan från början då hoten mot valkampanjen började bli kända. 

Obama fick dessutom en ordentlig genomgång av vad som skett redan i oktober, men han gjorde så vitt känt mycket lite eller kanske snarare ingenting för att stoppa attackerna.

Det sades under senatsförhöret igår att när skandalen var ett faktum nöjde sig USA med att kasta smågrus i riktning mot Kreml, när man i själva verket borde siktat med stora stenar redan från början. Och sista ordet i den här saken är ingalunda sagt och sista avslöjandet har heller inte publicerats.

Hackerskandalen kommer för evigt att solka Barack Obamas eftermäle. Ett påstående att Obama vid den aktuella tiden redan var lame duck håller inte ens för en ytlig granskning.

UPDATE kl. 22.42: 

Declassified report says Putin ‘ordered’ effort to undermine faith in election and help elect Trump

Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and “aspired to help” elect Donald Trump by discrediting his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a report released Friday. The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s assault represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage. MORE:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/intelligence-chiefs-expected-in-new-york-to-brief-trump-on-russian-hacking/2017/01/06/5f591416-d41a-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html?utm_term=.d286c3f2a2d6&wpisrc=al_alert-COMBO-politics%252Bnation

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.

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

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.

Why we need a President Clinton

By Anne Applebaum, Washington Post

Vladimir Putin is not a Bond villain, the Kremlin is not Spectre and, in the real world, we don’t need Daniel Craig to push back against Russia’s hybrid foreign policy. But we do need to elect Hillary Clinton for president. If we don’t, as we learned in recent days, we’ll be led by a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power, a man who cheerfully approves of hostile foreign intervention in a U.S. election campaign. And please remember: If that’s how he feels about Russia, there’s no guarantee that he’ll feel any different about China or Iran.

We also need a President Clinton to distance herself from the current administration, at least in this sense: President Obama has consistently refused to take seriously Russia’s hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.

This hybrid strategy needs a complex response. The reinforcement of NATO that began a few years ago was an important change but is insufficient: A further empowered alliance will help deter a devastating military conflict in Europe. At the same time, a crackdown on corrupt oligarchs, not just from Russia but also from around the world, could help stem the flows of illicit money that distort the politics of many developing countries and, increasingly, the United States and Europe, too.

The information war matters as well, particularly because the tactics are unfamiliar, at least to us: Americans aren’t used to the idea that foreign governments might use hacked emails for the purpose of distorting their politics. In fact, the Russian government has been playing similar games for years. Back in 2007, Russian hackers launched a major attack on Estonian government and commercial websites — including banks, the defense ministry, the parliament — in apparent revenge for a decision to move a Soviet war memorial. In 2014, hackers attacked Ukraine’s national election commission, three days before people went to the polls, in an attempt to disrupt the vote. In a report to be published next week,the Center for European Policy Analysis (where I am a senior adjunct fellow) documents Russian disinformation tactics in Europe, ranging from far-right websites in Poland to assistance for an anti-European Union referendum campaign in the Netherlands.

Russia has been experimenting in U.S. cyberspace, too. In 2014, police in St. Mary Parish, La., woke up to reports of a disastrous accident that turned out to have been faked. Hundreds of Twitter messages and even a fake YouTube video had been designed to create a panic and convince people that the Islamic State had blown up a chemical factory. Months later, the New York Times Magazine traced the perpetrators to St. Petersburg: Apparently, Russian trolls were trying to learn what works.

It’s not hard to imagine how these kinds of tactics could be used in the case of a real disaster — or in combination with military power — to increase panic and create false rumors. It’s also not that hard to imagine how the skillful production of fake information can be used in a fraught and highly emotional election. I confess, I thought the U.S. media ecosystem was too big to feel any impact from ill-intentioned outsiders, that this was mainly a problem in Europe. After this week, I’m not so sure.

It’s difficult for democracies to counter the rise in fake news. Our next president won’t control the media, and we wouldn’t want her to. But she can direct more resources into tracking disinformation and understanding how it works. She can invest in cutting-edge media literacy campaigns (an ugly term, but there isn’t a better one) both at home and abroad, and try to understand why fact-checking sometimes works and often doesn’t. She can inspire the development of a more secure Internet, even follow the lead of Estonia, which, after attacks on its cyberspace, created an electronic identity card that makes it much safer for Estonians to operate online.

Most of all, she can also place the growing influence of authoritarian states closer to the center of U.S. concerns. This isn’t about “regime change”: Western democracies are now playing defense, not offense, against dictatorships that openly seek to undermine them. I don’t think President Obama has ever understood this dynamic, but President Clinton might.

And if there isn’t a President Clinton? Then all of this is moot: There won’t be a pushback against the world’s authoritarians. In Donald Trump’s White House, they’ll be welcomed — and will feel right at home.

__________________________

Länk till Anne Applebaums kolumner i Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/anne-applebaum

Länk till hennes webbplats: http://www.anneapplebaum.com

BBC: Understanding media addiction to Donald Trump

By Nick Bryant, BBC New York.

Co-dependency is commonly defined as "an emotional and behavioural condition that affects an individual's ability to have a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship". Another term for it is "relationship addiction". People form and persist with relationships "that are one-sided, emotionally destructive and/or abusive".

Sitting in the atrium of Trump Tower on Tuesday, as Donald Trump harangued the press - well, you know where I'm going. For all the abuse, for all the belittlement, we as reporters show no sign of ending our relationship addiction with Donald Trump.

Much of our cravenness is easily explained. It stems from the record-breaking television ratings that Trump has generated and, just as important these days, millions of online hits.

A human headline, he more than satisfies the viral requirements of our new media age. At a time when media organisations are struggling still to monetise online news content, and to make the painful shift from print to digital, along comes the ultimate clickbait candidate, a layer of golden eggs.

Understandably, hard-pressed news executives are echoing the words reportedly uttered by Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, at her Brooklyn headquarters: "I've got to get me some Trump."

It has meant that the default setting for cable news channels here is a split screen showing an empty Trump lectern on one side with pundits on the other, bloviating endlessly as they await the billionaire's arrival.

Entertainment value

As for a Trump news conference, it is rather like broadcasting one of those freeway police chases filmed from a helicopter: car crash television that you want to stay with until the end - though perhaps the more accurate analogy is of security camera footage that captures a street fighter who has no qualms about reaching for the broken bottle. It is unedifying, gruesome even, but also utterly compelling.

It explains why none of the news channels cut away from the Trump news conference yesterday, even as it degenerated into a one-way slanging match. Or why none of the reporters present, myself included, simply got up and walked out.

Yet the media's Trump relationship addiction is not explained by commercial imperatives alone.

Political reporters have a tendency of writing a campaign narrative that comports with the race they ideally want to cover. It's not an invented narrative, as such - we can't simply make up storylines. But I would suggest it's a slanted narrative, which, rather than betraying a liberal bias, reveals a "great story" bias.

In a reworking of the old newsroom adage "if it bleeds, it leads", candidates tend to be assessed on the basis of their journalistic entertainment value.

My sense, while covering the 2000 campaign for instance, was that reporters handicapped the race in favour of George W. Bush because the possibility of a son following his father into the White House, with all the oedipal complexity that went with it, was a better story than seeing Al Gore become president.

That would have felt like a Clinton third term, absent its charismatic leading man.

This tendency was even more pronounced in 2008, during the Democratic primary campaign, when journalists were more excited by the prospect of the first African-American president than the first female president, Hillary Clinton. Everyone wanted to compose their own first draft of that dramatic historical moment.

Trump is also a beneficiary of great story bias. Never before has there been a candidate with such journalistic entertainment value.

His unexpected emergence meant that we ditched our initial narrative of Campaign 2016, which we had set up a dynastic showdown between a Bush and a Clinton, in favour of a better storyline.

Willing enablers

The media didn't create Donald Trump, the basis of the ever more fashionable "Frankenstein's monster" critique of the press. But we have been more willing enablers than we would care to admit.

So while there has been no shortage of critical coverage of Donald Trump, there has been a reluctance to go for his jugular.

This tendency is most noticeable in broadcast interviews. Jake Tapper's interview with Donald Trump, in which the billionaire failed to disavow support from white supremacists and said he needed to do more research on the Ku Klux Klan before condemning it, offered a case in point.

Tapper, who has done some excellent interviews during this campaign, was tough and probing but did not go in for the kill. An obvious follow-up question would have been "do you really need to do more research on the KKK to condemn it" but he did not ask it.

As for the interview between Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump, it provides the textbook case study of campaign co-dependency.

Kelly rocked Trump in a televised debate last year, with a brilliant and legitimate line of questioning about his misogyny. But when she sat down with him at Trump Tower for a prime time special, and talked about his hate-Tweeting, she described how she imagined him doing it wearing "a crushed velvet smoking jacket, chaise lounge, slippers".

Mainstream media's weakness

Jon Sopel, my colleague and compatriot, wrote a terrific blog on the Trump press conference, observing: "The remarkable thing that has struck me as a British correspondent living in Washington, and who is used to a robust relationship between journalist and politician, is how Trump has been treated with kid gloves."

I could not agree more. The preference in American broadcast journalism is to end interviews on amicable terms. There is not the adversarial tradition of British interviewing, nor a US equivalent of John Humphrys or Jeremy Paxman.

What's also striking is that we as journalists do not have the power of old. Trump and other candidates have used Twitter especially, not only to bypass the media but also to become part of the new media themselves.

The billionaire's Twitter account has more followers - 8.5 million - than the Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News, the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. He has become a self-publisher, and provided an unfiltered commentary of his own. Trump's strength is a measure of the mainstream media's weakness.

That imbalance was evident at the news conference in Trump Tower. He possessed the only microphone. He could drown out every reporter. He controlled who asked the questions, and probably half of the journalists present did not get the chance to do so.

Ever the shrewd media operator, he also knew that the cable news channels would stay with it until the end.

For another illustration of our comparative powerlessness, just witness the number of stories that have been written about Trump, which in an ordinary election cycle would have been disqualifying - his misogyny, his racism, his incitement of supporters to punch protesters in the face, his cussing, his refusal to release his tax returns, his constant flip-flopping on policy, Trump University, etc, etc.

Much has been written about how Trump defies the usual laws of political gravity, but one of the reasons is that modern-day media organisations lack orbital pull.

The Trump obsession has affected our coverage in subtler ways, too.

Had it not been for our fixation with the Republican contest, we would have paid more attention to Bernie Sanders' extraordinary success. Yet we've downplayed that storyline.

This is partly for valid analytical reasons. Early on, it became clear that Hillary Clinton was winning the all-important "black vote" - this race has proven again that it is all but impossible to win the Democratic nomination without it - and had the support of so many super-delegates that her lead became insurmountable.

But I wonder whether another explanation for short-changing Sanders goes to how Trump has impacted our professional pride. We can cope with being proven spectacularly wrong in one race, the Republican contest, but not two.

Absent Trump, journalists would have felt the Bern far more strongly, because it would have been the best storyline on offer. Again, it demonstrates how we as journalists tend to talk up certain narratives and talk down others, of how we are prone to great story bias.

Confessedly, I hated being at that Trump news conference, most of which I spent with my arm thrust skyward trying unsuccessfully to ask a question. But I also admit to being enthralled by the most extraordinary election campaign I have ever covered.

Like every other journalist, I dare say I'll be back the next time he summons us to Trump Tower. Perhaps, if he continues to be so personally abusive, journalists should stage a walkout. That said, I suspect we'll remain planted in our seats, sufferers of co-dependency, fellow Trump relationship addicts.

Anne Applebaum: Is this the end of the West as we know it?

Back in the 1950s, when the institutions were still new and shaky, I’m sure many people feared the Western alliance might never take off. Perhaps in the 1970s, the era of the Red Brigades and Vietnam, many more feared that the West would not survive. But in my adult life, I cannot remember a moment as dramatic as this: Right now, we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it.

In the United States, we are faced with the real possibility of Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump, which means we have to take seriously the possibility of a President Trump. Hillary Clinton’s campaign might implode for any number of reasons, too obvious to rehash here; elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle. That means that next January we could have, in the White House, a man who is totally uninterested in what presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan — as well as Johnson, Nixon and Truman — would all have called “our shared values.”

Trump has advocated torture, mass deportation, religious discrimination. He brags that he “would not care that much” whether Ukraine were admitted to NATO; he has no interest in NATO and its security guarantees. Of Europe, he has written that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” In any case, he prefers the company of dictators to that of other democrats. “You can make deals with those people,” he said of Russia. “I would have a great relationship with [Vladimir] Putin.”

Not only is Trump uninterested in America’s alliances, he would be incapable of sustaining them. In practice, both military and economic unions require not the skills of a shady property magnate who “makes deals” but boring negotiations, unsatisfying compromises and, sometimes, the sacrifice of one’s own national preferences for the greater good. In an era when foreign policy debate has in most Western countries disappeared altogether, replaced by the reality TV of political entertainment, all of these things are much harder to explain and justify to a public that isn’t remotely interested.

And Americans aren’t the only ones who find their alliances burdensome. A year from now, France also holds a presidential election. One of the front-runners, Marine Le Pen of the National Front, has promised to leave both NATO and the E.U. , to nationalize French companies and to restrict foreign investors. Like Trump, she foresees a special relationship with Russia, whose banks are funding her election campaign. French friends assure me that if she makes it to the final round, the center-left and center-right will band together, as they did two decades ago against her father. But elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle. What if Le Pen’s opponent suddenly falls victim to a scandal? What if another Islamic State attack jolts Paris?

By the time that happens, Britain may also be halfway out the door. In June, the British vote in a referendum to leave the E.U. Right now, the vote is too close to call — and if the “leave” vote prevails, then, as I’ve written, all bets are off. Copycat referendums may follow in other E.U. countries too. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, sometimes speaks of leaving the West in favor of a strategic alliance with Istanbul or Moscow.

It’s not hard at all to imagine a Britain unmoored from Europe drifting away from the transatlantic alliance as well. If the economic turmoil that could follow a British exit from the E.U. were sufficiently severe, perhaps the British public would vote out its conservative government in favor of the Labour Party, whose leadership is now radically anti-American. Everyone discountsJeremy Corbyn , the far-left Labour leader, but they also discounted Trump. Corbyn is the only viable alternative if the public wants a change. Elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle.

And then? Without France, Europe’s single market will cease to exist. Without Britain, it’s hard to see how NATO lasts long either. Not everyone will be sorry. As Trump’s appealing rhetoric makes clear, the costs of alliances (“millions of dollars annually”) are easier to see than the longer-term gains.

Western unity, nuclear deterrence and standing armies gave us more than a half century of political stability. Shared economic space helped bring prosperity and freedom to Europe and North America alike. But these are things that we all take for granted, until they are gone.

Anne Applebaum är amerikansk-polsk journalist, författare och kolumnist i Washington Post. Hon är gift med Polens förre utrikesminister Radoslaw Sikorski.  www.anneapplebaum.com

When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism

Maureen Dowds giftiga kolumn i söndagens New York Times.

WASHINGTON — THE Clinton campaign is shellshocked over the wholesale rejection of Hillary by young women, younger versions of herself who do not relate to her.

Hillary’s coronation was predicated on a conviction that has just gone up in smoke. The Clintons felt that Barack Obama had presumptuously snatched what was rightfully hers in 2008, gliding past her with his pretty words to make history before she could.

So this time, the Clintons assumed, the women who had deserted Hillary for Barack, in Congress and in the country, owed her. Democrats would want to knock down that second barrier.

Hillary believed that there was an implicit understanding with the sisters of the world that now was the time to come back home and vote for a woman. (The Clintons seem to have conveniently forgotten how outraged they were by identity politics when black leaders deserted them in 2008 to support Obama.)

This attitude intensified the unappetizing solipsistic subtext of her campaign, which is “What is Hillary owed?” It turned out that female voters seem to be looking at Hillary as a candidate rather than as a historical imperative. And she’s coming up drastically short on trustworthiness.

As Olivia Sauer, an 18-year-old college freshman who caucused for Bernie Sanders in Ames, Iowa, told a Times reporter: “It seems like he is at the point in his life when he is really saying what he is thinking. With Hillary, sometimes you get this feeling that all of her sentences are owned by someone.”

Hillary started, both last time and this, from a place of entitlement, as though if she reads her résumé long enough people will surrender. And now she’s even angrier that she has been shown up by someone she considers even less qualified than Obama was when he usurped her place. 

Bernie has a clear, concise “we” message, even if it’s pie-in-the-sky: The game is rigged and we have to take the country back from the privileged few and make it work for everyone. Hillary has an “I” message: I have been abused and misunderstood and it’s my turn.

It’s a victim mind-set that is exhausting, especially because the Clintons’ messes are of their own making.

On the trail in New Hampshire, Madeleine Albright made the case that it was a betrayal of feminist ideals to support Bernie against Hillary, noting that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” When Sanders handily won the women’s vote on Tuesday, David Axelrod noted dryly that they were going to need to clear out a lot of space in hell.

And in a misstep for the feminist leader who got famous by going undercover as a Playboy bunny, Gloria Steinem told Bill Maher that young women were flocking to Bernie to be where the boys are. Blaming it on hormones was odd, given the fact that for centuries, it was widely believed that women’s biology made them emotionally unfit to be leaders.

What the three older women seemed to miss was that the young women supporting Sanders are living the feminist dream, where gender no longer restricts and defines your choices, where girls grow up knowing they can be anything they want. The aspirations of ’70s feminism are now baked into the culture.

The interesting thing about the spectacle of older women trying to shame younger ones on behalf of Hillary is that Hillary and Bill killed the integrity of institutional feminism back in the ’90s — with the help of Albright and Steinem.

Instead of just admitting that he had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and taking his lumps, Bill lied and hid behind the skirts of his wife and female cabinet members, who had to go out before the cameras and vouch for his veracity, even when it was apparent he was lying.

Seeing Albright, the first female secretary of state, give cover to President Clinton was a low point in women’s rights. As was the New York Times op-ed by Steinem, arguing that Lewinsky’s will was not violated, so no feminist principles were violated. What about Clinton humiliating his wife and daughter and female cabinet members? What about a president taking advantage of a gargantuan power imbalance with a 22-year-old intern? What about imperiling his party with reckless behavior that put their feminist agenda at risk?

It rang hollow after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. When it was politically beneficial, the feminists went after Thomas for bad behavior and painted Hill as a victim. And later, when it was politically beneficial, they defended Bill’s bad behavior and stayed mute as Clinton allies mauled his dalliances as trailer trash and stalkers.

The same feminists who were outraged at the portrayal of Hill by David Brock — then a Clinton foe but now bizarrely head of one of her “super PACs” — as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” hypocritically went along when Hillary and other defenders of Bill used that same aspersion against Lewinsky.

Hillary knew that she could count on the complicity of feminist leaders and Democratic women in Congress who liked Bill’s progressive policies on women. And that’s always the ugly Faustian bargain with the Clintons, not only on the sex cover-ups but the money grabs: You can have our bright public service side as long as you accept our dark sketchy side.

Young women today, though, are playing by a different set of rules. And they don’t like the Clintons setting themselves above the rules.