Tuesday’s Debate: A Milestone in the History of Climate Politics

In Tuesday night’s demolition derby of a debate, President Donald Trump did not even pretend to confront white supremacists. He didn’t pretend to respect the legitimacy of the election, either. So it was telling that after moderator Chris Wallace asked him the first-ever question about climate change in a general election presidential debate, Trump did pretend to support electric vehicles.

“I’m all for electric cars,” he said. “I’ve given big incentives to electric cars.”

In fact, Trump is not all for electric cars; he’s mocked them, and his policies have penalized them. He certainly hasn’t given big incentives to electric cars; he actually tried to eliminate the existing incentives. But while Trump’s 90-minute tornado of unfiltered insults and right-wing red meat suggested that he’s happy to run as an enemy of cities, the news media and racial sensitivity, he clearly would prefer not to be seen as an enemy of the climate.

That is a milestone in the history of climate politics. Global warming has been dismissed for years as a niche concern for the tree-hugging fringe, but not only has it become the kind of mainstream issue that even a moderator from Fox News deemed worthy of prime time, it has become the kind of hot-button issue that even a Republican president who used to call it a hoax manufactured in China feels the need to dissemble about. If hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice, political lies are the tribute that unpopularity pays to popularity—and 2020 polling has found that climate science and climate action are both popular.

Green cars are especially popular; a survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 82 percent of Americans support tax rebates for energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels. That helps explain why Trump claimed to be one of them, even though his 2020 budget would have eliminated a tax credit for electric vehicles that was enacted during the George W. Bush administration and expanded during the Barack Obama administration. Trump made fun of electric vehicles during a 2019 rally in Michigan—“Darling, where do I get a charge?”—and scoffed that “all-electric isn’t going to work” in a Fox Business interview. And his rollback of Obama’s tough fuel-efficiency standards, along with his efforts to relax clean air regulations, could be devastating blows to zero-emissions electric vehicles.

Wallace’s original question was whether Trump believes the scientific consensus about climate change in light of the fires burning in California; the president dodged it rather than repeat his recent assertions that the science can’t be trusted and the earth is about to start cooling. When Wallace pressed him to clarify whether he accepted that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, he grudgingly conceded: “I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes.” That made political sense, too, since the Yale survey found 72 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, while only 12 percent don’t.

The survey found the public also agreed by a 61-29 margin that global warming will harm Americans, by a 56-44 margin that it’s already harming Americans, and by a 60-11 margin that the president should do more to address it—all of which helps explain why the president tried to tack towards the climate majority on the debate stage.

“We now have the lowest carbon,” Trump said. “If you look at our numbers now, we are doing phenomenally.”

America’s emissions are indeed lower in 2020, but that’s because of the coronavirus lockdowns, not because of Trump’s energy or environmental policies, which have had the consistent objectives of relaxing restrictions on polluting industries and promoting the mining and drilling of fossil fuels. Trump scrapped Obama’s Clean Power Plan that would have regulated carbon emissions—which, incidentally, had 75-24 support in the Yale poll—as well as rules limiting mercury, soot and other pollution from coal-fired power plants. As Biden tried rather inarticulately to point out, Trump’s administration has also ditched rules limiting methane emissions by oil and gas companies, accelerated permits for drilling, mining and logging on public lands, rolled back protections for wetlands, and made the United States the only nation to announce its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords.

Nevertheless, Trump tried to portray himself as a champion of clean air and water—or, as he put it, “immaculate air, immaculate water”—another nod to the power of environmental issues, especially among the suburban women who have been such a problem for his reelection campaign. The only specific environmental policy Trump brought up, aside from his nonexistent electric vehicle incentives, was his support for a global initiative to plant a trillion trees, which he misidentified as the Billion Tree Project. “It’s very exciting for a lot of people,” he said, although he didn’t really make it sound like he was one of those people.

Trump’s message was that he’s an environmentalist, but Biden is a radical environmentalist who would destroy the American economy with left-wing nonsense. Again, though, he had to resort to wild falsehoods to make that case. He attacked the Obama-Biden administration’s Clean Power Plan for somehow “driving energy prices through the sky,” even though it never went into effect. He accused Biden of wanting to spend $100 trillion on the climate, using a sketchy right-wing analysis of the Green New Deal that Biden doesn’t even support, and also of wanting to ban cows and air travel, another misleading reference to the Green New Deal, or at least to a list of talking points about the Green New Deal that Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s office released and then hastily retracted.

Biden, on the other hand, seemed delighted to discuss the substance of issues he sees as politically advantageous as well as globally consequential. When Wallace said he’d like to discuss climate change, Biden blurted out: “So would I!” He talked with a lot of passion, though not a lot of focus, about his role overseeing the Obama stimulus that helped bring down the cost of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources; about “weatherization” programs that could put unemployed Americans to work caulking windows and otherwise upgrading the energy efficiency of homes and businesses; and about his idea to pay the Brazilian government to crack down on the destruction of the carbon-rich Amazon. He also called for electrifying the federal government’s fleet of vehicles and installing 500,000 charging stations on America’s roads—a solution for the Darling-where-do-I-get-a-charge problem.

Wallace also challenged Biden about the fiscal and economic cost of his climate plan, which irritated many climate activists, but it’s a legitimate question that led to one of Biden's strongest moments in the chaotic debate. He argued not only that his $2 trillion plan will provide millions of jobs in green industries and green infrastructure projects, a common Democratic argument, but that the cost of inaction would be far greater, since America is already spending more than ever on climate-driven floods, hurricanes, fires and droughts.

“We’re in real trouble,” Biden said. “Look what happened in the Midwest with these storms that come through and wipe out entire sections and counties in Iowa. They didn’t happen before. They’re because of global warming.”

Back in 2012, CNN’s Candy Crowley explained after a presidential debate that she considered including a question for “you climate change people” but changed her mind because “we knew the economy was still the main thing.” Eight years later, there’s increasing recognition from politicians as well as media bigwigs that all people are climate change people, and that there’s no way to isolate the economy from the energy that fuels and powers it or the climate disasters that increasingly threaten it. It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be another year of presidential debates without a climate question, and the worse the problem gets, the more pressure candidates will face to embrace the science and call for action.

That doesn’t mean that every candidate will make climate warriors happy with every answer. Trump never did acknowledge that climate change is contributing to California’s fires, arguing that the more pressing issue was bad forest management, which was a reasonable case to make. Biden made a point of distancing himself from the Green New Deal, prompting Trump, in a weird moment of off-message punditry, to declare: “You just lost the radical left.”

But Biden isn’t tailoring his message to the radical left. He’s aiming for the 63 percent of Americans who are worried about climate change, the 86 percent who support research into renewable energy, the 56 percent who say it’s important to their presidential vote. And while it’s obvious from his rhetoric as well as his record that Trump doesn’t truly care about the climate, it's a reflection of the changing political climate that he felt the need to pretend he does.

Debates commission says it will add order to Trump and Biden’s remaining showdowns

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Wednesday that the prior night’s face-off between Donald Trump and Joe Biden demonstrated the need for “additional structure” in the format of the remaining forums to “ensure a more orderly discussion.”

The nonpartisan commission, historically responsible for organizing and producing the quadrennial televised primetime events, added in a statement that it “will be carefully considering the changes that it will adopt and will announce those measures shortly.”

The announcement comes a day after the first 2020 presidential debate, conducted Tuesday night in Cleveland, drew almost universally negative reviews from media pundits and elected officials of both major political parties.

Democrats condemned Trump’s behavior over the course of the 90-minute broadcast, which saw the Republican incumbent repeatedly bulldoze through Biden’s responses and interrupt moderator Chris Wallace with a barrage of baseless claims.

The White House’s allies and conservative commentators, meanwhile, have charged that Wallace challenged Trump more than he did Biden, and asserted that the Fox News anchor displayed bias toward the Democratic presidential nominee.

In its statement Wednesday, the commission commended Wallace for his “professionalism and skill” throughout the debate, and revealed that it “intends to ensure that additional tools to maintain order are in place for the remaining debates.”

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh criticized the announcement Wednesday, contending that the commission was only considering changes to the debate format “because their guy got pummeled last night.”

“President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs,” Murtaugh said in a statement. “They shouldn’t be moving the goalposts and changing the rules in the middle of the game.”

Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in her own statement that the former vice president would answer voters’ questions at the next debate in Miami “under whatever set of rules the Commission develops to try to contain Donald Trump's behavior.”

“The president will have to choose between responding to voters about questions for which he has offered no answers in this campaign — or repeating last night’s unhinged meltdown,” Bedingfield said.

In the hours since the candidates’ bitter clash — during which Trump attacked Biden’s family and Biden called Trump a racist and a clown — some Democrats have suggested their nominee should not participate in the two remaining debates, scheduled to take place next month.

At the very least, they argue, the commission should allow the moderator the ability to mute the candidates’ microphones if they violate the rules of the debate, agreed upon beforehand by both campaigns.

Top Biden campaign officials said Tuesday night and Wednesday morning that he plans to appear at both upcoming debates. The second debate, a town hall-style event scheduled for Oct. 15, is set to operate under a different format entirely, while the third debate on Oct. 22 was slated to be structured identically to the first.

Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

No, They Shouldn’t Cancel the Debates

The calls came from the Atlantic, from Slate, on the homepage of the New York Times; from commentators on MSNBC and CNN. Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s estimable media watcher, put it succinctly: “Failing some radical reform in the debate format, there’s no reason for the next two debates to take place as scheduled.”

It’s a rational response to what passed for a presidential debate Tuesday night, featuring a moderator alternately demanding and pleading with the sitting president of the United States to stop interrupting his opponent with endless verbal assaults, including insults to the non-elite status of Joe Biden’s alma mater, and what might have been the first scatological slur in debate history. (Responding to Joe Biden’s frequent “Number one, number two” rhetorical tick, Trump responded: “You’re a number two.”)

There is, however, a reason not to kill off a key feature of modern presidential politics, even if in the wake of Tuesday night, it may seem like a mercy killing. The reason? The format of the next Biden-Trump debate, scheduled for October 15 in Miami, is setting us up for something different. This will be a “town hall” format, with undecided voters posing questions to the candidates. C-SPAN’s Steve Scully is the moderator.

In past elections, the town hall has provided some of the more memorable debate moments: Bill Clinton walking into the audience to ask a woman to describe her concerns; President George H.W. Bush glancing impatiently at his watch; Al Gore striding over to “invade” George W. Bush’s space in 2000, to be met with a curt nod; Donald Trump looming behind Hillary Clinton four years ago (an attempt at dominance that Clinton now regrets not answering with a sharp retort in the moment).

True, town hall questions tend to the eminently predictable, combining personal testimony with impossibly broad inquiries. (“I have $100,000 in student debt; what will you do to make college more affordable?” … “How can you bring this divided nation together?”) But in this campaign, the format offers the best chance to salvage the debates. Why? Because the candidates will be responding to “regular people,” who are sharing these personal, sometimes unsophisticated, questions to a potential president. In this format, the spectacle of, say, Trump interrupting Biden while he’s talking to a citizen about health care would be even more egregious than what happened Tuesday night in Cleveland. It requires the “interrupter” to literally interpose himself between citizen and candidate, something even an instinctive “dominator” like Trump might hesitate to do while he’s still attempting to win votes.

Much has been made of Trump’s flagrant flouting of the debate rules on Tuesday, more extreme than anything he did in 2016, but one important difference was the lack of any real audience. Trump’s greatest campaign talent is playing to a physical crowd, stirring them up and even getting a laugh; with a tiny audience literally prohibited from reacting, his only move was to attack the two men on the stage with him. That won’t be the situation in a town hall, where the audience is woven into the proceedings—even if it still doesn’t amount to a Trump-style packed house.

Further, with the audience as the interrogator, the moderator is relieved of the burden of both keeping a semblance of order while posing the questions. Should Biden and Trump begin bickering, Scully can remind them that there are real people waiting to ask their questions. To strain an image, even the most disputatious of family arguments sometimes cease when the neighbors arrive.

For Biden, the town hall is a format suited to his strength: Making empathetic connections with an audience while sparing him the demands of the more formal debate stage to demonstrate quick recall. (He did not always meet that demand Tuesday. When Trump demanded to know if any law enforcement officials backed him, Biden had no answer; in fact, earlier this month, 175 present and former officials had done just that. On another occasion, Biden both rejected the idea of a "Green New Deal" and said it would “pay for itself.”)

As for Trump, even his supporters recognized that his behavior had likely done himself significant harm, suggesting he may have been too hot, too intemperate. When New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin, an unfailing Trump apologist, calls Trump’s strategy, “A very bad plan … that made him look boorish,” you know it was not a good night for the sitting president. Instant polls by NBC and CNN found Trump’s performance a failure. It is possible (barely) that even Trump himself will not buy the judgment of campaign manager Bill Stepien that “President Trump just turned in the greatest debate performance in presidential history,” and that he will decide to tone things down and bring a measure of civility to Miami. (Suggestion: if you’re looking to lower the temperature, maybe do not use Rudy Giuliani as one of your debate advisers.)

All that said, there is no guarantee we’ll get something better in Round 2. Indeed, given the freedom of the candidates to roam about the stage, and given Trump’s hunger to physically dominate, and Biden’s previous statement that he would “beat the hell out of Trump” if they were in high school, we may wind up witnessing the first fistfight in debate history.

It’s a risk worth taking. For all the justifiable complaints about the debates, and the scarcity of undecided voters this year, they do provide rare occasions where voters can make judgments about the temperament and character of the men and women who seek great power. We should pause before scrapping that flawed but valuable tool.

Chamber of Commerce and top political strategist part ways amid turmoil

Scott Reed, the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Tuesday that he resigned from the organization after a political shift at the business lobbying powerhouse.

The move comes amid mounting fears among Republicans — including many within the organization — that the traditionally conservative Chamber is moving to the left after endorsing roughly two dozen freshman House Democrats for reelection this year.

“I can no longer be part of this institution as it moves left,” Reed told POLITICO.

However, the Chamber of Commerce offered a different version of events, saying it had fired Reed "for cause."

"An internal review has revealed that Reed repeatedly breached confidentiality, distorted facts for his own benefit, withheld information from Chamber leadership and leaked internal information to the press," a Chamber spokesperson said in a statement. "We have the documentation of his actions and it is irrefutable. Our decision is not based on a disagreement over political strategy but rather it is the result of Reed's actions."

The House Democratic endorsements touched off a wave of recriminations inside the Chamber this summer, with donors and local business leaders pushing back against some of the proposed endorsements. But they were unable to stop the process. And after the endorsements came out, President Donald Trump called Chamber CEO Tom Donohue to complain, while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that he no longer wanted the Chamber’s support.

Reed’s resignation was first reported by the New York Times.

Reed has deep ties within the GOP; he worked his way up the party ranks and ran Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. He has been with the Chamber of Commerce since 2012, as the organization ramped up its political spending on behalf of Republican members of Congress during the Obama administration. Reed orchestrated the Chamber’s multimillion-dollar campaign to flip the Senate to Republican control in 2014.

But with Senate Democrats challenging for the majority in 2020, the Chamber has adjusted its approach. In a staff meeting last week, Jack Howard, one of the organization’s senior vice presidents and top lobbyists, outlined plans to reach out to Senate Democrats and “normalize our relationships” with the party.

Meanwhile, Republican criticism of the organization has increased. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview that he was not concerned about the Chamber potentially contributing to Democrats.

"Honestly at this point, I think they're so confused about what they're about that they probably don't make much difference," McConnell said.

Kevin McLaughlin, the executive director of Senate Republicans' campaign committee, called the Chamber's recent changes "difficult to watch."

"It's been difficult to watch what was once the gold standard for influence and advocacy slowly decline over the past few years, and now it appears the last vestige of relevance has just walked out the door," McLaughlin said.

Reed said that his decision to quit was linked to the Chamber’s unwillingness to spend significant money on Senate races in the closing days of the election. The Chamber has backed a number of endangered Senate Republicans, such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), but it has spent far less money in 2020 than it did in 2014, when it put tens of millions of dollars behind GOP Senate candidates.

“They would not let me spend Senate money down the home stretch,” Reed said.

He added that the Chamber is “hedging its bets with Democrats now.”

John Bresnahan contributed to this article.

James Baker’s 7 Rules for Running Washington

When James A. Baker III came to Washington in the mid-1970s to take an obscure post in the Commerce Department, he had no prior experience in government and had hardly even voted regularly up until that point in his life. He had only been a Republican for a few years, and his father, grandfather and great-grandfather — all distinguished Texas lawyers like Baker himself — had imposed a strict family creed of staying out of politics. For his first 40 years, Baker had followed their lead.

And yet, within a year of arriving in the capital as a nobody in the Ford administration, with little to recommend him but his friendship with an up-and-comer named George H.W. Bush, his doubles partner from the Houston Country Club, Baker somehow found himself running the campaign of the incumbent president of the United States. Over the next few decades, Baker would go on to run five presidential campaigns, winning two of them, and hold a number of the most powerful positions in Washington, serving as Ronald Reagan’s White House chief of staff and Treasury secretary, and Bush’s secretary of state. For a generation, in fact, from the end of Watergate to the end of the Cold War, every Republican president relied on Baker to manage his campaign, his White House, his world. Baker brought them to office or helped them stay there, then steered them through the momentous events that followed. He was Washington’s indispensable man.

So how did he do it? Working on his biography these past few years, we found that was the question virtually everyone had about Baker, now 90. In today’s dysfunctional Washington, awe at Baker’s accomplishments is a rare bipartisan phenomenon, and we heard from players in both parties who wanted to know Baker’s secret, the clue to how an obscure corporate lawyer could come to the capital, their capital, and succeed at a series of the hardest, most consequential jobs in the world. It’s a question that seems all the more relevant today amid political discord so epic that Congress and the Trump White House cannot even agree on how to give money away to hurting Americans during a deadly pandemic and recession. Baker, a relentless competitor who hated to lose but still believed in having a Scotch after work with his adversaries, excelled at just the sort of deal-making that no longer seems possible — real deals of the world-changing kind, with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad.

The politics of Washington have changed, perhaps beyond recognition, from Baker’s heyday. No matter how talented or brilliant the negotiator, it’s hard to envision a modern-day Jim Baker putting together a bipartisan coalition for tax reform or enlisting Russians to help with a war in the Persian Gulf. And even though Baker is widely considered the gold standard for a White House chief of staff, it’s safe to say that even he would have a hard, if not impossible, task in managing this unmanageable presidency. Yet Baker’s story is also a master class in the acquisition, exercise and preservation of power in the capital, and there the lessons are far more eternal. It was undoubtedly an unusual combination of luck, skill, hard work and timing that made Baker’s extraordinary career. But his playbook for courting the press, slaying bureaucratic rivals, exacting revenge and outwitting the Pentagon could serve as a guide for his aspiring 21st-century successors today.

Here, then, are Jim Baker’s rules for winning in Washington.

1. Titles don’t matter. (But good real estate does.)

There is no Baker move more storied than his outmaneuvering of Ed Meese to secure the preeminent position in Reagan’s White House, and it involved the simple lawyerly act of writing down on paper what his rival thought he wanted most: a grand-sounding title, giving Meese the status of a Cabinet member that Baker would not have. But vanity, and Baker’s smarts, were Meese’s undoing.

Baker, an outsider to Reagan’s inner circle who had run two presidential campaigns against him, was viewed suspiciously by Meese, who expected to become Reagan’s chief of staff himself and was hurt when Baker got the job instead. Ordered by Reagan to placate Meese, Baker proposed that they codify an arrangement by which the White House would work, and listed each of their portfolios in an agreement they both eventually signed in November 1980. In it, Meese got the status he wanted, the title of counselor to the president as well as Cabinet rank, but Baker secured the prime real estate — in this case, the corner West Wing office historically used by the chief of staff, meaning he would be the one to host meetings of the top staff. He also guaranteed himself equal rights with Meese to attend any meeting with Reagan (including those with Meese). And, most important of all, he secured full control over the real levers of influence in Reagan’s, or any, White House: personnel appointments, the communications and legislative offices, and the paper flow to the president. Meese had aimed for prestige, but Baker got the power.

A few years after that, Baker showed the emptiness of titles again when he managed to sideline one of the most persistent of his internal critics, White House political director Ed Rollins. Rollins had often criticized Baker as insufficiently ideologically committed to the Reagan revolution and, perhaps even more to the point, had already publicly claimed credit for organizing Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign when Baker hit upon his solution. Calling Rollins to his office one day, Baker told him that he had been selected for the great honor of serving as Reagan’s campaign manager. It was an impressive title but accomplished exactly what Baker wanted: getting a rival out of the White House and exiled to the campaign offices, while keeping control of all the important decisions himself. Years later, Baker made no effort to hide his motivation. “We wanted to get Rollins offline,” he told us, “and the way to do that was to make him the campaign manager.”

2. Don’t lie to journalists. (And always call them back, the closer to deadline, the better.)

Baker, who eventually became famous for his advanced skills in the care and feeding of journalists, learned this rule early in his Washington career, during the epic fight over the 1976 Republican National Convention. A political novice, Baker had found himself in charge of counting delegates for incumbent President Gerald R. Ford as he sought to beat back the challenge from conservative insurgent Ronald Reagan in what would end up being the last genuinely contested convention in either party. Reagan’s campaign manager, John Sears, blustered in advance of the convention, telling the press pack that his man had the advantage, but it turned out that his counts were inflated or even fictional. Baker, on the other hand, gave the media accurate information even when it showed how close the race really was, winning credibility with the national political reporters. He would internalize the lesson for later on. And, indeed, Baker’s role in that campaign earned him the first of what would be many flattering stories to come. “‘Miracle Man’ Given Credit for Ford Drive,” read the headline in the New York Times.

But if Baker did not lie to the press, he found many ways to stroke, manipulate and spin the Fourth Estate as he rose in Washington. In the Reagan White House, Baker tried to return any call from a reporter by the end of the same day. He was acutely aware of reporters’ deadlines and knew that if he called a broadcast journalist shortly before the evening news went on the air, he could shape the resulting report. If his aide Margaret Tutwiler popped her head into his office in the late afternoon to say that ABC’s Sam Donaldson was on the phone and wanted something fresh for broadcast, Baker was sure to come up with a new tidbit and have her pass it along to him.

Sometimes, more aggressive strategies of press management were required. In 1990, treacherous weather nearly derailed a superpower summit with the Soviets, which had been set to take place aboard ships in Malta. When the logistics debacle threatened to become the narrative, Baker, by then the secretary of state, told Tutwiler to immediately feed the media horde a distraction: 17 new proposals President Bush had brought to the meeting to roll out for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and which they had not planned to release until the end of the summit. “Dump!” he yelled into the phone, and she did.

3. If Dick Cheney (or anyone else) gets in your lane, run over him “with all possible alacrity.”

Collegiality only goes so far in the upper reaches of the Cabinet, any Cabinet. The first Bush administration had an unusually collaborative national security team, especially compared with its predecessors. But in a town where the perception of power often translated into power itself, Baker was still determined to maintain his prerogatives as secretary of state, especially in public. In the spring of Bush’s first year in office, amid a pause to re-examine policy toward the Soviet Union and its reformist young leader Gorbachev, Baker was furious when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney went on CNN and expressed doubts about Gorbachev’s chances of success. The Bush team was betting that Gorbachev’s reforms were for real, and, besides, foreign policy was Baker’s lane. While Cheney had been a friend of Baker’s for two decades and had helped make his Washington career by securing his promotion during the Ford administration, he had no business speaking out on diplomatic issues.

“Cheney, you’re off the reservation,” Cheney told us Baker said when the aggravated secretary of state called.

“I got it,” Cheney said. “Won’t happen again.”

But Baker was not done. He wanted to make sure Cheney’s view would not represent the administration’s position. He called the president as well as Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, and told them the White House should distance itself from Cheney’s remarks. “Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity,” Baker told Scowcroft. The White House did just that. Cheney learned his lesson.

4. Never let ’em see you pee.

Baker’s relentlessness was one of the reasons for his success as a diplomat — that, and an iron bladder. He would need both in dealing with the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. Assad was famously obstreperous, but Baker was determined to translate victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War with Iraq into a genuine opening for a broader Middle East peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. To start, that meant holding an unprecedented peace conference in Madrid at which the Arabs, including the Palestinians, would actually sit down collectively with an Israeli delegation in public for the first time. Which meant Baker needed Assad to agree.

Over the course of 1991, Baker traveled to Damascus for 11 meetings with Assad. Each visit was an ordeal, an endurance contest. Sessions lasted five or six hours, in one case nine hours and 46 minutes, all in a room with barely working air-conditioning that challenged even the hardiest negotiators to keep alert. While Assad launched into long, repetitive lectures about the evils of the Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing up the Middle East between Britain and France after World War I, as well as other crimes of Western imperialism, his guests gulped down lemonade and Turkish coffee to keep awake. But Assad never stopped for a bathroom break, almost as if it were a test of manhood. Eventually, in fact, Baker did concede in one meeting, perhaps seven hours in, when he pulled out a white handkerchief and waved it at Assad. “I give up,” the secretary of state said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” Baker and his staff dubbed this Bladder Diplomacy. Eventually that, and all the listening, paid off, and Assad agreed to participate in the Madrid conference with Israel. It had taken 63 hours of talks.

5. Revenge is best served cold.

Baker preferred to make deals using carrots rather than sticks, but he wasn’t above using his power to bludgeon those who dared to cross him. Even if it took him years. In 1986, amid complicated negotiations that yielded the first sweeping tax reform in a generation, Baker, then the Treasury secretary, took time out to figure out how to exact revenge on the HoustonChronicle for endorsing his Democratic opponent for Texas attorney general eight years earlier, in 1978, in what ended up being his one and only effort to secure elected office in his own right. The Chronicle’s decision not to back Baker had nettled him for nearly a decade. He took the opportunity for retribution by using the tax bill to force the publisher to give up control of the newspaper. The Chronicle was owned by the Houston Endowment, a charitable trust, and under a 1969 law, nonprofit organizations were required to sell newspapers on the theory that the nonprofits were unfair competition for private-sector businesses. Publishers were given 20 years to divest themselves, and with the deadline approaching, Baker stepped in to eliminate a provision from Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen that would have exempted the Houston Endowment. As a result, the endowment was forced to sell the Chronicle in 1987 for $400 million. “Did I get them back or what?” Baker told us when we asked about the move. “I don’t believe in getting mad. I believe in getting even.”

6. Never leave your enemies alone with the president.

One of Baker’s rare miscalculations was a screwup in the Reagan White House that cost him the job of national security adviser. Baker was exhausted after two years as Reagan’s White House chief of staff, during a period notable even by Washington standards for epic infighting, back-stabbing and intrigue. He engineered what he thought was the perfect escape, conspiring to oust William Clark from the national security post and take the position himself, while installing his ally Michael Deaver in the chief of staff’s office. Reagan agreed to the swap, but a debate in the Oval Office about the logistics and timing of the announcement led to the president being late for the meeting in the Situation Room where he was to inform his national security team, still filled with Baker’s rivals. Clark showed up at the Oval Office to fetch the overdue Reagan, and Baker made the wrong choice of not accompanying the president. During the short walk downstairs to the Situation Room, Reagan showed Clark the press release he had been given announcing Baker’s appointment. Clark, outraged, took advantage of Baker’s absence and rallied opposition to him during the meeting. A chagrined Reagan returned to the Oval Office and summoned Baker and Deaver to tell them he could not go through with the scheme that he had been minutes away from publicly announcing. “Fellas, I got a revolt on my hands,” he said.

7. And finally, never forget who the real enemy is: the Pentagon.

Washington turf wars matter far more than most D.C. principals are willing to admit, and even in high-stakes international negotiations, it’s not always the foreign interlocutor who is the real target. During the Bush presidency, Baker, heading a State Department that was perennially feuding with the much-better-resourced and far more hawkish Defense Department, knew this well.

At one negotiation in Moscow, in the waning days of the Cold War, the two sides were debating limits on the Tu-22M Soviet “Backfire” bomber. For years, the Russians had argued that the Backfire was a medium-range aircraft that should not be covered by the emerging treaty, but the Pentagon believed the bomber had a longer range than the Soviets admitted, making it a threat to the U.S. mainland, and therefore should be restricted under any strategic arms agreement. Conservatives pressured Baker’s negotiators hard on the issue. Eventually, the matter was kicked up to Baker and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, with whom Baker had expended much effort building a close working relationship. When they met in Moscow, Baker surprised Shevardnadze, as well as his own diplomats, by demanding a cap of just 500 bombers, a number even lower than the original American position. Despite Shevardnadze’s obvious anguish over the surprising new proposal, Baker refused to offer a compromise, and eventually the Soviet foreign minister buckled. Stunned, Baker’s team afterward wondered why he had pressed so hard on Shevardnadze, given their continuing need to do business together. “Let me tell you something,” Baker told the lead U.S. negotiator, Richard Burt. “This wasn’t really a negotiation between me and Shevardnadze or the U.S. against the Russians. This has more to do with the negotiations within the U.S. government.” His adversary, in other words, was the Pentagon.

When they returned to the U.S embassy in Moscow to debrief a roomful of military officers, Baker deliberately left out the Backfire until someone brought it up. “How many Backfires did they get?” one of the officers asked, as if to say, how many did you give away?

Baker leaned over the table. “Five hundred,” he said. Triumphantly, he added: “Fuck you.”

How Private Black Tragedy Shapes American Politics

Every Black family has a trauma story, even the most privileged, a story of a great-grandfather swinging from a tree, of cousins fleeing North in the middle of the night, of a sister or a brother or a husband who came this close to disaster with a cop.

These stories are extraordinary, because trauma always feels outsized. But they’re ordinary, too—ordinary in their commonplace-ness, a shared pain that’s tucked away, not talked about, because to do so picks at the scabs of barely healed wounds.

But for some Black families, trauma becomes a very public thing. They’re shoved into the spotlight, against their will, as their loved ones, ordinary Black folks, become extraordinary. Icons. Martyrs. Frozen in murals, fossilized on magazine covers, their personal lives dissected in the media. For them, grief becomes performance.

On Friday, this was Breonna Taylor’s family. Months after Taylor was killed by Louisville police officers executing a misfired warrant in the middle of the night, and two days after a Kentucky grand jury declined to charge police officers in her death, her family and friends stood in a downtown park. Amid a makeshift memorial to Taylor, an EMT technician who had hoped to buy her own home, they held hands, wearing masks that read, “Breonna Taylor.”

Perhaps the grief, perhaps the public-ness of it all was too much for Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mom. She didn’t say a word, standing there in, in tears. Her own mask read “Black Queen,” a reference to what she fondly calls her daughter. Instead, Palmer asked Taylor’s aunt, Bianca Austin, to read what she’d written about her sadness—and her rage.

“When I speak on it, I’m considered an angry Black woman,” Austin read. “But know this, I am an angry Black woman. … but angry because our Black women keep dying at the hands of police officers … You can take the dog out of the fight. But you can’t take the fight out of the dog.”

Taylor’s family has joined what the father of Jacob Blake, another 2020 shooting victim, describes as a “fraternity” all too familiar now in American life: the families of Black Americans killed at the hands of police, or by self-deputized vigilantes.

That would be the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Michelle Cusseaux, Jordan Davis, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Daniel Prude, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Aura Rosser, Alton Sterling…. In seeking justice, they become reluctant activists, forced to become instant experts in public relations and advocacy—and also becoming part of a long history in which Black trauma has become inextricably entangled with political movements.

“There’s a long history of unjust killing of African Americans that thrusts family members into an almost impossible situation,” said Omar Wasow, a political-science professor at Princeton University, who studies protest movements.

And in that history, there is kinship. Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest icon of the civil rights movement, was assassinated by a white man who’d decided King had gone too far, leaving behind a family whose activism, and lives, are shadowed by trauma to this day. On the day Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced the grand jury’s decision, Bernice King, his youngest daughter, acknowledged the Taylors had just joined that legacy. “Praying for Breonna’s mother and family,” she tweeted, “Because they knew and loved her before her name became a hashtag.”

To be sure, tragedy has driven other families into the public eye as well. The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, or the Parkland shooting, also had to deal with grief while under the klieg lights of instant, unwanted fame. But families like Taylor’s have yet another burden to carry in post-apartheid America: They’re expected to hold up a race, to counter the character assassinations of their loved ones by media looking to exonerate the police, to plead for peace in the wake of protests. All at the same time they’re grieving.

“These victims’ families are called upon to seek justice and call for peace in the same ragged moment,” said Cornell Brooks, the former president of the NAACP, who worked on behalf of the families of police shooting victims Michael Brown, Philando Castile and Jamar Clark.

Says Brooks, now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School: “It’s regular, routine and obscene.”

The Kentucky grand jury decision came down on the 65th anniversary of the acquittal of the white murderers of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, famously insisted on an open casket at her son’s funeral, using her tragedy to help launch the civil rights movement.

Mamie Till and other civil rights activists like the U.S. Congressman John Lewis used the model of “redemptive suffering” as a way to dramatize injustice. “No parent would ever choose this,” Wasow said. “But she was very intentional about how to transform her suffering into something that might serve a greater good.”

Today, social media and the ubiquity of smartphones with cameras means these moments of state violence are documented, making it easier to dramatize the injustice without having to open a casket for the world to see.

Some family members go further, and harness their suffering—and fury—to launch political careers. Lucy McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, the Georgia teen killed by a white man for playing loud music in a parking lot, channeled her grief into gun-control activism. She’s now a Democrat serving in the U.S. Congress. In August, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, narrowly lost a race for a seat on the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.

On Thursday, Fulton tweeted, “#BreonnaTaylor could have been You, your daughter, your sister, your cousin or your friend @home sleeping comfortably in her own bed, let that marinate.”

But for many families, the trauma of losing a family member so publicly, while an iPhone bears witness, takes both a physical and emotional toll—harder, perhaps, because it was a fight they never sought. Martin Luther King Jr. was groomed for the spotlight from a young age. But his kids weren’t. Malcolm X, the son of a man murdered for his fiery sermons, knew the risks: “I live like a man who is dead already.” But his kids didn’t, and his grandson, also named Malcolm, didn’t either.

The weight of the loss, and the stresses that follow, is a whole second arc of tragedy in the Black political story. Malcolm X’s daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, who was 4 when she saw her father murdered, was charged with hiring a hitman to kill Louis Farrakhan, whom she believed was responsible for his death. (The charges were later dropped.) Her son, Malcolm, was 12 when he started a fire that killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz. And he was 28 when he was found beaten to death in Mexico City in 2013.

What does inherited trauma do to the mind, to the body, to the soul? The daughter of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by police in a chokehold, became an activist in the wake of his death, only to die of a heart attack at age 27 in 2016.

Some seek solace in the notion that the death of their loved ones meant… something. George Floyd’s daughter, at a protest this year, sat on the shoulders of a family friend, beaming as she declared, “Daddy changed the world.”

Daddy might be changing the world, but he won’t be tucking her in at night anymore.

My own family told its trauma stories, too. Like that time when my maternal grandfather, a doctor in Jim Crow Atlanta, was heading home after a long night at the hospital. Tired. And there, waiting for him, was a white cop who liked to mess with him. Just because. Because he could. Every time my grandfather would drive around the bend in the road, heading home, the cop would be there, lying in wait. He’d pull the Black doctor over, because he could.

Until one night my grandfather, a very proper Southern gentleman, decided he couldn’t anymore. So Granddaddy got out of the car and administered a righteous beat-down to that racist cop.

He was lucky. The cop didn’t kill him. He just hauled him off to jail, where he spent the night, before a sympathetic judge, hearing his story, let him go. The privilege of his job and his standing shielded him, to be sure. To a point.

When I was a grad student, the office manager at my school, Akua Njeri, was the widow of Fred Hampton, a brilliant and charismatic Black Panther leader. Hampton, the head of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was 21 when he was gunned down by Chicago police officers as he lay in bed, with a very pregnant Njeri by his side. Their son, Fred Jr., was born just weeks after his father’s execution.

And as a student activist at the University of Michigan in the late ’80s, my husband was beaten by police officers at protests on more than one occasion. A colleague recalls the time an undercover police officer held a gun to her husband’s head in a case of mistaken identity. You already know why. He “matched the description”: Black male with an Afro and a denim jacket—which, she said, described virtually every young Black man in the late ’70s.

At the press conference for Breonna Taylor’s family, their attorney, Benjamin Crump, roll-called the names of those who reached out to Taylor’s family in sad solidarity: Sandra Bland’s family. Trayvon Martin’s family. Michael Brown’s family. Botham Jean’s mother. George Floyd’s family.

Jacob Blake Sr., whose son, Jacob Jr., was shot multiple times in the back in August by a Kenosha, Wisc., police officer, partially paralyzing him, told the crowd he drove eight hours in a show of support for Taylor’s kin. “I knew I had to be here, standing next to my fraternity,” Blake said. “We didn't choose this fraternity. This fraternity chose us.

“I knew this family needed some energy and I said, ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’ Because we’re not going to lay down anymore. You can’t stop the revolution.”

Trump ex-campaign boss hospitalized amid threat to harm self

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale was hospitalized Sunday after he threatened to harm himself, according to Florida police and campaign officials.

Police officers talked Parscale out of his Fort Lauderdale home after his wife called police to say that he had multiple firearms and was threatening to hurt himself.

Police Sgt. DeAnna Greenlaw said Parscale was hospitalized under the state’s Baker Act, which allows anyone deemed to be a threat to themselves or others to be detained for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation.

“Brad Parscale is a member of our family and we love him,” said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “We are ready to support him and his family in any way possible.”

Parscale was demoted from the campaign manager's post in July but remained part of the campaign, helping run its digital operation.

Standing 6’8” and with a distinctive beard, Parscale had become a celebrity to Trump supporters and would frequently pose for photos and sign autographs ahead of campaign rallies. But Trump had begun to sour on him earlier this year as Parscale attracted a wave of media attention that included focus on his seemingly glitzy lifestyle on the Florida coast that kept him far from campaign headquarters in Virginia.

Over the summer, he hyped a million ticket requests for the president’s comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that ended up drawing just 6,000 people. A furious Trump was left staring at a sea of empty seats and, weeks later, promoted Bill Stepien to campaign manager.

Parscale was originally hired to run Trump’s 2016 campaign by Jared Kushner, the president’s powerful son-in-law. While the Republican National Committee owns most of the campaign’s data, voter modeling and outreach tools, Parscale ran most of the microtargeted online advertising that Trump aides believe was key to his victory four years ago.

Under the state's Red Flag Law, officials could ask a judge to bar Parscale from possessing any weapons for up to a year.

Judicial Crisis Network launches $3 million ad campaign for Barrett

The Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal group, will spend $3 million on a television and digital advertisement calling for the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — part of a broader $25 million conservative push for the nominee.

The ad buy, first reported by POLITICO, will air within three hours of Trump officially announcing Barrett as his pick. It comes on top of a $2.2 million ad buy previously made in Senate battleground states. The Judicial Crisis Network is expected to spend $10 million in the next 30 days on Barrett’s nomination.

The latest ad, titled “From Her” will air nationally on cable as well as in Colorado, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Utah and Washington D.C. The ad features Barrett delivering a speech declaring that “courts are not arenas for politics” and includes an image of Barrett with her family. The narrator in the ad describes Barrett as an individual “grounded in faith and family” and declares her the “perfect choice to follow Justice Ginsburg.”

The advertisement comes as conservative groups are gearing up for a fierce partisan fight to fill the seat left by the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin confirmation hearings October 12.

The advocacy group will also launch a website and a rapid response team.

“We have definitely scaled up our team,” said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, in an interview. “We have more resources. I think we get better every time.”

The Judicial Crisis Network also spent millions on the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Other conservative groups are also moving quickly to support Barrett’s nomination. The Club for Growth is planning to spend $5 million, CatholicVote.org is slated to spend $2.5-3 million, America First Policies will spend at least $5 million, Susan B. Anthony List is expected to spend over a million dollars and Heritage Action will spend $3.5 million.

Barrett is expected to get broad support from Senate Republicans and unanimous opposition from Senate Democrats, who want to see Ginsburg’s vacancy filled by whoever wins the Nov. 3 presidential election.

DeSantis flings open Florida in Trump’s campaign for normalcy

President Donald Trump found a new applause line at his Florida rally this week: “Normal life. O! I love normal life. We want to get back to normal life.” The next day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to deliver on that promise — or the appearance of it.

The Republican governor of the president’s must-win battleground responded 24 hours later by canceling all state coronavirus restrictions Friday without warning, catching local governments and epidemiologists off-guard amid their own strategies to keep the coronavirus contained.

“The state of Florida is probably the most open big state in the country,” DeSantis bragged Friday, as he announced the reopening and said he was using his executive power to cancel all fines levied against people who didn’t wear masks. “We’re not closing anything going forward.”

DeSantis’ unilateral action capped a week of headline-grabbing announcements – from a crackdown on rioters to protections for college kids partying during a pandemic – that aligned neatly with president’s campaign messaging around putting the coronavirus behind us. The burst of activity, including the Jacksonville MAGA rally DeSantis attended with Trump on Thursday, coincided with the first batch of domestic absentee ballots being mailed out to Florida voters.

At the outdoor MAGA rally DeSantis attended with thousands of maskless Trump supporters, the president similarly cheered the state’s trajectory while musing about normalcy and pledging that “the Florida tourism and hospitality industries will reach record highs. That's what's going to happen. You see it. And next year will be one of the greatest years.”

Trump has a history of downplaying the threat of coronavirus and repeatedly predicting an economic renewal, only to see Covid-19 cases surge along with hospitalizations and deaths in different parts of the country. This spring, DeSantis similarly fumed at his critics for predicting a wave of coronavirus cases would overtake Florida under his leadership, only to see cases, hospitalizations and deaths jump after reopening the state in early June.

A DeSantis spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Epidemiologists and Democrats predicted that would happen again, especially with the president holding big rallies without people wearing masks and a governor determined to open the state quickly. But whether the cases will skyrocket the way they did in July depends largely on whether individuals take the prerogative to keep enough social distance and wear masks.

On the day DeSantis made his announcement, the state reported 2,847 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 120 related deaths. Total cases since March 1: 695,887. Total deaths: 14,038.

Even if cases rise, it’s “highly probable” that cases won’t spike in a meaningful way before Election Day, said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist with the University of South Florida, “especially if it starts with the less-vulnerable and then extends to the more-vulnerable from the less-vulnerable.”

Florida slowly began the process of reopening earlier this month, but DeSantis’ decision Friday accelerated it at warp speed. It also blindsided Republican allies like Carlos Gimenez, a congressional candidate and mayor of Miami-Dade, the state’s most-populous county, and home to the most coronavirus cases in the state.

Miami-Dade used to have a county-wide mask-wearing ordinance and fines to give it teeth. Now, that precaution has been blocked by DeSantis.

Gimenez said the county could still impose restrictions but would have to let businesses and bars open up, and they could be subject to some regulations. Miami-Dade’s 11 p.m. curfew can also remain in effect, Gimenez said, who confessed to some worry.

“Of course, I am concerned,” Gimenez said while steering clear of criticizing DeSantis.

DeSantis was only able to block local governments from levying the fines because the governor did not repeal his state-of-emergency order, which gives him extraordinary powers. So the state is technically under an emergency due to the coronavirus — an order still standing despite the rhetoric from Trump and DeSantis so the governor can keep pull back local governments from reacting to that emergency.

The Florida Democratic Party’s chairwoman, Terri Rizzo, accused Trump and DeSantis of ignoring science, issuing bad messages during a pandemic and presiding over an “unmitigated disaster.”

“We all desperately want things to return back to normal, but that can't happen when DeSantis and Trump have no plan to get us out of this public health crisis," Rizzo said.

A rising Black GOP star faces fury from African Americans over Taylor case

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron — the 34-year-old, up-and-coming Black Republican who snagged a prime-time speaking slot at Donald Trump’s convention last month — has been pegged as a potential successor to Mitch McConnell in the Senate someday.

But after his handling of the Breonna Taylor case this week, Cameron will have to get there over the fierce opposition of many African Americans in his home state and across the country.

For months, Cameron resisted intense pressure to charge the officers who shot and killed Taylor, 26, in her own home in March. Eventually the case went to a grand jury, which this week cleared two of the three officers involved in the shooting. During a lengthy news conference Wednesday, Cameron refused to say whether he recommended exoneration.

Cameron’s performance drew kudos from McConnell and Trump, who said after the Taylor news that the Kentucky attorney general was doing a “fantastic job.” While his handling of the high-profile case probably won’t hurt him with Republicans in future potential bids for public office — it might well help — Cameron has ensured a motivated, well-funded opposition.

“You know what they say? All skinfolk are not kinfolk,” said Phelix Crittenden, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Louisville. “This was absolutely a career-defining moment … [designed] to set him up for stuff in the future. He had a chance to do right by his people. And he chose to do right by himself.”

Some civil rights groups have begun holding strategy meetings to discuss ways to hold Cameron accountable for his actions in the case and plan to work against him if he runs for office again down the line.

“Unfortunately, he was recently elected,” said Arisha Hatch, vice president of Color of Change. She alluded to activists’ efforts to oust St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014. “There will be repercussions for his refusal to act, and we believe that he should resign or be replaced.”

Elected a year ago, Cameron is the first African-American attorney general of Kentucky and one of six Black attorneys general in the country, two of them Republicans. Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, the only other Black Republican who currently holds that post, told POLITICO that Cameron insisted his role in the case “has nothing to do with any personal feelings that he might have or any emotional reactions that might tug at his own heartstrings.”

“I recognize there have been problems in our country with race from Day One, and we’re still dealing with that. So it’s very near and dear to our thought process on a regular basis,” Hill said.

Cameron alluded to his personal feelings at his news conference announcing the grand jury decision, at one point choking up as he invoked his own family.

“I understand that as a Black man, how painful this is ... which is why it was so incredibly important to make sure that we did everything we possibly could to uncover every fact,” Cameron said.

“My heart breaks for the loss of Miss Taylor,” Cameron added. “And I’ve said that repeatedly. My mother, if something was to happen to me,” he said, pausing as his voice faltered and he held back tears, “would find it very hard. ... I’ve seen that pain on Miss [Tamika] Palmer’s face,” he said, referring to Taylor’s mother. “I’ve seen that pain in the community.”

Critics dismissed his remarks as performative, saying the mention of his race did nothing to alleviate the damage done in the case. Palmer said Friday she “never had faith in Daniel Cameron to begin with.”

“I knew he had already chosen to be on the wrong side of the law the moment he wanted the grand jury to make the decision,” Palmer said in a statement read by Taylor’s aunt, Bianca Austin. “He knew he had the power to do the right thing, that he had the power to start the healing of this city, that he had the power to help mend over 400 years of oppression. What he helped me realize is that it will always be ‘us against them.’”

Cameron’s lack of transparency on what led to the grand jury’s decision — he has not released transcripts of its deliberations — has compounded frustrations. His Wednesday remarks roughly outlined the circumstances leading to Taylor’s death: that only one of the six bullets fired at her killed her and that none could be traced back to Brett Hankison, the only police officer charged. He faces three counts of wanton endangerment because his bullets pierced the apartment of the family next door.

Cameron also cited testimony from a neighbor who relayed hearing police announce themselves before entering Taylor’s home. An analysis by the New York Times, however, found that of 12 neighbors, 11 did not hear the police announce themselves.

Pointing to that reporting, critics say the attorney general’s suggestion that Taylor’s death was an unavoidable tragedy is misleading. It has amplified calls for the attorney general to provide more information on the details of the case, something Cameron has said he cannot do to ensure the integrity of the investigation.

“The facts as we know them generally [don’t] really support the charges that were brought,” said Cedric Powell, a professor at the University of Louisville School of Law. “Daniel Cameron in his press conference was really selective about the evidence that he presented and the public doesn't have confidence in this charge. The charge is just really like a compromise. A really bad compromise.”

Ben Crump, a lawyer representing the Taylor family, called on Cameron to release the grand jury transcripts, saying he believes that not all evidence was presented to the jurors before they made their decision.

“Did [Cameron] allow the one neighbor who they keep proclaiming heard the police knock and announce [themselves] testify before the grand jury? Even though I understand on two previous occasions he declared that he did not hear the police,” Crump said at a news conference. “Is this the only person out of her apartment complex that [Cameron] allowed to testify before the grand jury? That doesn't seem fair. That doesn't seem like you're fighting for Breonna. That doesn't seem like you're putting forth evidence for justice for Breonna.”

Cameron’s allies describe him as a hard worker whose team followed the facts of the Taylor case without bias or caving to public pressure.

“To be crystal clear, Attorney General Cameron is not anybody’s enemy. He’s working hard on behalf of all Kentuckians of all backgrounds to uphold the law,” said Mike Lonergan, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Republican Party. “Kentucky has a lot of strong Republican leaders, and certainly Daniel Cameron is one of them.”

Those words of support amplify how polarizing a figure Cameron — who, according to one poll during his attorney general campaign, had the support of roughly a third of African-American voters — has become the past week. Leaders of the racial justice movement in Louisville say that until now Cameron wasn’t especially disliked, but was viewed as part of a flawed criminal justice system.

But now it’s personal.

Shauntrice Martin, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Louisville who attended the University of Louisville with Cameron, said it was “disappointing” to see her former classmate on the opposite side of this case.

“I was hopeful that because we finally had someone who was Black in a position … that possibly, things will be different, at least a little,” she said. “Instead of being better [for] Black people, he’s actually been worse.”

How the left killed another major NYC development

NEW YORK — It’s New York City’s biggest development setback since the deal to bring Amazon’s headquarters to Queens flopped last year — and the latest victory for New York’s ascendant left.

The Industry City megaproject — a planned repurposing of a former industrial area on the Brooklyn waterfront — weathered relentless community opposition as it worked through a very public, very political approval process. After years of delay, the project was closer than ever to moving forward, even as the coronavirus pandemic halted nearly every other major construction effort in New York.

Then Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Hakeem Jeffries (both D-N.Y.) got involved. In the era of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a slate of progressive upsets in local races, Democrats in New York are increasingly wary of challenges from the left. The lawmakers opposed the development, touted to generate some 15,000 jobs and $100 million in annual tax revenue, on the grounds it would hasten gentrification and raise rents in the working-class neighborhood.

The project’s fate was sealed when Velázquez began corralling other opponents to lobby against the plans, four sources with knowledge of the events said. The developers pulled the plug on Tuesday, six years after launching the undertaking, citing the growing political opposition and the absence of a champion in City Hall.

The outcome for Industry City reflects the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose south Brooklyn chapter opposed the project’s approval. The trend has sitting politicians in some sections of the city worried they’ll face tough primaries if they don’t appear adequately aligned with left-leaning groups.

“It’s pure politics, which we can’t afford right now,” said Kathy Wylde, head of the influential business consortium, Partnership for New York City.

Developers were seeking a zoning change to expand the waterfront complex and allow more businesses, retail and academic space at the site. They were making the case to the City Council that the expected benefits merited the plan’s approval over the objection of local Council Member Carlos Menchaca, who would otherwise be given veto authority under the Council’s traditions. The argument seemed to have more weight as much of the city’s development has frozen amid the Covid-19 pandemic and New York stares down a steep drop in tax revenue.

But the path forward became shakier as Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Mayor Bill de Blasio remained largely absent from the debate, people familiar with the discussions said. And a letter sent to Council members Tuesday from Brooklyn’s congressional delegation and several state lawmakers — who argued the project would accelerate gentrification and displacement in the neighborhood — reflected growing opposition from powerful political players.

Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball said Thursday the “lack of interest at all levels, but particularly at the City Council, in engaging in a constructive dialogue” on the substance of the proposal contributed to the decision to scrap the rezoning.

“It’s hard in a process like this when you don’t have somebody on the other side who seems eager, willing to come to the table to negotiate a plan,” he said on a call with reporters. “That became very clear, that there wasn’t that willingness.”

The left’s efforts on fighting gentrification already had real political consequences for establishment Democrats. In Sunset Park, longtime Assemblymember Felix Ortiz lost the seat he’d held since 1994 to newcomer Marcela Mitaynes, a tenant activist and vocal rezoning opponent, this past July. De Blasio recently backed out of a new plan for the former Amazon site in Queens over concerns about a lack of community investment.

Kimball said he heard frequently from politicians through the rezoning process that, while they liked the substance of the proposal, they couldn’t support it given the politics of the moment.

Velázquez recruited other members of Congress to sign the Tuesday letter, including Jeffries and Yvette Clarke, both of whom represent neighboring districts, according to two of the sources. Jeffries, who is considered a moderate Democrat and has risen the ranks of House leadership, raised eyebrows as one of the signatories.

“It was kind of the nail in the coffin,” said one Council official who, like other sources in this story, requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject. “The electeds in Brooklyn lean on him and his voice is very powerful. He’s a common sense elected official, he’s not far left, so when he speaks, people listen and follow.”

Jeffries’ opposition came despite support for the project from many of his political allies, including clergy members and other central Brooklyn elected officials, according to a Brooklyn political consultant who asked to remain anonymous.

“Now [Jeffries and others] have to go back and answer to these community members, predominantly Black ones, who are like, ‘Why would you do that?’” the person said.

Johnson, the City Council speaker who until this week was considering a run for mayor, remained noncommittal as discussions on the project continued. On Wednesday, he noted the widespread opposition to the plan from local elected officials, saying Menchaca “had a united front.”

“The developer was not able to make the case or convince, not just the elected officials who represent the area, but a broader set of elected officials in the borough of Brooklyn,” Johnson said at a press conference. “If you can’t convince the local elected officials then that tells you where things are going to go. I don’t think it’s appropriate to think that I’m going to jump in and say that I know better than every local elected official.”

De Blasio, meanwhile, repeatedly declined to get involved when asked about the plan in recent weeks. The mayor, also a Democrat who ran as a progressive, has largely stepped back from his development agenda, once a core focus of his mayoralty.

The Council generally defers to the position of local members on land use projects. However, after Menchaca announced his opposition to the project in late July, other Council Members urged the body to support the proposal anyway. Council Members Ritchie Torres and Donovan Richards wrote a New York Daily News op-ed arguing the Council’s member deference tradition shouldn’t doom a project that could generate thousands of jobs during an economic crisis.

The op-ed angered Velázquez, and her involvement grew as she sensed the project may pass over Menchaca’s opposition, two sources said.

A spokesperson for Velázquez did not make her available for an interview.

“The Congresswoman got involved because members of the local community were alarmed this massive rezoning was being rushed through and would have accelerated displacement during an economic crisis that is already disproportionately harming working immigrant families,” spokesperson Alex Haurek said in an email.

Menchaca and Sunset Park activists who opposed the rezoning declared victory after POLITICO first reported this week, the developers were pulling the application.

“[Industry City] attempted to use their money and influence to circumvent the community-backed position and win over Council Members,” Menchaca said in a statement on Wednesday. “Despite these efforts to divide the community and the Council, they couldn’t defeat the power of the people coming together to protect their neighborhood.”

“This is sending a message to elected officials and developers that development can no longer look like this,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director at UPROSE, a local environmental justice group that fought the plans.

Business and civic leaders, as well as politicians who supported the project, lamented the fate of the rezoning.

"I thought more weight would have been given by elected officials to the economic circumstances we’re in,” said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. "We have unemployment approaching the Great Depression, we and others are issuing reports every month that demonstrate how private investment is shrinking in New York City...That whole issue just seems to have been thrown to the wind here."

Sally Goldenberg contributed reporting.

DHS whistleblower testimony delayed again amid security clearance dispute

A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower’s testimony to House investigators has been postponed a second time as his attorney awaits a top secret security clearance that he now accuses DHS of slow-walking in order to “prevent the deposition.”

The witness, Brian Murphy, has accused top DHS officials of suppressing evidence of malign Russian activity in the U.S. and downplaying white supremacist violence in order to bolster President Donald Trump’s emphasis on leftist extremism. DHS leaders have sharply denied the allegations.

Murphy was slated to testify to the House Intelligence Committee earlier this week, but the interview was postponed to Friday after his lawyer, Mark Zaid, indicated that DHS had not yet processed his request for an expedited security clearance so that they could review the classified evidence Murphy planned to discuss with lawmakers. Now, because Zaid’s request is still pending, the interview has been postponed again, and both he and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), say it’s the result of intentional foot-dragging by DHS.

“It is now clear,” Schiff said in a statement, “that DHS political appointees have commandeered the security clearance process by obstructing and delaying clearances for whistleblower attorneys as part of a transparent effort to impede the Committee’s ability to ascertain the truth about serious allegations involving senior DHS and White House officials.”

DHS rejected the notion that it is slow-walking Zaid’s clearance, and suggested that pressure to speed up an already-expedited process would require cutting corners with serious national security matters.

“DHS is cooperating with the Committee in good faith and attempting to engage through the accommodation process — what the Supreme Court has referred to as the ‘tradition of negotiation and compromise’ — between Congress and the Executive Branch,” a DHS spokesman said. “It is the Committee that is ignoring the required accommodation process and instead seeking to needlessly rush an expansive, undefined investigation.”

DHS indicated that Murphy — who was demoted by the department in July amid allegations that he deployed DHS intelligence resources to monitor journalists covering protests and riots in Portland, Ore. — did not have a “need to know” basis to access the classified information he is seeking. “His filing of a complaint does nothing to change that,” the spokesman said.

Zaid said that the reply from DHS was “simply a joke,” and accused the agency of refusing to process his expedited request for a clearance as a delay tactic.

“It is very common for this type of limited access to be permitted, especially in this type of situation, and I have been granted temporary access to TS/SCI in other cases,” Zaid said, using the shorthand for top secret and sensitive compartmented information. “That DHS did not do so is intentional and designed to prevent the deposition.”

Hey, Gen Z. Let’s talk about 2020.

One-in-10 eligible voters this year are part of Generation Z, which means America’s youngest adults are about to step into their political power.

While young people usually vote at lower rates than older generations and are more distrustful of political institutions, there’s a lot at stake this year. A tumultuous presidential cycle, an unprecedented global pandemic, a mass reckoning over racism — not to mention a nomination fight that could shape the Supreme Court for generations.

If you’re Gen Z and will be at least 18 years old on Election Day, we want to know how 2020 has shaped your views about voting, politics and America’s policy priorities.

Bernie Sanders rips Trump over comments about election integrity

Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Donald Trump on Thursday, delivering an indictment of the president’s recent comments that doubted the integrity of the November election and portraying him as an imminent threat to democracy.

“It is terribly important that we actually listen to and take seriously what Donald Trump is saying,” Sanders said in an address at George Washington University in Washington.

The Vermont independent then went on to catalog all of Trump’s recent public statements about the election, including several weeks ago when the president claimed that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election” and his repeated jibes about serving more than the two terms allowed by the Constitution.

Despite Trump’s constant complaints about supposed mass voter fraud in elections, Sanders pointed to several studies — including the conclusion of Trump’s own White House commission on the matter — that have found voter fraud to be exceedingly rare.

He also assailed Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in voting ahead of an election that is expected to see unprecedented levels of votes cast by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. Sanders pointed to an interview in which the president appeared to admit that his opposition to including funding for the U.S. Postal Service in a coronavirus relief bill stemmed from his desire to thwart Democratic efforts to expand mail-in voting, and to Trump’s floating a delay in the election over mail-in voting.

He also noted that Trump himself appeared to encourage voter fraud earlier this month when he urged North Carolina voters to attempt to vote twice as a test of mail-in voting systems.

But Sanders pegged a large portion of his speech to more recent events.

“Just last night Donald Trump went even further down the path of authoritarianism,” he said, referring to the president’s refusal on Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose reelection.

“Trump’s strategy to delegitimize this election and to stay in office if he loses is not complicated,” Sanders contended. “Finding himself behind in many polls, he is attempting massive voter suppression.”

Sanders began his speech by lamenting “grotesque levels of income inequality,” a lack of guaranteed health care for all and the threat of climate change.

“All of these issues and others are enormously important and should be the issues that are being debated in this campaign. But today, I am not going to talk about any of them,” he said, instead saying he would focus on “something in my wildest dreams I never thought I would be discussing.”

“This is not just an election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” Sanders said, referring to the Democratic presidential nominee. “This is an election between Donald Trump and democracy, and democracy must win.”

The senator outlined a number of action items that he argued might help alleviate chaos surrounding the election.

First and foremost, he pushed for voters to hand Biden a decisive, landslide victory on Election Day, saying it would “make it virtually impossible for Trump to deny the results” and calling it “our best means for defending democracy.”

He urged state legislatures to allow the counting or processing of mail-in ballots prior to Election Day, arguing that “the faster all ballots are counted, the less window there is for chaos and conspiracy theories.”

Sanders also called on the news media to begin preparing the American electorate for the virtual certainty that because of increased mail-in voting, the winner of the election will not be decided on Nov. 3, and he encouraged social media companies to take further action to stop the spread of disinformation on their platforms.

The senator also argued for hearings in Congress and statehouses alike to provide transparency on the election process — including how the days following the election will be handled — suggesting that he sees the possibility for violence in some places.

Sanders pleaded that “every elected official in America, whether they be Republican, Democrat or independent … vigorously oppose voter suppression and voter intimidation, to make sure that every vote is counted, and that no one is declared the winner until those votes are counted.”

And he issued a call to action in particular for Republicans in Congress.

“Please do not continue to tell the American people how much you love America if, at this critical moment, you are not prepared to stand up to defend American democracy and our way of life,” Sanders said. “Stop the hypocrisy.”

Can Rochester's mayor survive the storm?

ALBANY — If Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren thought that firing her city’s police chief in the aftermath of the killing of Daniel Prude might ease the pressure on her office and her tenure, she was mistaken.

Even with the chief dismissed two weeks before his announced retirement date, there are at least five separate investigations into how officials handled Prude’s death, with a new trove of documents showing that Warren’s office had been aware of police involvement from the beginning. Some wonder if the 43-year-old Warren, Rochester’s first woman mayor, can survive the mounting pressure — protesters and the police union alike are calling for Warren’s resignation — and a deadly shooting Saturday has now piled more anguish onto the city.

Part of the tension can be traced to Warren’s promise during her 2013 mayoral campaign to bring the city together after years of economic dislocation and racial inequities. Critics argue that the promise remains painfully unfulfilled.

“If from day one, police accountability and oversight and transparency had been undertaken by this administration, you don't get this kind of a moment,” said Adrian Hale, a native of Rochester and a senior manager of talent strategy, workforce development and education initiatives at the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

“So I think just her failure to take on the issue of police transformation seven or six years ago is what created this issue and has led us to this crisis: a crisis of the destruction of trust in leadership. It's a crisis of deep adversarial skepticism of the policing institution and the questioning of the social organization within Rochester right now.”

Despite incremental steps Warren and the community have taken — during her reelection campaign she touted her first-term push for neighborhood-based community policing and the implementation of police body cameras — the secrecy involved in City Hall's response Prude’s death has dashed what little trust had been restored.

“We don't disregard all the good work has been done, but we have to say, ‘OK, you know, we're almost back to square one, we’ve actually regressed, we have to change,’” said Bob Duffy, who was Rochester’s police chief and later mayor before becoming lieutenant governor for Andrew Cuomo’s first term.

“How do you prevent these things from happening?" Duffy added. "They happen and it’s not just this administration; every administration has these. I always say this: No chief or no mayor can stop what happens at 3 o'clock in the morning. But what they do control is what happens afterwards.”

Adding to the city’s plight is a rift between local Democratic Party factions, which has historically prevented Rochester’s elected leaders from presenting a unified front in the face of fiscal, racial and social challenges.

That leaves an embattled Warren without some key political support as the crisis deepens.

“It seems pretty clear that she's fighting for her political life and is taking actions that are a little bit otherwise hard to understand,” said Larry Rothenberg, the director of the W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy at the University of Rochester. “The fact that she fired the police chief with two weeks to go, after he already announced his resignation: She's trying to differentiate herself from the rest of the people involved in this.”

Prude, 41, died in March after police pinned him to the ground and covered his head while he was handcuffed, naked and under mental distress. The incident was not made public until several weeks ago, when the Prude family released body cam footage it had obtained as part of its lawsuit against the city.

Last Monday, 323 pages of documents were released as part of an internal review. They showed a slew of actions officials took to minimize and conceal police responsibility in Prude’s death.

Amid the uproar, Warren not only fired police Chief La’Ron Singletary but also announced new initiatives to change the policing culture and invited the U.S. Department of Justice and the city's Office of Public Integrity to look into the city's response. That’s on top of state Attorney General Tish James' criminal investigation, the police department’s internal investigation and the City Council's upcoming investigation.

Warren has said she did not know the details of the encounter with Prude until Aug. 4, and has apologized for not making the public aware when she did see the video.

"We have a pervasive problem in the Rochester Police Department, one that views everything through the eyes of the badge," Warren said Monday. "The culture of policing in Rochester must change."

Some would argue that the culture of Rochester’s divisive politics needs to change as well if the city is to recover from the summer of 2020.

The divides didn’t start with Warren. But the bitterness among local factions was laid bare in her upset mayoral victory in 2013. Warren, who was City Council president and legal counsel to the late Assemblymember David Gantt, beat incumbent mayor Tom Richards in the Democratic primary. Richards was the favorite of Rep. Joe Morelle, who was then the state Assembly majority leader and chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party.

Richards had money, strong polling and party backing. But Warren defeated Richards 57 to 42 percent, thanks, in part, to the strength of Gantt’s political organization in Rochester’s poorest neighborhoods.

“I think much of Black Rochester elected Mayor Warren as a home-grown daughter of the city, as someone who has shared their interests and priorities,” Hale said. “And so police reform is a given: There's no Black community in the country where police reform is not at the top of the issues that need to be taken. Whether it was explicitly said, ‘I'm going to do this or not,’ there's an assumption that you will address the disparities and the system bias that plagues our belief system.”

Warren went on to win the general election with 55 percent of the vote, but not with a unified Democratic Party behind her. Even after Richards and Morelle both endorsed her, some City Hall staff and political organizers launched an unsuccessful effort to elect Richards on the Independence and Working Families party lines.

Gantt, who was described in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle in 2002 as “highly principled to some, blatantly dictatorial to others,” died in July, a blow for the mayor, who lost an ally and a friend. His likely successor, Demond Meeks, bested Gantt’s pick for the spot in the June primary.

Warren wasn’t dealt an easy hand as the city’s second Black mayor. Roughly one-third of the population lives in poverty. The congressional district that houses Rochester was ranked last year as the second worst in the country for Black people. Black people are almost three times as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to live in poverty. They earn incomes that are less than half of white people's incomes in the region.

The city’s schools record some of New York’s most dismal performance rates and its school board is so mismanaged that it found itself in a financial hole of as much as $60 million earlier this year. Warren hasn’t been shy about asking Albany for help, but lawmakers have been wary to fund systems which they say lack oversight or clear plans to remedy the situations.

Even before Prude’s death, Warren’s position has been a balancing act of enormous proportions. As a Democrat and Black female mayor, she has faced calls from young liberal activists to be the voice of their movements, even as she must partner with the police department and the city’s power establishment to make the city safer and more prosperous.

She is sometimes laden with responsibility that might not be entirely hers, noted Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association. Urbanski said Warren has always garnered both “fervent support” and “fervent opposition” but has been a supportive partner with the teachers union.

“Could she have done more? Probably. All of us could do more. The reality is — and I think she understands — that schools cannot be an oasis of excellence in an environment of discord and disorder," Urbanski said.

That environment may become even more disorderly in the weeks to come, for reasons that have nothing to do with demonstrations related to Prude’s death. Monroe County prosecutors are presenting criminal allegations against Warren to a grand jury after the state Board of Elections concluded there was “considerable evidence” that members of her 2017 reelection campaign intentionally evaded limits on campaign donations. A former Warren ally, lobbyist Robert Scott Gaddy, pleaded guilty to different misdemeanor theft charges Wednesday while pledging to cooperate with campaign finance inquiries, a signal that he could be involved in the ongoing investigation of Warren's campaign.

But that investigation, which the mayor has dismissed as a "political witch hunt," could be overshadowed by continued reverberations from the Prude case, said former television journalist and Monroe County Legislator Rachel Barnhart, one of Warren's two primary challengers in 2017.

“After seven years of being mayor, if you don’t know that you have problems in your police department, who’s fault is that?” Barnhart said. “People are willing to forgive Lovely Warren for all kinds of sins, but they’re not going to forgive her for Daniel Prude."

Warren’s reelection campaign in 2017 had offered three promises: “better educational opportunities,” “safer streets and neighborhoods,” and “more jobs for Rochester residents.” And after her 2017 primary win she called for unity within her party. "Four years ago we stood up to the power brokers," she said at the time. "Now we need everyone's support to help our city and to heal our party."

But Warren’s critics say she hasn’t forgotten the challenges mounted against her or the battles she was forced to fight to ward them off. Barnhart says that Warren’s office has instilled a culture of “fear and intimidation and retaliation.”

Other Rochester political observers who declined to speak on the record said that in an environment in which political vendettas aren’t easily forgiven, factions have struggled to unite around common goals proportionate to the scale of the problems in the city.

For instance, when Rochester Assemblymember Harry Bronson, a Democrat, pushed back against Warren's plea for a temporary state takeover of the city school board — which he said “abdicates our responsibility to lead,” — he found himself with an (ultimately unsuccessful) primary challenger: Warren’s chief of staff, Alex Yudelson.

Many current elected officials declined to weigh in specifically on Warren’s long-term future as mayor, but most expressed confusion and disbelief that the city failed to disclose Prude’s death in any form over a number of months.

Bronson said he does not believe Warren has handled the situation appropriately, but did not comment on her motives.

“We don't know all of the timeline and there's some disagreement, but there's no disagreement on when this was sent to the attorney general's office,” Bronson said. “And it should have been disclosed, at the very least, that a person of color with mental illnesses died in connection with law enforcement, and it’s going to be investigated. I frankly believe it should have been disclosed long before that.”

One thing is clear: If Warren does survive, she'll be tasked with a massive job of overhauling a number of local systems, and she won't be able to do that alone.

“Maybe elected officials should listen,” Duffy said. “And maybe citizens and people, relatives on streets and police officers and other people, should give their perspectives ... as opposed to shouting at each other, fighting with each other, trying to one up each other, or trying to give excuses. And you know, leaders take responsibility, leaders don't blame others. And then behind the scenes, they fix those problems and fix them quickly. And in this particular case, we're not going to change anything through press conferences.”

Warren's office declined to provide comment.