red-meat

The Real Trump Foreign Policy: Stoking the G.O.P. Base

Why else would he pursue so many policies in Latin America that do not serve the national interest?

Americans can be forgiven if they struggle to find any coherence in the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It zigs and zags, with senior administration officials saying one thing and President Trump contradicting them without warning the next day. It punishes our allies and coddles our adversaries; it privileges demagogy over democracy. Mr. Trump’s approach appears impulsive, improvisational and inchoate — devoid of clear purpose, values or even ideology.

Yet, upon closer examination, there is indeed a consistent logic staring us in the face. The unifying theme of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is simply to service his domestic politics.

Mr. Trump welcomes and encourages Russia, a hostile adversary, to interfere in our elections so long as the manipulations benefit him. He discards decades of bipartisan policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to curry favor with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and thus right-wing political support. The president follows a basic, if unorthodox, playbook: He and his party over our country.

Nowhere is this pattern more consistently apparent than in the administration’s dealings with Latin America. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has taken a series of actions that are not tied to coherent strategies and will not deliver the desired results — if those results are to be measured in terms of achieving American foreign policy objectives. Rather, they may succeed only to the extent that they help Mr. Trump gain re-election by dishing up red meat to energize the Republican base.

Take Cuba. Last month, the Trump administration turned the clock back to the Cold War, imposing the harshest forms of sanctions against Cuba allowable under United States law. Mr. Trump reversed the policy of his Republican and Democratic predecessors by permitting Americans to sue foreign companies that use property confiscated without compensation by the Castro regime.

The administration also canceled a deal to allow Cuban baseball players to play in the United States, sharply constrained remittances and promised to end most forms of nonfamily travel, actions that will directly harm Cuba’s people and nascent private sector. In triumphantly announcing this policy shift before veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the national security adviser, John Bolton, repeatedly stressed the contrast with President Obama’s approach and pledged relentless pursuit of regime change.

Anyone familiar with the 60-plus years of failed United States policy toward Cuba before Mr. Obama’s opening in 2014 knows that the embargo only strengthened the Castro regime’s grip on its long-suffering people. Instead of causing the collapse of the Cuban government or the abandonment of its ally Venezuela, Mr. Trump’s approach will again bolster hard-liners in Havana, entrench policies we oppose, drive Cuba closer to Russia and China, further isolate and impoverish the Cuban people and punish our European and Canadian allies, whose companies will now be sued.

Yet, this policy reversal surely pleases the old guard among Cuban émigrés, as it did the Bay of Pigs celebrants who cheered Bolton. Given the changing attitudes among younger Cuban-Americans who largely supported Mr. Obama’s engagement, it remains to be seen how much political sway the hard-liners still have in the crucial battleground state of Florida. Still, Mr. Trump is betting on firing up that faction.

Not content to bank only on the Cuban community in Florida, Mr. Trump is also courting the state’s many Venezuelan immigrants, who justifiably detest the government of President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas. To hasten Mr. Maduro’s exit, the Trump administration has rightly joined with regional and international partners to impose sanctions against Mr. Maduro, his government and cronies, and to recognize the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as interim president.

But, because Mr. Trump’s Cuba announcement will alienate the United States from the very coalition of allied countries that we need to stay united on Venezuela, his real goal appears to be something else: stoking his base. That’s why Mr. Trump trumpets the bogus threat of Venezuelan-style “socialism” invading America through the Democratic Party. Similarly, he periodically threatens military intervention in Venezuela, which is music to the ears of many exiles in South Florida. Despite what Mr. Trump says, there is no practical military option for deposing Mr. Maduro. Bombing Caracas would kill countless innocents and a ground invasion would meet determined resistance from the Venezuelan military.

Rather, if the president were truly serious about helping Venezuelans, he would grant the many thousands now in the United States temporary protected status, allowing them to remain here safely until conditions improve in Venezuela. But extending such status would anger another, much wider swath of Mr. Trump’s base: anti-immigrant voters in every state who applaud Mr. Trump’s efforts to rid the country of brown and black people. Mr. Trump can hardly grant Venezuelans temporary status after he has methodically tried to strip so many other groups of the same protections.

Playing to these same die-hard supporters is also the only explanation for the president’s most ill-conceived, counterproductive policy toward the Western Hemisphere. Against the counsel of his own advisers and many Republicans in Congress, Mr. Trump recently announced that he is ending all assistance to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the three Northern Triangle countries sending the majority of migrants to the American border — ostensibly to punish them for failing to stop the outflow.

Large numbers of families are indeed fleeing those countries, which suffer among the highest rates of violence in the world, to seek asylum in overwhelming numbers at our southern border. The $450 million in assistance the United States provides each year, mainly to nongovernment groups in the Northern Triangle, has demonstrated success in reducing gang activity, crime and corruption — the very things that push asylum-seekers north.

By halting assistance, Mr. Trump is decimating an effective, bipartisan Obama-era initiative and catalyzing an even greater flow of migrants to the United States. This is antithetical to American interests. But an epic crush of migrants at the border might make Mr. Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric and policies seem more justified and help him whip the Republican political base into what is now their reliably biennial anti-immigrant frenzy.

Plenty of presidents before Mr. Trump have made serious, sometimes catastrophic foreign policy mistakes; but, few, if any, decided almost every aspect of foreign policy on the basis of what would help him get re-elected. Our previous commanders-in-chief conducted policy to advance their vision of the national interest. And until recently, we had two parties in Congress that mostly put country first.

No longer. The Republican Party has largely abdicated its responsibilities in favor of the whims of a president guided solely by personal and political interests, even in executing the most sacred and solemn duty of the office — to keep America safe.

Kris Kobach Is the G.O.P. at Its Worst

In his race to be Kansas’ next governor, Kris Kobach represents the ugliest part of today’s Republican Party. He also sounds a lot like the president.

.. Kris Kobach, the state’s secretary of state — and quite possibly the most pernicious public official in America.

.. This distinction is not conferred lightly. Mr. Kobach has labored for it long and hard, notably in the areas of voter suppression and nativism. He is best known for having been the vice chairman of President Trump’s ugly voter fraud commission, spawned in 2017 to root out the millions of illegal voters who Mr. Trump’s ego pathetically, and falsely, claimed had cost him the popular vote in 2016. The commission was dissolved this January, having failed to find any evidence of widespread fraud, but having succeeded in raising Mr. Kobach’s national profile and cementing his reputation as a master purveyor of Trumpism.

Mr. Kobach on Wednesday declared victory at a noon news conference, acknowledging that only 191 votes separated him from Mr. Colyer and that the election result may change as provisional and other ballots are counted. Awkwardly, as the state’s top election official, Mr. Kobach would be the person charged with overseeing any recount of votes. Unless he recused himself, which he has said he would not.

Mr. Kobach is running for governor on a promise to “Make Kansas Great Again.” (#MKGA!)

.. Starting with a failed run for Congress in 2004, Mr. Kobach has regularly sounded the alarm that illegal immigration and widespread voter fraud are destroying this nation. Indeed, he has suggested that fraud played a role in his congressional defeat.

A former constitutional law professor with degrees from Yale, Harvard and Oxford, Mr. Kobach’s specialty is concocting creative legal arguments to achieve controversial political ends — such as, say, forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall. (His plan: use a provision in the Patriot Act to track and tax the remittances that undocumented immigrants send home to family members.)

He was the brains behind the self-deportation proposal for which Mitt Romney was widely mocked in his 2012 presidential run.

.. As an adviser to immigration hard-liners in Arizona — including the felonious-until-pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio — he helped write the state law that, among other measures, tasked the local police with verifying the citizenship of anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” to believe was undocumented.

.. ProPublica and The Kansas City Star recently detailed Mr. Kobach’s 13-year history of pitching his consulting services to small towns, helping them enact such ordinances. This has been a profitable gig for Mr. Kobach, but not so much for the towns in question, some of which wound up drowning in legal fees after trying to defend measures that ultimately proved unenforceable.

.. His crowning achievement as secretary of state was a law passed in 2011 requiring people to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. Or, rather, it was his crowning achievement until a federal judge this year struck down the law as unconstitutional.

In the course of that case, Mr. Kobach so violated basic courtroom rules that he was held in contempt and, among other humiliations, ordered to take six hours of legal education.

.. he has a flair for the dramatic and isn’t overly concerned with facts.

.. His speeches contain plenty of red meat, such as comparing Planned Parenthood to the Third Reich’s Josef Mengele.

.. Until early 2017, Mr. Kobach spent several years hosting a local call-in show, on which he held forth on such terrors as the “illegal alien crime wave” that he warned was decimating America.

.. He also got a kick out of indulging the dark fantasies of listeners, such as the 2014 caller fearful that the immigration policies of then-President Barack Obama would lead to the “ethnic cleansing” of whites.

.. Then there was the 2015 caller anxious about whether Mr. Obama might one day decree that “any black person accused of a crime, charged with a crime, is not going to be prosecuted.”

“Well, it’s already happened more or less in the case of civil rights laws,” Mr. Kobach soothed. “So I guess it’s not a huge jump.”

.. in Mr. Kobach, Mr. Trump clearly sees a kindred spirit.

General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He’ll Drag You Down

He even seemed to explain how the president’s phone call to the widow of a Green Beret killed in Niger got garbled.

.. If only he had stopped there. But instead he began to talk like Trump, gratuitously smearing a black congresswoman who was a friend of the Green Beret’s bereaved family — with provably false charges. It was tragic. In an instant he went from General Kelly to Kellyanne Conway, just another Trump apologist.

.. That leaves Mattis as the last man standing — the only one who has not been infected by Trump’s metastasizing ethical cancer, the only one who has not visibly lied on Trump’s behalf, and who can still put some fear into Trump.

.. you need to lead McMaster, Tillerson and Kelly (Pompeo is a lost cause) in telling Trump that if he does not change his ways you will all quit, en masse.

.. Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway — not his. That is how you talk to a bully. It’s the only language he understands.

Tell him: No more

ridiculous tweeting attacks on people every morning; no more

telling senators who forge bipartisan compromises on immigration or health care that he’s with them one day and against them the next; no more

casual lying; no more

feeding the base white supremacist “red meat” — no more

distracting us from the real work of forging compromises for the American people and no more

eroding the American creed.

.. if you can’t together force Trump onto an agenda of national healing and progress, then you should together tell him that he can govern with his kids and Sanders — because you took an oath to defend the Constitution, not to wipe up Trump’s daily filth with the uniform three of you wore so honorably.