Author: Richard Cohen

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Opinion Viewpoint

Trump and the Liar’s Paradox

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Until recently, the famous liar’s paradox was a liar saying, “I am lying.” Now, though, it has to be when any of Donald Trump’s friends or associates claims not to have called the president an ignoramus, a liar, an egomaniac, or heroically unsuited for the presidency. Their choice is either to confirm the obvious or to appear a liar.

Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, has put them all on the spot. Wolff is a controversial figure whose journalistic reputation falls somewhat short of impeccable. What matters at the moment, though, is that most everything he has written in the excerpts I’ve read of Fire and Fury strikes me as true and, moreover, has already been said by others.

As every journalist knows, news is not that a dog bit a man but that a man bit a dog. In the same vein, it would be news if someone confided to an author or journalist that Trump was a reasonable man, self-effacing, considerate of others, cautious in his approach to major decisions, knowledgeable about the grand issues of national security, or, even, aware that his hero, Andrew Jackson, did not live to see the Civil War. This would be startling stuff. It would be similar in a way to the revisionist assessment of Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered a mumbler in his time, but understood now as a president who cleverly shielded his intentions by being purposely inarticulate. Maybe so.

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Donald Trump

From the White House and in the House of Lies known as the Republican National Committee have come denials aplenty. Who believes them? The president himself has gone into his Rumpelstiltskin act, stomping his foot and tweeting his innocence, but who believes him, either? Trump has effectively lent credence to Wolff’s reporting by having his lawyer threaten to sue Wolff for, of all things, “outright defamatory statements … about Mr. Trump, his family members, and the Company.” So huffed lawyer Charles Harder.

How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron,” was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth? When others in the White House said something similar, was that defamatory, or was it a statement of fact? Actually, these statements would constitute matters of opinion so clearly protected by the First Amendment that only a Supreme Court packed by Trump with caddies from his golf courses could rule in his favor. That same holds for the effort to restrain Wolff’s publisher from publishing the book. Ain’t going to happen.

As the eminent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams reminded me, the issue of prior restraint was settled by the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case. If Trump and his legal team want, I will arrange for them to see The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie about how The Washington Post came to publish the Pentagon Papers. The question there revolved around national security — not a president’s hurt feelings — and still the court supported the Post and The New York Times.

Trump’s anger has clouded his PR sense. In essence, he’s promoting the Wolff book. The president and the presidency are unraveling. Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar’s Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Minding Trump

In August, President Trump asked for a certain newspaper clipping, thus throwing the White House into the Trump version of Defcon 2. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly assigned two aides to investigate how the clip made its way to the president without being “cleared.” These aides, anonymous but clearly brave, determined that Keith Schiller, a former New York City police officer and Trump’s longtime body man, had slipped the “contraband newsprint” to the commander in chief. Soon, Schiller was gone from the White House.

Kelly, a retired Marine general but an American sniper at heart, had picked off another. This account of the “contraband newsprint” came from the New York Times last week and was written by three of the paper’s top reporters. Their reporting brings to mind Napoleon on St. Helena — his newspapers coming three months late and his days so empty that he took four hours’ worth of baths.

Trump’s newspapers arrive promptly, but the rest of his reading is censored and, instead of taking four-hour baths, he devotes as much time to watching TV. We also learned from the Times that Trump consumes about 12 Diet Cokes per day.

John Kelly

A new book by former Trump campaign staffers added other culinary details. On the road, the future president typically ate for dinner two McDonald’s Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate shake. Because the McDonald’s delivery system is both quick and direct, this diet poses a greater threat to the nation than the North Korean nuclear program.

But it is not, apparently, what the president eats that concerns Kelly. It is what he sometimes reads. Understandably, Kelly is constantly on the alert for a presidential friend slipping Trump a highly unauthorized news article. This happened over Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago. Some of Trump’s guests “passed him news clips that would never get around Kelly’s filters,” the Times reported. These guests were probably Trump’s old pals from New York and Palm Beach, billionaires with a nose for the oncoming socialist apocalypse who fear the president does not know how crooked Hillary Clinton really is or that the press is still insisting that Trump lost the popular vote or maintaining that it was his voice on that Access Hollywood tape when, upon repeated hearing, it just could be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Trump himself begins the day commendably early. (It’s the farmer in him.) The Times says he rises at 5:30 a.m. and turns on the TV. For some reason, he watches CNN — monitoring fake news, no doubt — and then self-medicates with “Fox & Friends.” Later, in an updated version of “hate week” from George Orwell’s 1984, he clicks on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. His friends suspect the program’s critical approach “fires him up for the day.”

Thus stoked, our commander in chief sallies forth to meet with probably the most illustrious collection of aides since Groucho hooked up with Chico and Harpo. The group includes Ivanka Trump, of the world of fashion; Jared Kushner, late of New York real estate; Hope Hicks, formerly of the Trump Organization; and, for some reason, H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser. What he knows about real estate or fashion is not at all clear. Then the president resumes a day of strenuous TV viewing.

The Times interviewed 60 advisers, associates, friends, and members of Congress for the article and reported that Trump spends four to eight hours a day watching cable news. Since the shows are mostly about him, he must recognize cable news as an extension of his old reality show, only he cannot fire Kim Jong Un. He can, however, insult him.

At the White House, Trump controls the remote control. This, it turns out, is the true “football” of this administration — comparable to the one that accompanies the president everywhere and contains nuclear codes. “No one touches the remote control except Mr. Trump and the technical support staff,” the Times reported.

I confess that by the end of the article, I found myself feeling sorry for the harried Kelly. He spends 14 hours of his day at his task, reining in a White House staff that once felt free to just drop in on the Oval Office, possibly interrupting Hannity or something equally important. As the Times also reported, Kelly not only monitors Trump’s phone calls but sometimes listens in. I finished the article no longer thinking of Napoleon in exile but of Jack Valenti, Lyndon Johnson’s aide, who said he slept better at night “because Lyndon Johnson is my president.” It’s a wonder Kelly sleeps at all.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Murdoch’s Legacy

Back in 1983, then-Representative Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) was fixing eggs for her kids when she looked down and got an idea about President Ronald Reagan. She called him “Teflon-coated” because nothing bad stuck to him. The same could be said about Rupert Murdoch. He’s the Teflon mogul.

Richard Cohen

This year, Fox News, which Murdoch controls, signed Bill O’Reilly to a $25 million-a-year contract, even though the company knew that O’Reilly had recently settled a sexual harassment claim for $32 million. That tidy sum was just the latest of O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements, the grand total being about $45 million.

Not only was 21st Century Fox aware of the settlements, it even helped O’Reilly come up with some of the money and included, in the new contract, that he would be fired if new allegations arose.

Not too long before, Fox News forced out its president, Roger Ailes, who also, it turned out, was a serial sexual harasser. In sum, Murdoch presided over a smarmy frat house where sexual harassment was rampant, and, for the longest time and through Herculean effort, the network managed to look away.

Somewhat in the same vein, Murdoch did not know that reporters at one of his British newspapers, the News of the World, were hacking into the phones of newsworthy people. Murdoch, a newspaperman to his bones, apparently never wondered where the scoops came from. One of the hacked phones belonged to a murdered school girl. This was too much even for Fleet Street, but Murdoch, three monkeys in one, apparently never saw, heard, or said anything.

Murdoch’s lifelong passion has been newspapers, but his real power base is Fox News. The network is to Republicans what the Daily Worker was to American communists — the only trusted news source. With the possible exception of the way the once isolationist Chicago Tribune dominated the Midwest, there has never been anything like it.

In the most recent presidential campaign, fully 40 percent of Trump voters said their main source of news was Fox News. Just 8 percent of them relied primarily on CNN — enough, nevertheless, to send Donald Trump baying at the moon about fake news. These figures are not only bad news for Fox News’ competitor, but they are also bad news for the Republican Party.

Fox News has been a force in converting the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. The network’s allegiance to Trump approaches mindless adoration. It once had the occasional nighttime skeptic, notably Megyn Kelly, but she is gone. In her stead has come Laura Ingraham, who spoke for Trump at the convention, and an even-more abrasive Tucker Carlson. As for the dominant Sean Hannity, he apparently so fears Breitbart News that he went soft on Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who is accused of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32. (Even Trump withheld judgment.)

Moore has become the GOP’s litmus test. The refusal or hesitancy to denounce him is a consequence of where Murdoch’s Fox News has led the party. The GOP has gone so far to the right that it is about to veer off a cliff. The Fox News audience is old, white, and in a cane-stomping rage at the way America is going. It believes in the media mendacity that Trump proclaims and Fox News incessantly echoes. Aside from Fox News, it will trust only similar sources.

But look. Look, in fact, at Virginia. In that state’s recent election, the repudiation of Trump was beyond argument. Non-whites went Democratic in a big way. So did the more affluent suburbs, young people, and women. What’s left for the GOP is rural, less educated, less affluent, and, to be charitable, less young. On the back of any envelope, it’s a bad business plan.

Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have long been friends. Murdoch has occasional access to the Oval Office, where he advises Trump — the amoral leading the immoral. Trump is 71; Murdoch is 86, and the median age of a prime-time Fox News viewer is 68. Anyone can see where this is going. The grim reaper has become a Democratic poll watcher.

Murdoch came to the United States from Australia to fulfill his gargantuan ambitions. He bought New York magazine by deceiving his friend Clay Felker. He buckled to China and booted the BBC from his Asian TV network. He has undoubtedly realized his ambitions but will be remembered not for what he built, but for what he destroyed — American political comity and a sensible Republican Party. No amount of Teflon can change that.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Predatory Behavior

In 2004, I wrote a column about Bill O’Reilly’s alleged sexual harassment of Andrea Mackris, one of his producers. Her suit charged that O’Reilly pressured her to have telephone sex with him. Mackris had taped some of their conversations, including O’Reilly’s threat that he would destroy any woman who retaliated against him. A transcript of that call was conveniently available on the Internet.

The consequence was hardly immediate: Thirteen years later, O’Reilly was fired.

I exhume O’Reilly and, if I may, Fox News in general, as a rebuttal to the argument that something awfully pernicious and immoral about liberalism accounts for the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

We are told over and over about how his alleged behavior was an open secret in show business but that the liberal press, in odious partnership with liberal politicians, looked the other way. Some of that is true — the bit about Weinstein’s behavior being an open secret. The man was known as a brute, possessed of a hair-trigger temper, shielded from the consequences of his behavior not by the press, but by a phalanx of lawyers and the purchased silence of his victims.

Without an accuser — or witnesses — willing to talk on the record, the hands of journalists were tied. Ken Auletta, who profiled Weinstein in 2002 for The New Yorker, was consistently thwarted by an inability to get Weinstein’s alleged victims to say what had happened.

But if Weinstein’s behavior was an open secret, then what about O’Reilly’s? He settled with Mackris for $9 million. Other women also agreed to settlements. In the end, he and 21st Century Fox paid out $32 million to settle sexual harassment suits.

The predations of Roger Ailes, the late chairman of Fox News, cost the network even more — not to mention costing Ailes his job. The list of his victims was long and distinguished — Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, to name just two — and here, too, was yet another open secret. Ailes’ behavior was not only long-standing — TV producer Shelley Ross wrote that Ailes had made unwanted sexual advances to her back in 1981 — but it had been reported in a 2014 book by Gabriel Sherman, then of New York Magazine.

The consequence? Ailes got raise after raise and, ultimately, a golden parachute worth about $40 million. Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of Fox News and much else, never had to account for the frat house he was running on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, and Ailes reportedly prepped Donald Trump for last year’s presidential debates. Trump did not object to associating with such a man. As we all know, besides wanting lower taxes, the two apparently had another thing in common.

The Democrats clearly do not have Trump’s sang-froid. They rushed to either return Weinstein’s money — he has been a steady Democratic Party contributor — or donate the filthy lucre to charity. But why? Weinstein’s money was legitimately earned and, while it is not unconnected to the man himself, it is unconnected to what his accusers say he did — and it was accepted in good faith. The rush by Democrats to rid themselves of this supposedly tainted money is in itself an ex post facto confession of guilt by association and plays into the argument of conservatives that something is rotten about liberalism.

After Representative Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), a vehement anti-abortion member of Congress, was revealed to have demanded that his mistress terminate a pregnancy, op-eds popped up informing us that Murphy was a typical conservative hypocrite. Some other conservatives were named, but of course we would not know the names of those who were ideologically consistent — maybe the vast majority.

Still, the urge to slander an entire class of people by using a single person is apparently so powerful it cannot be resisted. In Weinstein’s case, he has been used not only to accuse the press of inexcusable sloth but also to represent men in general, or maybe the man who lurks inside every man of power.

Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O’Reilly personifies American conservatism. If anything, they personify the truism that sexual misbehavior is nonideological — as Republican as Warren Harding, who carried on an affair with Nan Britton in the White House, or as Democratic as Bill Clinton, who did the same with Monica Lewinsky. Weinstein is not a typical liberal nor a typical man. He’s a typical beast. Leave it at that.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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The Endless War in Afghanistan

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, I differed with a friend who said I was wrong to support an invasion of Afghanistan to root out al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban. I said the United States had no choice but to make the terrorists and their Afghan hosts pay for what they had done. I insisted I was right. That, amazingly, was almost 16 years ago. I never expected to be right for so long.

Richard Cohen

Afghanistan has become the war without end. The United States cannot win it and cannot afford to lose it. The country consumes American wealth and lives. More than 2,300 American soldiers have died there. Some $828 billion has been spent there. Generals who once commanded there are deep into their retirement, and soldiers who fought there as youths are approaching middle age.

Kipling’s Brits could not control the country; neither could the Russians nor, come to think of it, can the Afghans. Afghanistan is not a country. It’s a chronic disease. The Trump administration, like the several that preceded it — George W. Bush twice and Barack Obama twice — is mulling a new approach. This time, there will be no certain date when American involvement will end — a bit of Obama-era silliness that, in effect, told the Taliban to hold on, be patient, and the Yanks will leave. President Trump has reportedly left decisions on troop levels to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general and a man of such reckless courage that he refused to fawn over Trump at a Cabinet meeting. Somewhere a medal awaits.

Mattis, however, is reportedly cool to a plan developed by Erik Prince that would entail turning over a substantial part of the Afghanistan effort to “contracted European professional soldiers” — what you and I call mercenaries. The term has an odious connotation, but there is no avoiding it. Prince is referring to British, French, Spanish, and other Europeans who are experienced soldiers. They would not, as is now the case with Americans, be rotated out of the country after a period of time to the effect that, in a sense, the United States is always starting anew. These contract soldiers would get about $600 a day to command Afghan troops and be embedded with them — much as U.S. Special Operations forces now are. Trouble is, the United States has a limited number of those forces.

I took the phrase “contracted European professional soldiers” from an op-ed Prince wrote for The Wall Street Journal. It seems the president read it and was intrigued. Good. The plan has its virtues, the most obvious one being that nothing else has worked — and more of the same is going to produce more of the same. The plan also has its difficulties, one of them being its provenance. Prince is the founder of the highly controversial security firm Blackwater, which he has since sold. While he owned it, though, some of its employees opened fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 civilians and wounding 20.

If Prince remains controversial, he also remains influential. He’s a former Navy SEAL who has entry to the White House and the CIA, and his sister is Betsy DeVos, the education secretary. Like his sister, Prince is rich and indefatigable. He has been peddling his Afghanistan plan for more than a year, and while it is frequently described with the pejorative term “for profit,” it has, as Prince contends, a pedigree. “Contract Europeans” were used by the British East India Company to rule India for more than 100 years.

Prince’s references to colonial rule are admiring. He has even revived the term “viceroy” to describe the person who would direct American policy in Afghanistan. By his count, the United States has had 17 military commanders in the past 15 years — not counting ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, and, of course, the inevitable special representatives, such as Richard Holbrooke, whose genius and energy were wasted by Obama. All that would stop. The viceroy would run things.

The war in Afghanistan is the longest in American history. A loss would allow the country to revert to a terrorist haven. A win would require a commitment in manpower that the United States is not willing to make. In almost 16 years, the fight in Afghanistan has gone from noble cause to onerous obligation. I don’t know if Prince has the answer, but he has come up with one way to sustain the fight at less cost in American lives and treasure. Will it work? I don’t know, but nothing else has.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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The “Fake News”

For reasons he cannot fathom, President Donald Trump has been asked recently about anti-Semitism, not just the rising number of incidents both here and abroad but also — as he oddly interpreted a question at his latest news conference — his own attitudes. As for the latter, he is, by his own testimony and that of others, no anti-Semite. If he were, he’d have to hate one of his own daughters, her husband, and their children, who are all observant Jews. So when he declares, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” his crude hyperbole aside, I believe him.

Richard Cohen

But either out of calculation or instinct, Trump operates as an anti-Semite of old in the way he describes the news media. Listen for the anti-Semitic tropes: Journalists are urban — or as the communists used to say, cosmopolitan. They live in a bubble, a kind of ghetto. They are rootless — another communist opprobrium — in the sense that few journalists work where they were born and are not responsible to their original community. They are politically and culturally liberal and secular, meaning they are free of conventional morality or religion. They can lie. They can sin. They can, as a result, be attacked with impunity.

Anti-Semitism is largely a spent force in America. We live in an era of Seinfeld and Streisand and Stewart. A Jew ran for vice president (Joe Lieberman), and one recently ran for president (Bernie Sanders), and both of last year’s presidential nominees have a child who was married by a rabbi. This is not your grandfather’s America. That one was virulently anti-Semitic. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Charles Lindbergh cuddled with Hitler, Jews fleeing the Holocaust were told to go somewhere else, and my mother had to go from Pearl Rosenberg to Pat Tyson to find work as a bookkeeper. All that is gone.

What remains, though, is the continuing need for some force that could serve as a scapegoat. Trump, a man of considerable ability in such matters, has found it in the media. As it always was with anti-Semitism, portions of the culture were already receptive. Many people needed to find someone to blame for a society that was becoming less comforting, less conventional, that was depressing their standard of living, closing their factories, favoring foreign labor — doing all the things that Jews once supposedly did. Here is Trump at his news conference last week:

“Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles, in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system. The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it, to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

This is a neo-Hitlerian statement — only the word “Jews” is missing. Not missing is the alien, secular big city, the unnamed “special interests,” the loaded word “profiting,” and, of course, the utter mystery of it all. Why are these people doing such things? Why do they lie? Why do they want to hurt “the American people”? Why? It’s because they are not-like-us. They are evil.

You may argue that this is nothing new. I remember Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s corrupt vice president, ranting against the liberal press. At one Agnew event I covered, his denunciation of the media brought Republican women out of their chairs, fists in the air, shouting their agreement and serenely unaware that Agnew’s words were probably written by future New York Times columnist William Safire.

George Wallace, both a racist and self-pronounced champion of the working man, castigated the press for its unaccountable hostility to Jim Crow, naming “the Time magazine,” “the Newsweek,” and so on. Still, even an Agnew or a Wallace would have shied away from Trump’s expansive conspiracy theory.

Trump has set himself an agenda. He must rid America of the evil that he describes and that is visible only to him and his followers. He must, in other words, rein in the news media, limit their scope and influence — a task that will become more and more urgent as he fails in his presidency. The fault for that, after all, cannot be his. He will go from florid-faced fool to brooding menace. It is an old pattern. Only the scapegoat is new.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Opinion The Last Word

Coach Trump

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Some time ago, the public intellectual Milton Himmelfarb put his finger on what the current presidential campaign is all about. Referring to his fellow Jews, he said that they “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Never mind the rearview mirror of PC tut-tutness, what Himmelfarb had observed was that not all the people all the time vote their pocketbooks. It’s not always the economy, stupid.

Himmelfarb, who died in 2006, lived long enough to see his quip extended to other social, ethnic, and cultural groups. In 2004, Thomas Frank did just that with his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? It wasn’t just that the state had gone deeply conservative, it was that its voters were doing away with programs that benefited them. Ideology was overshadowing economics.

Now Donald Trump proves the same point. We have oodles of polling data to show that Trump’s supporters are typically white males who topped out in high school. They are supposedly forlorn, adrift, not living better than their fathers and seeing their sons about to live even worse than they do. Trump, with his anti-immigrant, anti-trade, and anti-China policy promises to change all that. This check will forever be in the mail.

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There is, however, some contrary evidence that money alone is not at the root of the Trump evil. More recent studies suggest that racial and cultural isolation also play a role — maybe a dominant one. For instance, anti-immigrant feeling intensifies the farther one gets from the Rio Grande.

In other words, to know Mexicans is to know that they are hard-working and law-abiding, hardly the rapists and criminals of Trump’s description. Trump’s appeal may not, at bottom, be economic. It might be just plain emotional.

Liberals have a hard time with noneconomic explanations of political behavior. They subscribe to the Officer Krupke Rule of Life, propounded by me and named after the character in West Side Story who is mocked by gang members who spout liberal platitudes relieving them of all responsibility for being bad. It’s all society’s fault. This explains why it surprised liberals that the crime rate did not zoom during the recent deep recession. Most crimes are committed by criminals, not people who have been laid off.

Trump has an economic message, of course, but it’s beside the point. He doesn’t really have a jobs program. He has a get-even program. His appeal is visceral, emotional, nationalistic. He instinctively knows something about resentment and pride and the place they play when someone enters the voting booth. I don’t think he’s given these matters a moment’s thought. On the contrary, they come naturally to him. He makes his people feel good. He makes them feel proud. He makes them feel as Americans should. It’s a feeling I yearn for myself, although not at the cost of voting for Trump.

Hillary Clinton’s response to all this is quintessentially Hillary Clinton. Her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was — in the harshest put-down of all — one of her best efforts, but it was bloodless, an endless train of programs and ideas, all of them good, but none of them producing a snappy salute. Her message was economic, almost exclusively so: “My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States,” she said. Yes, yes, of course. All words. No music. She is the school’s principal. Trump is the football coach.

Trump’s advantage is that he has enemies — Mexicans, Muslims, the Chinese, criminals, idiotic government regulations, the media, and, by inference, a smothering political correctness that inhibits speech, seasoning hate with frustration. Never mind that his enemies are really scapegoats; he enables the angry and frustrated to vent. Their America has changed. It is less white and less Christian and more sexually permissive. It permits same-sex marriage and unisex bathrooms and has taken a blender to all sorts of sexual categories and made them all one. Trump’s supporters are bewildered. Uncle Sam does not know which bathroom stall to use.

Clinton represents that changed America. Her enemies are hers alone — the vast right-wing conspiracy, for instance — but not those of wretched white males. She promises them a job, but they have heard that before. What they want is pride, status, a return to when white males owned the culture, understood the culture, were the culture. Trump offers them the past. For that, they’ll sacrifice the future anytime.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Addicted to Trump

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Paris — I awake to brilliant sunshine. It is a glorious day here on the Left Bank, a short walk from the storied cafe Les Deux Magots, where I’m told Hemingway has preceded me.

What shall I do today? There is a wonderful exhibition of Picasso sculptures at the Picasso Museum and one of contemporary Chinese art at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and, right downstairs, a beckoning breakfast of succulent croissants and butter and coffee made just as I like it.

Oui, oui, so Parisian, but all that must wait. I fire up my laptop. I wonder what Donald Trump has been up to? Ah, he has questioned Hillary Clinton’s mental health. This is a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black — n’est-ce pas? — but it is precisely what I need in the morning, my Trump fix.

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With a sinking feeling, I have come to a horrible conclusion: I am addicted to Donald Trump. Wherever I am in the world, I awake to news about Trump. What has he said while I was asleep? What will he say as the day goes on? I travel with a laptop, an iPad, a smartphone. I am constantly checking on Trump, running up huge bills for data or whatever, consuming gigabytes (whatever they are) that will bust me in the long run. I will squander my fortune, leave nothing for my son and some worthy charities, all because of this addiction. I need a 10-step program, maybe even 12 steps.

I stop. I walk a bit to the cafe and then stop and check my phone: What has he done now? You have to admit that Trump is endlessly creative. He has insulted the disabled, the dead, the parents of the dead, women, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, African Americans, former POWs, the media, and, to get just a bit more specific, my employer, The Washington Post.

And then he says he did not say what you just heard him say. This is a version of the old Chico Marx line: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Or he says he was just joking. Or being sarcastic. He is an immense word flow, a human mudslide that comes at you, engulfs you, moves on, and then insists it didn’t happen. When cornered, he commits intellectual bankruptcy: Wipe the slate clean.

What’s next? Now that it seems that Trump will lose and Clinton, as a result, will win, I have come to appreciate him for his entertainment value. To tell you the truth, I was not looking forward to yet another presidential campaign in which nothing extemporaneous ever happened.

Imagine Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton! Where’s the remote?

I long ago tired of politicians who never say anything, adhere to their talking points, and avoid all controversy. They employ the word “frankly,” which is a “tell” that a lie is coming. “Frankly, I don’t look at the polls. The only poll that matters, frankly, is the one they hold on Election Day.” They frequently avoid answering a question by invoking “the American people” — as in, “I don’t think the American people care that I lied about going to college.”

Frankly, they do. But never mind. It has become commonplace to call Trump a reality TV star. That is said as an aspersion, the way Ronald Reagan was called an actor. But Reagan’s acting experience, his ability to talk to the camera and not yell to the hall, is what helped make him such a good politician.

It is the same with Trump. Just as every installment of a reality television show must have conflict, so does almost every one of his campaign days produce a shocking moment. His genius is being able to keep them coming. So I obsessively pay attention. I know that I can turn my back on Clinton and not miss anything much. She will stick to the script, talk the talking points, and maybe make a misstep or two, but they are nothing compared with what Trump is likely to say on even a slow day. I am hooked.

It is a lovely day in Paris. I am with the woman I love, and we are sitting in our favorite cafe for breakfast. I have a croissant and coffee, but the tension is building. Suddenly, my phone twitches with news. Did Trump really just call Clinton “Hillary Rotten Clinton”?

Yes. I am at peace.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Hillary Mans Up

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

What if Hillary Clinton were a man? What if she were a 68-year-old male rather than a 68-year-old female? Would we think differently of her? Her raised voice would be lower. She would be better at physically commanding the stage. Her indomitability might be seen as manly. If she were taller an

Jackson Baker

d bigger, might she have been able to get away with saying nothing about her email server — as Donald Trump has with his tax returns? As they say, I’m just askin’.

And I am asking because the dislike of Clinton is so palpable that it has become akin to a prejudice. I understand the criticisms and don’t reject them out of hand. She has been slippery. She has fibbed. She has used a private email server, which was wrong and careless. She has been the marital partner of a man who has taken other partners. She did not leave him, as many women wanted her to do. To them, she became the personification of the female doormat.

Still, it does not all add up. I know her a bit, but I know others who know her quite well. In the corners of rooms dedicated to ugly gossip and whispered betrayals, what you hear from those who know her is not agreement with the general consensus but puzzlement: She’s warm. She’s bright. She’s charming. She has a great sense of humor.

And yet, on the podium, these qualities are rarely in sight. Her voice escalates, the pitch rises, the emphasis is often misplaced. She is rhetorically wrong-footed. Her smile seems fake, the wave is to no one, the laugh sounds manufactured. She is defensive. She fights for privacy, yet she has chosen politics played on the most expansive of all scales. If she wins, she will be a renter in a house owned by all of us. She will remain under continuous observation.

I met Clinton during her husband’s first campaign for the White House. It was 1992, New Hampshire, and both Clintons had stopped at a coffee shop to greet the folks and get something to eat. It was Bill Clinton’s campaign, so he took question after question, exhausting much of the county before finally sitting down at the counter. Hillary joined him. So did I. There was one more question to go.

The waitress was a single mother. She wanted to go to college. Was there some sort of program that could help her? Bill started to answer. There was this and there was that, all of them designated with some government number, and there was yet another — and here he stopped to put some eggs in his mouth, and Hillary finished the sentence for him. They weren’t a team. They were a machine. She was no ordinary political spouse, whatever that might mean or might have meant. This one was different. This was Hillary Clinton.

I would, to get right down to it, vote for Kim Kardashian over Donald Trump, so my support of Clinton comes easy. Still, I am vexed by her rampant unpopularity, especially among the young women who found Bernie Sanders so exciting. I had to recall the wisdom of Gloria Steinem, who knows, because she was once a young woman herself, that aging is tough on women. When they are young, they are cherished, adored. But as they age, they become less adored — by men, sometimes, but by employers, too. They have children, complicating their lives. Every day-care center is constructed out of glass ceilings.

Sanders, somewhere along the line, had a child out of wedlock. Imagine if Clinton had done the same. After Bill’s sex scandal broke, I never thought Hillary would accept the suggestion of Representative Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) and run for the Senate. I thought she’d seek privacy, a place to nurse her wounds. But she jumped into the race. She worked New York state hard, campaigning in every county. And she won.

She will win this time, too, but it will be harder than it ought to be. It will be hard because she can be tone-deaf as a politician, because lots of people find her to be shrill, and because she has an awesome ability to turn a political misdemeanor into a firestorm. But as Trump lazes through the campaign, relying on his unreliable instincts, she will work harder than he knows how.

As a woman, she’s always had to.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Joe Biden for Veep. Again.

In my circle (an expression I want to revive), Joe Biden is being mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate. Of course, Biden is already vice president, and my circle is not exactly Hillary Clinton’s, but more than any of the others mentioned, Biden would balance the ticket. He’s not black, and he’s not Hispanic, and he’s not a woman, but he is an open-handed, warm-hearted, old-fashioned pol. He’s the politician Clinton, try as she might, simply cannot be.

Vice President Joe Biden

Alas, Biden might already have taken himself out of consideration. “I’m not interested in re-upping for VP,” he told George Stephanopoulos the other day. “I’ll do anything I can to help [Hillary] win. And I think she’s going to win, but I have been proud to serve for eight years as vice president, and I think that’s enough.”

Statements such as this are the political equivalents of “the check is in the mail.” An expression of non-interest is traditional in these matters, politics being the last place where no does not mean no. Stay close to the phone, Joe.

Let us now look over the field. They are, of course, marvelous people, but this being presidential politics with ticket-balancing and all, they are also categories. Two of them are black males — Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (D). Three are Hispanics — Representative Xavier Becerra (D-California.), Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. They are good men all, even though all of them could pass through an airport with no one asking for a selfie.

Clinton is also said to be considering Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. They are the white guys, some from battleground states, but none of them have vaunted political organizations — not that anyone does anymore. Then comes former NATO commander James Stavridis, an admiral. The lone woman being mentioned is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the only one who has managed to attract a national constituency of her own.

So, talking strictly categories, what do we have? The primaries showed beyond a doubt that Clinton is beloved by African Americans. Putting a black male on the ticket is not going to help any. Donald Trump, with his lazy denunciation of David Duke, has already seen to it that he is not going to draw more than half a dozen back votes.

Hispanics: Here again, Trump has a problem. He has so alienated the Hispanic community with his call for mass deportations and his characterization of Mexican immigrants as rapists, that if he gets more than 100 votes out of an estimated 55 million, it will be prima facie case of voter fraud.

A woman: There’s already one on the ticket, and Trump is glued to a passé, Sinatra-style sexism. He just loves the broads. But the women don’t love him.

White males: This is Trump’s supposed fan base, but none of the white males being mentioned have what it takes to appeal to the Trump types. As for Stavridis, Clinton does not need her foreign policy credentials augmented. She’s a regular Bismarck. Besides, Stavridis is not a politician, and a presidential campaign is not for amateurs. One bush-league comment and there goes the news cycle.

So we come down to Biden. If anyone can appeal to Trump’s white voters, it’s Biden. He’s a great campaigner, a regular pol, who got elected to the Senate seven times. He is, in FDR’s phrase for Al Smith, a “happy warrior” who could bring some joy to what could be a dour ticket. Even better, he could be president in an instant, which is what the job is all about.

Reconsider, Joe. You won’t have to move (such a hassle), and Clinton could use you. And although the wits in the media will call you Vice President for Life, you’ll be out there taking on Trump. You were born for this fight. Uncle Sam needs you.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.