Author: Juan Williams

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The Trump Virus

Okay, let me answer the only talking point the Trump campaign has left: The president’s team is demanding that critics tell them what Joe Biden could have done better than President Trump to prevent the deaths of 140,000 Americans, and counting, due to the coronavirus. Obviously, this is a weak argument. You might even say it is a desperate argument.

Why? Because the only real issue is Trump’s handling of the virus.

Juan WIlliams

Already, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the virus, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. Another recent poll, from Fox News, had 56 percent of registered voters disapproving of Trump’s response to the virus. In fact, voters have already concluded by a large margin — 17 percentage points in the Fox poll — that they trust Biden to do a better job of leading the nation through the pandemic.

Even on a personal basis, Fox reports that only 36 percent believe Trump has “the compassion to serve effectively as president.” By comparison, 56 percent say Biden is a compassionate man.

So the American people have reached a conclusion about the performance of the incumbent: Trump failed. And that has big political consequences because the coronavirus is the No. 1 issue for voters.

By asking what Biden could have done differently, Trump’s campaign is trying to change a national conversation that has already reached a conclusion. They are kicking up a storm of distraction by arguing that even if Trump dropped the ball, where is the evidence that Biden might have done any better?

Biden answered the question last week. While Trump was promising that “like a miracle — it will disappear,” Biden said he would have to work — improving testing, tracing people who had spread the disease, and using the Defense Production Act to get U.S. companies to produce tests, masks, and equipment for hospitals.

Trump did not do those things, Biden said, but instead “raised the white flag.”

“He has no idea what to do,” Biden told MSNBC host Joy Reid last week. “Zero.” Trump’s only concern is winning the election, Biden said. “And it doesn’t matter how many people get COVID or die from COVID,” Biden added, “because [Trump] fears that if the economy is strapped as badly as it is today … he is going to be in trouble [in November].”

Let’s take Biden’s answer with a grain of salt, since he is running against Trump. But what do political reporters — people watching every day, the judges at ringside — think of how Trump is handling the virus?

After interviewing Trump for an hour, Chris Wallace of Fox said Trump’s White House still “doesn’t seem to have a handle” on the pandemic. That is damning given that Trump was warned about the potency of the virus to kill in January.

Jake Tapper of CNN offered a similarly negative judgment. Trump’s “refusal to lead has a body count,” as in the number of people who have died from the virus.

How does Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has seen Trump’s response from the beginning, judge Trump’s performance? “When you look at the numbers, obviously, we’ve got to do better,” Fauci told The Atlantic a week ago. “We’ve got to almost reset this and say ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense.’ … So rather than these games people are playing, let’s focus on that.”

These judgments that Trump has failed are hard to refute. It is a fact that in January Trump told CNBC he had no worry about the coronavirus because “we have it totally under control. … We have it under control. It is going to be just fine.”

In late February, Trump again steered the country wrong by tweeting that the virus is “very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

In March, as the situation grew worse, Trump blamed “Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party,” for trying to “inflame the CoronaVirus situation.”

Then in mid-March he declared, “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Later in March, he announced the virus would be gone in time for Americans to gather at church for Easter services in mid-April.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi  now goes so far as to call the disease the “Trump Virus.”

“If he had said months ago, ‘Let’s wear masks. … Let’s socially distance’ instead of rallies … then more people would have followed his lead. He’s the President of the United States,” Pelosi told CNN, in explaining her negative judgment of Trump.

That’s why the question of what anyone else might have done is a useless parlor game. Its only purpose, as conceived by a desperate Trump campaign, is to get people to ignore the president’s costly failure.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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“Bounty” Scandal Shows Again How Putin Owns Trump

Stop it!

There is no way to explain President Trump’s lack of action in response to U.S. intelligence showing Russia paid bounties for the murder of American soldiers. Even worse, there is no explanation for why congressional Republicans aren’t raising hell over Trump’s silence.

Juan Williams

Some military veterans are speaking up: “Putin pays bounties to Taliban enemies to kill American soldiers and not a word from Donald Trump,” says the narrator in an ad from the group “VoteVets.” In a different ad from the same group, the narrator says: “Benedict Arnold can step aside, because Benedict Donald is America’s No. 1 traitor.”

I get uneasy when political players start throwing around loaded words like “traitor.” But what’s the choice now? Trump’s only defense is to say he was not told about the intelligence and did not read his briefing book.

“Either way, it is an unjustifiable dereliction of duty,” tweeted Joe Biden, the Democrats’ nominee for president.

Trump is also hiding behind the fact that the intelligence is not totally confirmed. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the idea that Trump did not react to the report because the intelligence agencies did not have a “100 percent consensus.” She called it a “con.”

“We would practically be investigating nothing if you had to start off at 100 percent. … Just because they didn’t have 100 percent consensus, should this not be briefed to the president of the United States?” Pelosi said.

Keep in mind the seriousness of the Russian bounty report. The Washington Post reported that in April 2019 there was an attack in Afghanistan killing three Marines and “those who planned it may have been paid a bounty by a Russian military intelligence unit to kill Americans.”

So it is hard to say which is worse: Either Trump did not read his written briefing report or his aides thought it best not to tell him. Whatever the case, it is shockingly clear that the President of the United States did nothing.

So, where is the shouting from all those flag-waving congressional Republicans? Their current silence reminds me of their quiet when the Trump administration did nothing to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Trump even enlisted fellow Republicans in demonizing the FBI for looking into the plot.

Trump called the probe into Russian election interference a “hoax.” Now he is calling news of the Russian bounty intelligence a “hoax.” He is keeping Republicans in line by linking the election-tampering probe to the questions about the bounty scandal. He said this latest outrage is “possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax … wanting to make Republicans look bad!!”

But it is an outrage to play politics with a matter of life and death for American soldiers.  And it is particularly galling when you consider how they attacked people who asked questions about the Iraq War — people like me. They smeared critics of Bush’s Iraq War as traitors. So, where are today’s Republicans calling out the Trump administration for its lack of response?

The only action by the Trump administration has been to start a probe to find out who leaked news of the intelligence reports to newspapers. That diversionary tactic is consistent with Trump’s failure to handle foreign affairs throughout his presidency.

The American people see it. In the current RealClearPolitics average of polls, 52 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy. Trump’s foreign policy failures are too numerous to list in one column, but here are some of the lowlights:

Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not only cost Americans jobs but has ceded our leadership role in the world to countries like China.

“Trump didn’t want to hear [early reports about the coronavirus in China] because he didn’t want to hear bad things about [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping. … He didn’t want to hear bad things about the Chinese economy that could affect the ‘fantastic’ trade deal he was working on,” former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton recently told ABC News.

Trump failed to act against North Korea for the murder of American student Otto Warmbier and never got a nuclear deal with Kim Jong-un.

He has exacerbated tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians by giving enormous concessions to the Netanyahu government.

And perhaps, most dangerously, Trump failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program after ripping up President Obama’s nuclear deal — which was working.

The Democratic National Committee has started running ads hitting Trump’s stumbles on foreign policy. “Trump said he’d get tough on China,” a narrator intones. “He didn’t get tough. He got played.”

And once again, Trump — and our troops and the American people — are getting played by Russia.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Trumped by Facebook

If Senator Elizabeth Warren wins the Democratic nomination, her prime opponent in the general election will not be President Trump. It will be Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

That’s because Zuckerberg refuses to halt even the most obvious lies from popping up in political ads on Facebook.

Juan Williams

“I think we are in the right place on this,” he told The Washington Post last week. “In general, in a democracy, I think that people should be able to hear for themselves what politicians are saying.”

That’s great news for the Russians and President Trump. The Russians continue to use social media, principally Facebook, to stir political division, racial division, and hatred, according to the FBI, the CIA, the Mueller Report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, Trump’s team is acting on its own to swamp Facebook with lies about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — and there are no consequences.

Facebook allowed a manipulated video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to go viral, even though Pelosi pointed out that it was fake and asked for it to be taken down.

Now Warren is campaigning on a promise to break up big tech companies. They are so powerful and so wealthy that they are able to ignore questions about how they are enabling propaganda. By selling politicians the chance to twist the truth and deceive voters, Facebook profits at the expense of the public good.

Warren put it bluntly: Facebook is guilty of taking “money to promote lies. … A handful of monopolists” should not “dominate our economy and our democracy.”

Zuckerberg could largely solve this problem by simply refusing to accept political advertising. It is not a significant source of income for his company, which is worth upwards of $500 billion. Another solution is for Facebook to set its own rules to stop political lies and propaganda. That is what newspapers and cable television companies do.

In both cases, Zuckerberg refuses to act. He did nothing even after the documented abuse of Facebook was proven to be the No. 1 pathway for foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg claims he is protecting America’s free speech rights by allowing political spin, distortion, and mockery to flourish on Facebook. People can decide if a politician is telling the truth for themselves, he says. He says he is open to having the government put rules in place. That position allows him to use political paralysis in Washington as a smokescreen.

Warren has a quick, simple solution: Break up these reckless firms. As you can imagine, Zuckerberg opposes Warren’s plan.

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah,” Zuckerberg told his staff in audio leaked to the website The Verge. “But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

In other words, Zuckerberg has no interest in Warren becoming president. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign are betting big on the power of social media platforms like Facebook to carry the president to re-election. That explains the elevation of Brad Parscale, whose primary experience is as a digital media guru rather than in political organizing, to be campaign manager.

Thomas B. Edsall, writing in The New York Times, noted that Trump’s campaign has spent more than all three leading Democrats on social media. According to CNN, in the last week of September more than 1,800 ads ran on Trump’s Facebook page mentioning “impeachment.” Those ads wildly distorted reality to make Congress and Democrats into villains attacking a blameless president.

CNN reported: “The ads have been viewed between 16 and 18 million times on Facebook, and the campaign has spent between $600,000 and $2,000,000 on the effort.”

Just as the right-wing smear merchants put bogus stories about Uranium One into the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton, they are doing the same in 2020 with anti-Biden smears regarding Hunter Biden’s position with a Ukrainian gas company. If Facebook continues to allow their platform to be abused by propagandists, they will be giving Trump a giant advantage in the 2020 campaign.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Eyes on the Prize: An Impeachment Primer for Democrats

Eyes on the Prize is the title of a 1988 book I wrote about the civil rights movement.

The title, taken from a folk song, became an anthem for activists who constantly struggled to stay focused on their goal of racial equality as they were called troublemakers, jailed, and even killed. Now the call of history requires the same fierce focus as congressional Democrats begin the impeachment of President Trump.

In every case, the president’s strategy is to get Democrats to take their eyes off the prize — with distraction, distortion, and delay in producing evidence and witnesses. He is betting that Democrats will get tired of the fight and lose focus about exactly what he did to deserve impeachment.

Juan Williams

It is not just Democrats he is trying to derail through distraction. He wants the public to call off the Democrats. If the public gets confused and can’t keep track of his corruption, he expects polls to tell Democrats that most Americans are dismissing the whole thing as just more political fighting.

So, here is a primer for Democrats who want to keep their eyes on the prize. We begin with one fact: The President of the United States withheld military aid to Ukraine while asking the country’s new president to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden’s son. Trump put the nation’s military security concerns beneath his personal political goal of damaging Biden, an opponent who consistently beats him in 2020 presidential polls.

Last week, in a brazen effort to make his corruption look normal, the president openly called for another nation — China — to also launch a corruption probe into Biden.

These facts are not in dispute. The president released a summary memo of his phone call with the Ukrainian president that confirms the facts. There are also memos and messages among U.S. diplomats that confirm the facts. But to get everyone to look the other way, Trump is putting on a dazzling cable news show full of shouted insults and pained claims that he is a victim of Democrats who want to undo the 2016 election. He complains Democrats are conducting a coup. He says they are guilty of treason. He warns of civil war.

He has also begun using profanity on Twitter and at his rallies. He distracts by giving Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, the nickname “Shifty Schiff.” His friends in the right-wing echo chamber are daring Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a formal vote on starting impeachment — even though it is not required by the Constitution. They want to drag Pelosi into a time-consuming exercise that does not advance actual impeachment. It will give Trump more time to cover up and stonewall. By the way, Pelosi has the votes if she felt such a vote would make a difference to actually impeaching Trump. It does not.

This is just one more distraction from the fact, as affirmed last week by Ellen Weintraub, chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, who issued a statement that it is illegal to ask a foreign government for help in an American political campaign.

Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano put it plainly last week: “Is violating campaign finance law by involving a foreign government in an American presidential campaign an impeachable offense? Yes, it is. … The expressed intention of those who wrote the Constitution and those who wrote the campaign finance laws 200 years later — and the lesson of the post-2016 election and Mueller-investigated angst in America — was to keep foreign governments out of the American political system.”

An open-and-shut case, right?

More and more polls show growing support for the House impeaching Trump. That’s why the effort to distract goes on. You can watch it live every time Rudy Giuliani goes on television and delivers a rambling, bizarre conspiracy theory. Democrats also have to be careful not to distract themselves by responding to calls from their supporters to load up the articles of impeachment with every grievance against Trump for the last four years — contact with Russians, obstruction of the Mueller probe, foreign leaders staying at Trump hotels to gain his favor — as legitimate and important as that might be.

We must all keep our eyes on the prize if the country is to survive Trump.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Why Republicans are Afraid to Challenge Trump

Last week, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley broke the Republican cone of critical silence on President Trump by tweeting, “This can’t continue …” as the federal budget deficit raced past $1 trillion. 

Juan Williams

Fear of a larger jail-break from the cult of enforced silence among Republicans about Trump’s failures is the big reason the president’s campaign officials have pushed state party officials to cancel Republican presidential primaries in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and South Carolina. And that fear explains why the Republican National Committee is withholding polling data on the president from GOP candidates for state and local offices.

“Republican consultants say the Trump information is being withheld for two reasons: to discourage candidates from distancing themselves from the president, and to avoid embarrassing him with poor results that might leak,” according to the investigative news site ProPublica. 

It is no secret that Trump’s approval rating has been sagging all summer. As of last week, 53 percent of voters disapproved of him, according to the RealClear Politics average of polls. Who knows how high that number might go if Republicans begin calling out Trump for never building that wall. And what happens if Republicans begin to ask about the missing health-care plan that was going to be better than ObamaCare?

Trump has already thinned the ranks of high-profile Republican voices willing to challenge him on his lack of results and his impulsive, autocratic behavior. GOP critics are shut down by the threat of being targeted by one of Trump’s angry tweets or worse — having Trump endorse a far-right opponent.

Then there is this odd political dynamic at play: After losing 41 seats in the midterms and watching the rush of current House Republicans into retirement, the remaining party faithful have concluded that despite Trump’s negatives, their only chance to hold on to power is to stick with Trump.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan turned down requests from Republicans who asked him to consider a challenge to Trump. He said it would have amounted to a “kamikaze mission.”

Why the talk of political death in launching a primary challenge against Trump? Here’s the answer, from a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll in June. Self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning adults were asked if they are “more a supporter of Donald Trump or more of a supporter of the Republican Party?” Fifty-two percent said they are loyal to Trump. How many held a higher allegiance to the party than to Trump? Only 38 percent.

Top Republicans believe they need Trump to hold on to those Republicans who identify with Trump more than with the party. The party can’t afford the loss of any voters because already 60 percent of all voters, according to a CNN-SSRS poll released last week, do not think Trump deserves a second term.

That’s why Trump is fighting to keep up the mirage of total GOP voter fealty to him. He keeps hammering the phony message that he has set the all-time record for support within the party for any Republican president. Yes, Trump does have strong support from Republicans — 82 percent, according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll. But former President George W. Bush set the record in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Trump’s fixation with this very disprovable lie is revealing about his anxiety about facing a challenge in the primaries, even from fellow Republicans he has demeaned as the “three stooges.” He is referring to three men who have announced they will run against him in the Republican primary: former Representative Joe Walsh, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

“I’m running because he’s unfit,” Walsh said in a recent interview with ABC News. “Somebody needs to step up, and there needs to be an alternative. The country is sick of this guy’s tantrums. He’s — he’s a child.”

“I think we have to have a conversation about what it means to be a Republican,” Sanford said on Fox News Sunday, adding that today’s GOP “has lost [its] way.” The Trump campaign’s ongoing effort to stop Republican primaries from taking place next year, Walsh said on CNN, is an effort to “disenfranchise voters.”

No president in my lifetime has ever short-circuited their party’s presidential primary process. It is contrary to the basic principles of democracy.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Choice for DNI, is a Partisan Hack

Last week, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said it was “frustrating” to hear “rumors” about being fired by President Trump. They were more than rumors.

On Sunday, Trump confirmed via Twitter that Coats is leaving his position on August 15th. Officially, Coats is resigning — but no one really doubts that he has been pushed out by the president. Coats fell out of favor with Trump for publicly confirming Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Trump appointee also raised eyebrows at a conference when he revealed Trump failed to consult with him before extending an invitation to the White House to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Juan Williams

Now Coats is on the way out for doing his job. But it is Coats’ proposed replacement that takes this story beyond frustrating and straight to outrageous. Trump will nominate Representative John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to fill the role. Ratcliffe is a pure political player and a direct threat to the nonpartisan reputation of America’s intelligence agencies and their ability to protect the country by producing unbiased, first-rate information.

He auditioned for the role last week, when he subjected Robert Mueller to harsh questioning when the former special counsel appeared before Congress. Ratcliffe absurdly accused Mueller of having failed to respect “the bedrock principle of our justice system … a presumption of innocence” when it came to Trump. At the second of two hearings that day, Ratcliffe pumped conspiracy theories and innuendo into the congressional record as he quizzed Mueller about the Steele dossier and the FISA warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. These are two red herrings that Trump allies have consistently used to try to discredit Mueller — and to downplay the threat from Russia.

It could have been even worse. Another name reported to have been in the mix was Representative Devin Nunes (R-California). This is the mudslinger who lied by saying he had evidence to support Trump’s claim that President Obama “wiretapped” Trump during the 2016 election. Nunes’ claim to fame comes from his eagerness to promote Trump’s “deep state” and “witch hunt” narratives about the intelligence agencies. The goal is to undermine the credibility of our intelligence agencies’ findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Instead of facing that truth, Ratcliffe, Nunes, and Trump continue to feed conspiracy theories to right-wing websites and conservative talk radio.

“The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress the day before Mueller asserted that the Russian interference is ongoing. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said. “They’re doing it as we sit here.” Wray emphasized that the U.S. has not done enough to deter Russian interference.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-California) recently said he had been unaware that three Senate races had been attacked by Russia. Earlier this year, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was reportedly told by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney not to mention Russian interference in front of Trump for fear it would upset him by calling into question the legitimacy of his presidency.

Wait, it gets worse. Hours after Mueller’s impassioned plea, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, blocked three bills passed by the House of Representatives to safeguard U.S. elections from foreign interference. Should we be calling into question the patriotism of every Republican who last week voted against the election security bills?

McConnell dismissed the bills as “partisan” and their authors as promoters of a “conspiracy theory.” “This is an issue of patriotism, of national security, of protecting the very integrity of American democracy, something so many of our forbears died for. And what do we hear from the Republican side? Nothing,” said Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate.

“To this day, Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted,” wrote The New York Times editorial board. “The president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats, and independents, at risk.”

Let history record that a delusional president, concerned only with his own ego, and a traitorous Republican Congress, concerned only with their own re-elections, chose to ignore hard evidence regarding the Russian threat to our elections. Instead, we get the likes of John Ratcliffe as the president’s nominee to head national intelligence.

God save us.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Killing Obamacare: Trump Goes It Alone

If you are a Trump voter, why trust me? Let’s go to President Trump’s toadies in Congress and see what they have to say about his Justice Department’s call last week to push the federal courts to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Representative Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), one of Trump’s strong backers, bluntly told The Washington Post that the president’s order to the Justice Department is “not the smartest move.” He explained that doing away with the current law without having a replacement ready to go “leaves millions of Americans in harm’s way and they didn’t do anything.”

And here’s a Republican voice with enough distance from Trump to get the joke: “We couldn’t repeal and replace it with a Republican House,” Senator Lamar Alexander said, also to the Post, while laughing at the memory. He also pointed out the obvious: The House is now under the control of a Democratic majority.

Juan Williams

Now let’s go to Trump’s biggest enablers. Oh, they’re not talking. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want no part of this political suicide.

Here’s a tweet from Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former top aide. “Dear GOP,” Holmes wrote, “When Democrats are setting themselves ablaze by advocating the destruction of American health care, try to resist the temptation of asking them to pass the kerosene.”

What about the cabinet? Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Attorney General William Barr both told the White House not to do it, according to several reports.

And here is more dissent, this time from the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal. Destroying Obamacare without a replacement plan means angering millions of Americans who “now rely on the law for health insurance,” the paper editorialized. As for the long-promised, fantastic replacement plan, the Journal wrote: “If there’s some new emerging GOP consensus, we haven’t heard about it.”

Okay, so even the people who have been making excuses for Trump are not looking the other way on this one. Why? The answer is that angering voters by destroying the ACA would be a political catastrophe.

Health care stands out as the top reason the GOP lost 41 seats and control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. According to the 2018 exit polls, 41 percent of voters identified health care as the most important issue to them. Fifty-seven percent of voters said Democrats are the better of the two parties at protecting people with pre-existing conditions. A poll taken by the Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-March found that 50 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Obamacare. Every one of the Democrats running for president are celebrating the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Several are promoting the idea of “Medicare for all” and “single-payer.” They know voters elected a class of freshman House Democrats who campaigned on these ideas.

AdWeek‘s Jason Lynch wrote after the midterms that health-care-themed advertising “accounted for 49 percent of all Democrat ads overall and 59 percent of all Democratic ads for House races.” Meanwhile, 367,000 Republican advertisements — only one-third of the Democratic total — mentioned health care, according to the Kantar analysis. The Republicans preferred to focus on tax reform, immigration, and low unemployment. That proved to be a loser for the party.

But the president is looking to stir his hardcore base for the 2020 campaign. Attacking Obamacare is a potential sop to the Ann Coulter faction of his base who correctly point out he has not lived up to his promise to build the wall — and have Mexico pay.

Will it work? Here is James Capretta, a health-care expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, on CNN last week: “The president, I don’t think, really has any idea what he’s really saying there. It’s more of a promotional and marketing impulse on his part. It leaves Republicans open to … ridicule by the Democrats that they don’t have a plan.”

But Trump is not convinced: “We are going to have great health care. The Republican Party will be the party of great health care. You watch,” the president told Sean Hannity last week.

If this legal takedown works, Trump will take all the credit. But Republicans in Congress know they will take the blame for leaving millions without health insurance. That’s why Trump’s tribe in Congress is not lining up on this one.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Color of Politics

It was one of those unforgettable moments in Congress. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a new member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was speaking to Elliott Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela:

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair … I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”

Juan Williams

“If I could respond to that —” Abrams interjected.

“It wasn’t a question,” Omar shot back, cutting off the witness.

The sight of a young Muslim congresswoman, wearing a hijab, holding a powerful 71-year-old white Republican accountable signals the dawn of a new day in American politics. The heavily white, older male party of Trump is fighting to hold back what they see coming over the horizon.

Many people — including me — have been targets of President Trump’s Twitter tirades, but women of color provoke a special kind of Trump ire. Trump last month dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a wave of the hand and a “who cares,” after she told CBS’ 60 Minutes she has “no question” that Trump makes use of the “historic dog whistles of white supremacy.” Trump has been even more dismissive of other women of color.

A “lowlife” and a “dog.” That’s Trump talking about his former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman. Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida? Trump demeaned her as “wacky” and said she was “killing” the Democratic Party. Former Utah Republican Congresswoman Mia Love? Right after her failed reelection bid, Trump said she “gave me no love and she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters has been described by Trump as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

Imagine the bitter attacks if Trump faces a strong woman of color, such as Senator Kamala Harris, in the 2020 election.

The Democrats’ success in the midterms set off these unsettling changes in American politics for Trump and his base. The new House majority includes a record number of freshman Democratic congresswomen. In fact, 43 women of color are now serving in the House. Only one non-white congresswoman is a Republican — Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was reelected in Washington state. The record number includes 22 black women, 11 Latinas, six Asian-Pacific Islanders, and the first two Native American women in Congress. It also brought to Congress the first two Muslim women: Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Last month, Tlaib told an excited crowd of liberal activists: “We’re gonna impeach the motherf****r” — referring to Trump. In that moment, she joined Ocasio-Cortez as a target of right-wing hate.

The New York Times reported last week that Republicans have “amped up” their efforts to demonize these young Democratic women. The most frequent charge against the newcomers from Trump’s conservative talk radio fans is that these women of color are dividing the country with “identity politics.”

That drew a response from Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, the first black woman nominated by a major party to run for governor. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Abrams pleaded guilty to having “intentionally and vigorously highlighted communities of color and other marginalized groups, not to the exclusion of others but as a recognition of their specific policy needs.” Abrams concluded that new “noisy voices represent the strongest tool to manage the growing pains of multicultural coexistence. By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours, Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”

Abrams did not mention Trump. But he regularly uses white identity politics to stir up his base. It can be seen in his attack on Mexicans as rapists and his denigration of “shithole countries.” And who can forget Trump’s false and repeated insinuation that President Obama was not born in the United States? That racist conspiracy theory was the springboard for Trump’s presidential run. What we see in Trump’s fear of women of color is resistance to the rapid rise of racial change in our politics.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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The Democrats’ Purity Tests Will Only Help Trump

Can you see what is taking shape on the left? That’s the look of liberals forming a circular firing squad to shoot at top Democrats running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. 

The Democratic Party is highly unified in its opposition to President Trump. Independent and swing voters also tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump’s policies on taxes, immigration, and race relations. And the Party of Trump — formerly the GOP — lost 40 House seats in the midterms. That political reality makes Trump a weak candidate for reelection.

Juan Williams

But the Democrats still have to find a good candidate with an attractive message to beat even a bad candidate. The president’s supporters can see what’s up. Right-wing websites and Trump cheerleaders on talk radio are attacking possible Democratic candidates as budding socialists who will increase taxes and let every illegal immigrant run across open borders.

Trump’s white, working-class base is being warned on racial grounds that any Democratic nominee will ignore them while playing “identity politics” that favor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, women, and gays.

Trying to divide voters by race is so predictable for Trump’s team. What is surprising is that Democrats are too often fueling the Trump camp’s caricature by insisting on race-based review of their candidates. How painful and ironic will it be if racial debates inside the Democratic Party are allowed to weaken the focus on beating Trump and his racism?

For example, look at the attacks coming from the left against the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in early polls, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Activists on the far left are bashing Biden for his support of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill.

That bill had support from the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, being seen as an answer to high crime rates in black neighborhoods. But the old crime bill is now condemned by today’s activists, who take their cues from the Black Lives Matter movement. They fault the bill for pushing more black people into jail as a result of increased sentences for selling crack cocaine, and mandating longer sentences for repeat offenders and violent crime.

Biden is trying to get past this line of attack by asking for forgiveness: “It was a big mistake that was made,” Biden said at a Martin Luther King Day celebration last week in Washington.

Next in line for allegedly failing the racial test is a black woman, California Senator Kamala Harris. Her sin is that she was a prosecutor and California’s attorney general. “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system,” according to an essay on The Intercept, a liberal website.

Also in line for the gauntlet of race-shaming are white candidates who did not show an interest in racial injustice early enough in their careers. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are all vulnerable on this point.

More broadly, this year’s Women’s March was a case study in how explosive racial issues — and, in that case, accusations of being soft on anti-Semitism — can splinter the unity of anti-Trump activists. Blacks, Latinos, and liberal women are at the heart of today’s Democratic base. There are record numbers of Latinos, Asians, and blacks now in Congress, and they are almost all Democrats. Honest debate about racial justice is overdue for both parties.

That debate will happen in the South Carolina primary, the first contest with a high percentage of minority voters. Early attention to that race indicates its importance for any Democrat trying to win the party’s nomination.

Democratic strategists know that Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination if he had won more black and Latino votes. Democrats across the racial spectrum have to keep in mind that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Trump, a man whose racist rhetoric and white identity policies are damaging people of every color daily.

After a Black Lives Matter leader refused to talk with President Obama in 2016, Obama made the point that activists sometimes feel “so passionately … they never take the next step and say, ‘How do I sit down and try to actually get something done?'”

The most important “something” to get done right now is beating Trump. As liberal comedian Bill Maher is fond of saying, there is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Trump’s Race Problem: Black Republicans with Nowhere to Go

Trump supporters are rare among black people. President Trump won just eight percent of the black vote in 2016. His family business’ sordid history of housing discrimination and his racially insensitive comments — “look at my African American over here” — leave black Trump supporters open to mockery and charges of self-hate.

Juan Williams

A few black people thought they had a winning strategy for dealing with Trump. In exchange for access to his presidential power, they’d ignore warning signs and jump on his bandwagon. How did that work out for you, Omarosa? Trump reacted to her critical book by calling her a “dog” and a “crazed, crying low-life.”

Kanye West similarly went to the White House in a red “Make America Great Again” hat before realizing he was being “used” by Trump backers to, as he later said, “spread messages I don’t believe in.”

All that was bad enough. Now it is getting worse for the black conservatives trying to find a place in the party of Trump. Exhibit A is how Trump went out of his way to trash the first black Republican congresswoman, Utah’s Mia Love, after she lost a hard-fought reelection battle last month. “Mia Love gave me no love. And she lost,” Trump sneered. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.” After Trump insulted her, Love told supporters: “This election … shines a spotlight on the problems Washington politicians have with minorities and black Americans.”

This is not a race problem afflicting all Republicans or all Washington politicians. It is more accurately labeled a “Trump politician race problem.” It is Trump who emboldened racists by saying that a march of white supremacists — and the people who protested against them — featured “fine people on both sides.”  

Trying to make sense of Trump’s bad record on dealing with people who are not white, Love argued: “It’s transactional. It’s not personal.” Wrong, congresswoman. It is personal.

His family business was sued in the 1970s for refusing to rent apartments to black people. He never apologized for wrongly blaming five black and Latino teenagers for a brutal attack on a woman in New York’s Central Park.

As Colin Powell, a black Republican, once wrote, Trump is a “national disgrace.” As Condoleezza Rice, another black Republican, said, she is “uncomfortable [with] what I see and hear” from Trump.

Next year, the 116th Congress will be the most racially diverse in history due to a record number of black and Latino Democrats. There will be just two black Republicans, Representative Will Hurd of Texas and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Scott is performing a high wire act in dealing with Trump. He recently opposed Trump’s nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal judgeship. Farr has a long history of defending racially discriminatory legislation. “We are not doing a very good job of avoiding the obvious potholes on race in America and we ought to be more sensitive when it comes to those issues,” Scott said.

Scott similarly broke with his party earlier this year to oppose Ryan Bounds, another Trump judicial nominee with a troubling history on race.

Scott also flies away from Trump by championing economic development for black America. While Trump is cutting the Minority Business Development Agency and neighborhood block grants, Scott is crisscrossing the country on a national “Opportunity Tour,” pushing conservative ideas for boosting economic development in minority neighborhoods. Scott insisted on a provision in last year’s Trump tax cut law that creates “opportunity zones,” making economically disadvantaged areas eligible for new federal tax breaks.

But here again, up pops the problem of being a black conservative when all Republican politics is defined by loyalty to Trump. While he got a provision into the Trump tax bill as the price for his vote, Scott still ended up supporting a Trump tax cut that in the short run benefits the richest one percent of Americans. That historic scam is exploding the deficit to pay for tax breaks for corporations and the rich. That means less federal dollars to help poor neighborhoods in need of revitalization.  

I am rooting for Scott and other principled black conservatives to reclaim the mantle of the party of Lincoln. There is a lot to lose if black conservative approaches to racial progress are sunk due to Trump loyalty tests.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.