Hope Hicks, the White House communications director and one of President Trump’s longest-serving advisers, said Wednesday that she plans to leave the White House in the coming weeks.
Ms. Hicks, 29, a former model who joined Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign without any experience in politics, became known as one of the few aides who understood his personality and style and could challenge the president to change his views.
Ms. Hicks had been considering leaving for several months. She told colleagues that she had accomplished what she felt she could with a job that made her one of the most powerful people in Washington, and that there would never be a perfect moment to leave, according to White House aides.
Her resignation came a day after she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee, telling the panel that in her job, she had occasionally been required to tell white lies but had never lied about anything connected to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Multiple White House aides said that Ms. Hicks’s departure was unrelated to her appearance before the committee. They said that she had told a small group of people in the days before the session that she had planned to leave her job.
When the cat’s away those mice sure do play, don’t they?
One
need look only at the decision Sunday by China’s Communist Party to
abolish the country’s presidential term limit, which will enable Xi
Jinping to remain in power indefinitely, to appreciate that it’s
springtime for strongmen — and nobody has to worry what America thinks
about that.
Just
being “president” or “prime minister” is so passé now, so 1990s. Xi
wants to be emperor, not president. Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to be
czar, not president. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to be caliph,
not president.
Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to be pharaoh, not
president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban wants to be king, not prime minister.
And Iran’s Ali Khamenei already has the most coveted title du jour,
supreme leader, and he’s bent on keeping it. ’Tis the season.
Martin
Luther King Jr., once observed that “the arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice.” If so, it seems to be taking a
detour this decade in some really big important countries. “The arc of
history looks less like it’s bending toward justice and liberty and more
toward the 1930s,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the author of “Mission
Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.”
Tempting
as it might be, one can’t blame this trend on Donald Trump alone —
although he is not only comfortable with foreign strongmen, but in the
case of both Putin and Xi, seems to be awed by them, and may even be
envious of them.
Indeed,
if you were to draw one of those New Yorker maps of the world from
Trump’s perspective, it would show Trump Tower, the White House and
Mar-a-Largo, all clustered together on one side of a wall, and beyond
that just Trump-branded golf courses, countries that won the Miss
Universe contest when Trump ran it, foreign oligarchs who’ve funded the
Trump Organization, and flags denoting North Korea and a U.S. Embassy in
Jerusalem. Everything else would be specks labeled “shitholes.”
But,
truth be told, Trump is also reflecting a widespread exhaustion in the
country with democracy promotion. “It started post-911, with Bush
getting bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan,” argued Mandelbaum, a
historian of U.S. foreign policy. “Then the great financial crisis of
2008 exacerbated it. Obama believed that America and the Middle East
would both be better off if we withdrew our involvement there. And then
we got Trump’s pointless self-infatuation and tendency to judge foreign
leaders not on human rights or support for democracy, or even on support
for America, but on how much they praised him.”
Roll out the red carpet for Trump and you can roll up as many democracy protesters as you like.
At
the same time, though, who’d look at our democracy today as a model for
emulation? It takes $1 billion to run for the White House, Congress has
become a forum for legalized bribery, the president has uttered roughly
2,000 lies and misleading statements since taking office — and his own
party doesn’t care — a gun cult holds Congress hostage, and
computer-designed gerrymandering enables candidates to pick their
voters, not have voters pick them.
Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
We
also now have our own major state-run network, Fox News, that treats
our president as “Dear Leader” — much the same way that China’s People’s
Daily does Xi.
Is this a democratic model you’d stand in front of a tank to import?
Other
trends are at work as well. One is the quest for stability. In places
like Egypt, Russia and Iran, for instance, people reflect on their own
recent failed democratic revolutions — or they look at the Hobbesian
chaos that came in their wake in Syria and Libya — and they utter a
famous Arab proverb or its local equivalent: “Better 100 years of
tyranny than one day of anarchy.” And strongmen in all of these
countries have become very adept at playing on these popular fears of
instability or anarchy.
In
addition, the combination of climate change and governance breakdown in
swaths of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America has resulted in
more refugees on the road around the world today than at any other time
since World War II. They’re all trying to get out of their “world of
disorder” into the “world of order.”
These
refugee flows have proved to be very useful boogeymen for all these
strongmen, who combine a kind of aggressive nationalism of historical
destiny — “Only I can return our country to its rightful place in the
world” — with an aggressive defense of national boundaries. This
approach works to tighten their grip on power and on their borders, and
to deflect attention from how much they and their cronies are stealing.
At
the same time, rapid changes in the workplace, and around social norms,
have come so fast for some people that they’re looking for leaders who
will erect a wall that can stop the winds of change and bring back the
1950s.
Lastly,
there’s technology. It’s been great for mobilizing protesters into the
square — and for autocrats to use facial recognition, cyberspying or
data mining to more efficiently track, arrest and silence all of them.
In
the long run, I’m still hopeful that this phase will pass — that the
stability and sugar highs that these strongmen offer will prove to be
illusory — and that the free flow of ideas and people, and regular
rotations in power, will prove superior vehicles for the greater good.
But it won’t happen unless we reaffirm their validity here in America.
Today, that’s not the case.
Officials
in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can
manipulate Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser,
by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial
difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience, according to current
and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the
matter.
Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner
to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and
Mexico, the current and former officials said.
It is unclear if
any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner’s contacts
with certain foreign government officials have raised concerns inside
the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a
permanent security clearance, the officials said.
Kushner’s
interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret
to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had
to highly classified information, according to administration
officials.
Senior
adviser Jared Kushner’s lack of foreign policy experience has been a
concern within the White House, current and former officials say. (Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post)
H.R. McMaster, President
Trump’s national security adviser, learned that Kushner had contacts
with foreign officials that he did not coordinate through the National
Security Council or officially report. The issue of foreign officials
talking about their meetings with Kushner and their perceptions of his
vulnerabilities was a subject raised in McMaster’s daily intelligence
briefings, according to the current and former officials, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Within
the White House, Kushner’s lack of government experience and his
business debt were seen from the beginning of his tenure as potential
points of leverage that foreign governments could use to influence him,
the current and former officials said.
They could also have legal
implications. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has asked people
about the protocols Kushner used when he set up conversations with
foreign leaders, according to a former U.S. official.
Officials
in the White House were concerned that Kushner was “naive and being
tricked” in conversations with foreign officials, some of whom said they
wanted to deal only with Kushner directly and not more experienced
personnel, said one former White House official.
Kushner has an
unusually complex set of business arrangements and foreign entanglements
for a senior White House aide, experts have said. But his behavior
while in office has drawn more scrutiny and raised concerns that he
would be unable to obtain a final security clearance, which he needs to
perform the many jobs Trump has entrusted to him, from negotiating
foreign trade deals to overseeing a Middle East peace process.
“We
will not respond substantively to unnamed sources peddling second-hand
hearsay with rank speculation that continue to leak inaccurate
information,” said Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner’s lawyer.
White House officials said McMaster was taken aback by some of Kushner’s foreign contacts.
“When
he learned about it, it surprised him,” one official said. “He thought
that was weird. . . . It was an unusual thing. I don’t know that any
White House has done it this way before.”
The official said that McMaster was “not concerned but wanted an explanation. It seemed unusual to him.”
In
the months since, McMaster and Kushner have worked to coordinate so
that the National Security Council is aware of Kushner’s contacts with
foreign officials and so Kushner has access to the council’s country
experts to prepare for meetings.
“General McMaster has the
highest regard for Mr. Kushner, and the two work well together,” said
council spokesman Michael Anton. “Everything they do is integrated . . .
it’s seamless.”
Foreign governments routinely discuss ways they can influence senior officials in all administrations.
“Every
country will seek to find their point of leverage,” said one person
familiar with intelligence intercepts of foreign officials discussing
Kushner.
But Kushner came to his position with an unusually
complex set of business holdings and a family company facing significant
debt issues.
A
Mexican diplomatic source said that Kushner “has remained strictly
professional” in his dealings with the country, “with both sides looking
after their interests but trying to find common ground.”
Officials
from the UAE identified Kushner as early as the spring of 2017 as
particularly manipulable because of his family’s search for investors in
their real estate company, current and former officials said.
Officials at the embassies of China, Israel and the UAE did not respond to requests for comment.
Kushner’s
lack of a final security clearance has drawn scrutiny in recent weeks. He had an interim clearance that gave him access to information at the
top-secret level, as well as more highly classified information, such as
the president’s daily intelligence briefing. But the application for
his final clearance dragged on for more than a year. The downgrading of
his interim clearance from top secret to secret was first reported by
Politico.
On Feb. 9, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein
alerted White House Counsel Don McGahn that significant issues would
further delay Kushner’s security clearance process, according to four
people familiar with their discussions.
Kushner has repeatedly
amended a form detailing his contacts with foreign persons. Not fully
disclosing foreign contacts ordinarily would result in a clearance being
denied, experts said.
In
2016, Kushner was simultaneously running his family business, Kushner
Cos., and helping to oversee Trump’s campaign. One of his top business
concerns was what to do with his family’s investment in 666 Fifth Ave.
in New York, which the company bought under his direction for $1.8
billion in 2007, the highest price paid at the time for a U.S. office
tower. The purchase became troubled as the Great Recession hit, and
Kushner refinanced it, leaving the company with a $1.2 billion debt that
comes due in January 2019.
The Manhattan property has been a
particularly nettlesome problem inside the government because Kushner’s
company has sought foreign money on the project.
Kushner and his
company had proposed a redevelopment plan that would double the
building’s size, requiring major new investment. Before Trump took
office, Kushner and other company officials explored several options for
the financing. They met with an executive of a Chinese-run insurance
company, Anbang, which had bought the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. They also
discussed a possible investment by the former finance minister of Qatar,
who oversaw an investment fund. But after Kushner served as Trump’s
senior adviser for a few months in the White House, questions arose
about potential conflicts of interest, the financing talks ended, and
neither Anbang nor the Qatari fund signed on.
Thomas Barrack,
a close Trump friend who asked the Qataris to consider investing in the
Fifth Avenue property, has told The Washington Post that the
refinancing efforts were “crushed” because Kushner’s move to the White
House “just about completely chilled the market, and [potential
investors] just said, ‘No way — can’t be associated with any appearances
of conflict of interest,’ even though there was none.”
Questions have also been raised about whether Kushner discussed financing with a Russian banker. He met in December 2016 with Sergey Gorkov,
the top executive of Vnesheconombank. The bank has said they talked
about “promising business lines and sectors,” but Kushner told Congress
that the meeting did not involve any discussion about his family’s
company.
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Kushner,
upon entering the White House, divested his stake, which is now
controlled by family members. With the deadline for the $1.2 billion
debt looming, the company has continued to search for a lender. The
redevelopment plan appears to be on hold after the company’s main
partner, Vornado, run by Trump friend Steve Roth, deemed it “not
feasible.”
Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who plays a major role at the company, told The Post in a recent interview
that he and the firm have not been contacted by Mueller. The company,
which is privately held, has stressed that the Fifth Avenue property is a
small fraction of its assets and that it is doing well financially.
A funny thing is happening on the American scene: a powerful upwelling of decency. Suddenly, it seems as if the worst lack all conviction, while the best are filled with a passionate intensity. We don’t yet know whether this will translate into political change. But we may be in the midst of a transformative moment.
You can see the abrupt turn toward decency in the rise of the #MeToo movement; in a matter of months ground that had seemed immovable shifted, and powerful sexual predators started facing career-ending consequences.
You can see it in the reactions to the Parkland school massacre. For now, at least, the usual reaction to mass killings — a day or two of headlines, then a sort of collective shrug by the political class and a return to its normal obeisance to the gun lobby — isn’t playing out. Instead, the story is staying at the top of the news, and associating with the N.R.A. is starting to look like the political and business poison it should have been all along.
And I’d argue that you can see it at the ballot box, where hard-right politicians in usually reliable Republican districts keep being defeated thanks to surging activism by ordinary citizens.
This isn’t what anyone, certainly not the political commentariat, expected.
After the 2016 election many in the news media seemed all too ready to assume that Trumpism represented the real America, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote and — Russian intervention and the Comey letter aside — would surely have won the electoral vote, too, but for the Big Sneer, the derisive tone adopted by countless reporters and pundits. There have been hundreds if not thousands of stories about grizzled Trump supporters sitting in diners, purportedly showing the out-of-touchness of our cultural elite.
Even the huge anti-Trump demonstrations just after Inauguration Day didn’t seem to move the conventional wisdom. But those pink pussy hats may have represented the beginning of real social and political change.
Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.”
Here’s how it works: When people see the status quo as immovable, they tend to be passive even if they are themselves dissatisfied. Indeed, they may be unwilling to reveal their discontent, or to fully admit it to themselves. But once they see others visibly taking a stand, they both gain more confidence in their dissent and become more willing to act on it — and by their actions they may induce the same response in others, causing a kind of chain reaction.
Such cascades explain how huge political upheavals can quickly emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Examples include the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, the sudden collapse of communism in 1989 and the Arab Spring of 2011.
Now, nothing says that such cascades have to be positive either in their motivations or in their results. The period 2016-17 clearly represented a sort of Alt-Right Spring — springtime for fascists? — in which white supremacists and anti-Semites were emboldened not just by Donald Trump’s election but by the evidence that there were more like-minded people than anyone realized, both in the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, historians have described 1848 as a turning point where history somehow failed to turn: At the end of the day the old, corrupt regimes were still standing.
I nevertheless find the surge of indignation now building in America hugely encouraging. And yes, I think it’s all one surge. The #MeToo movement, the refusal to shrug off the Parkland massacre, the new political activism of outraged citizens (many of them women) all stem from a common perception: namely, that it’s not just about ideology, but that far too much power rests in the hands of men who are simply bad people.
And Exhibit A for that proposition is, of course, the tweeter in chief himself.
At the same time, what strikes me about the reaction to this growing backlash is not just its vileness, but its lameness. Trump’s response to Parkland — let’s arm teachers! — wasn’t just stupid, it was cowardly, an attempt to duck the issue, and I think many people realized that. Or consider how the Missouri G.O.P. has responded to the indictment of Gov. Eric Greitens, accused of trying to blackmail his lover with nude photos: by blaming … George Soros. I am not making this up.
Or consider the growing wildness of speeches by right-wing luminaries like Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A. They’ve pretty much given up on making any substantive case for their ideas in favor of rants about socialists trying to take away your freedom. It’s scary stuff, but it’s also kind of whiny; it’s what people sound like when they know they’re losing the argument.
Again, there’s no guarantee that the forces of decency will win. In particular, the U.S. electoral system is in effect rigged in favor of Republicans, so Democrats will need to win the popular vote by something like seven percentage points to take the House. But we’re seeing a real uprising here, and there’s every reason to hope that change is coming.
Richard Taylor, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for his experiments that demonstrated the existence of quarks, constituents of matter even more fundamental than the protons and neutrons that are commonly regarded as composing the atomic nucleus, died Feb. 22 at his home in California. He was 88.
Dr. Taylor lived on the campus of Stanford University, where he carried out the high-energy experiments that brought him his share of the 1990 Nobel. The university announced his death. No cause of death could be learned.
By demonstrating through experiment the reality of quarks, Dr. Taylor helped lay the foundation of what scientists know as the Standard Model of particle physics. The model, with quarks at its heart, establishes the fundamental particles of the universe and the forces that govern their interactions.
In Dr. Taylor’s experiments, electrons, possessed of enormous energies imparted by a linear particle accelerator, were smashed into protons. By studying the angles and directions in which the electrons flew away from the protons, scientists were able to recognize what lay within the protons.
In one notable description, the experiments demonstrated that the proton was not some ball of nuclear jelly, homogeneous and without structure. Rather, in the words of former Stanford accelerator director Persis Drell, it was more like jam with seeds embedded. The seeds were the quarks.
Richard Taylor, shown above in 1990, helped lay the foundation of what scientists know as the Standard Model of particle physics. (Chuck Painter/Stanford University)
To a significant degree, the work of Dr. Taylor and other scientists represented a milestone on the long path to find out what is at the heart of all the objects, large and small, that can be seen around us.
Democritus, in ancient Greece, put forward the idea that at its smallest level, the universe was made of atoms. At one time, the entire atom was thought to be tiny, solid and homogeneous.
Groundbreaking experiments early in the 20th century discovered that the atom was largely empty space, with a tiny but solid nucleus at its core. The nucleus, in turn, was found to be composed of protons and neutrons.
It was Dr. Taylor and his two co-winners of the Nobel Prize, Jerome I. Friedman and Henry W. Kendall, both then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who showed by experiment from 1967 to 1973 that even the protons and neutrons were not nature’s fundamental building blocks.
“Before that time, we had this vast collection of particles and did not know how they were put together,” said Martin Breidenbach, a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National
Accelerator Laboratory who participated in the work while at MIT.
Richard Edwin Taylor was born Nov. 2, 1929, in the town of Medicine Hat in the province of Alberta in western Canada. He eventually held dual citizenship in the United States and in Canada.
As a boy, he read “quite a bit” and was good in mathematics but was otherwise “not an outstanding student,” he wrote in his Nobel biography. An early interest in chemistry, he once said, was discouraged when an experiment with explosives in his basement laboratory blew off parts of three fingers.
After receiving undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Alberta, he entered Stanford to work for his PhD. Interrupting his studies, he spent the period from 1958 to 1961 at a linear accelerator laboratory in Paris. On his return to the United States, he completed his dissertation and received his doctorate from Stanford in 1962.
It was about then that construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was starting up. He began working there, and his principal contributions to the research that would win the Nobel were in designing the experiments and in collecting and analyzing the data, according to Les Cottrell, who worked with Dr. Taylor in 1967.
An enormous amount of teamwork is involved in large-scale scientific experiments. The Stanford Linear Accelerator was one of the world’s largest atom smashers. Its size and the energies it could impart offered one of the best chances available not only to see the basic building blocks of the universe, but also to see inside them.
Enthusiasm was infectious, and traditional labor hierarchies dissolved. “I lived in mortal fear that a union steward would drop in unannounced,” Dr. Taylor once wrote, “and find a millwright [steelworker] building a wooden scaffold, while a carpenter was operating the crane.”
As the head of a group of scientists and engineers, Dr. Taylor gave an example of hands-on leadership. “He was an integral part of the experiment, not just the boss,” Cottrell said. “He would show up at 5 in the morning to take his shift, and he would be there in the evening” when the lab director came around to check on progress.
Scientists studied what was within protons by scrutinizing the paths electrons followed when they were bounced off the protons. As the experiment developed, Cottrell said, “there were too many particles coming off at a large angle than expected.” It was puzzling. Perhaps the measurements were off, some thought.
But finally theory and experiment merged. The unexpected angles meant unexpected objects within the proton. These objects, scientists came to recognize, were the quarks that had been predicted by theorist Murray Gell-Mann. He took the name from a sentence in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
Dr. Taylor’s experiments made him something of a celebrity, and his work became the subject of a clue on the television game show “Jeopardy!”
Survivors include his wife, the former Rita Bonneau, and a son.
While so much of Dr. Taylor’s work involved the design and construction of massive pieces of equipment with the sensitivity needed for the most delicate and refined measurements, Dr. Taylor recognized their larger meaning to science and to humanity.
“The quarks and the stars were here when you came,” he once said, “and they will be here when you go.”
MEXICO CITY — What has surprised Mexicans is not that President Trump “lost his temper” in a telephone conversation with his Mexican counterpart, prompting President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel a trip to Washington, but that Peña Nieto was even thinking about going in the first place.
Why, asked foreign affairs analysts and many Mexicans taking to social media Sunday, would the country’s unpopular president contemplate another tête-à-tête with Trump after two embarrassing encounters — that served to strengthen Trump politically at the expense of Peña Nieto?
No one faulted him for canceling this trip to Washington, which he did Saturday. But many Mexicans questioned what purpose the meeting could have served and wondered if the president and foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, had learned from the humiliations of Peña Nieto’s previous encounters with Trump. In those conversations the U.S. president brought up his “big, beautiful” border wall and the prospect of Mexico paying for it — which the Mexican government says will never happen.
“There hasn’t been a single meeting [with Trump] in which Peña Nieto has obtained some sort of benefit, whether personal or for the country,” said Brenda Estefan, a foreign affairs analyst and former security attache in the Mexican Embassy in Washington. “It’s absurd to continue asking for a reunion so that you can be treated like a doormat.”
Others wondered whether the administration still harbored the belief that it could persuade Trump of the value of the Mexican relationship and sticking with the North American Free Trade Agreement amid tricky renegotiations.
“How bad could things be, when the best news from yesterday was the cancellation of the EPN/Trump meeting following a heated phone call,” tweeted Gabriel Guerra Castellanos, a former Mexican consul in Toronto. “The incredible part is [the call] saved us from [Trump’s] tantrum and not the foresight of our diplomats.”
The discourteous telephone called served to underscore the difficulties of Peña Nieto’s dealings with Trump, even though Videgaray had described the U.S.-Mexico relationship as being “closer under Trump than in previous administrations.”
The news broke at a tough time for Peña Nieto, though it distracted from a Saturday mishap at Flag Day celebrations, in which soldiers at the official ceremony raised a massive Mexican flag upside down — something seen as oddly apt by many on Mexican social media as the country suffers corruption scandals, crises of confidence in public officials and violence rising to record levels.
The ill-tempered Trump call also came as the country gears up for the July 1 presidential election. Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has sunk in the polls, while the sedate speaking style of its candidate, former finance minister José Antonio Meade — picked in part for of his clean track record — fails to excite voters or move the polls upward. Some observers speculated the proposed trip to Washington was as much about raising attention at home as it was to accomplish anything to do with NAFTA or Mexico-U.S. relations.
“Peña Nieto and Videgaray wanted to show ‘leadership’ at a time when they believed that Mexico was doing well in the renegotiation of NAFTA — at least better than Canada — and their candidate is suffering,” said Carlos Heredia, professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics.
The trip, however, “didn’t make sense,” he added. “What are they thinking? Any Mexican can tell you that there isn’t any point.
”What are you going to get out of it? Nothing — another humiliation,” Heredia said.
Polls show Meade running a distant third — the newspaper Reforma put his support at just 14 percent — trailing Ricardo Anaya, of the unwieldy left-right coalition, and left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Surveys also show Mexicans deeply disliking Trump, but early rhetoric for the election has focused on domestic matters rather than promises to confront Trump or defend Mexican dignity.
Trump is “not a factor because it’s not something you can influence at all,” Heredia said. “And because we do not have a constituency inside the United States that could make Trump pay for insulting Mexicans.”
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