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Why Trump Can’t Tweet His Way Out of This

On impeachment and Syria, Congress and the news media at last care more about what the president does than what he says.

By JACK SHAFER

October 07, 2019

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

You needn’t believe the hype about President Donald Trump being a 21st-century media wizard to concede he has a special talent for powershifting through the gears of the news cycle to blow past whatever current event might threaten his presidency. Whether it’s a function of Trump’s volatility or a measure of his craft, he has a knack for freezing out damaging news by creating his own news storms that transfix the press. He fires members of his Cabinet and staff, over-reaches with executive orders, picks fights with a Gold Star mother and football players, engages in ad hominem, and insults entire friendly countries.

In recent days as bad news has swelled around him, Trump has taken to screaming “treason” and “coup” at full volume to divert the news flow. But this time Trump’s hydraulics don’t seem to be working. Instead of Trump flooding the news cycle, the news cycle has begun to flood Trump. His special talents—if they really exist—have begun to fail him, and he seems to know it. In two recent press sprays, with the Finnish president and on the White House lawn, Trump’s peach complexion has gone scarlet with rage as he dodged and parried all the bad publicity.

You’d go scarlet, too, if you were Trump. Democratic members of the House of Representatives have begun marshaling evidence to prove Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors as part of the House’s formal impeachment inquiry against the president. Two whistleblowers have come forward to allege abuse of power by Trump in his dealings with Ukraine’s president. An IRS whistleblower has filed a complaint alleging that a political appointee at the Treasury Department attempted to interfere with the annual audit of the president or vice president’s tax returns. A federal judge has ordered Trump to turn over his tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney. In recent days, three Republican senators (Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska) have broken ranks with their cowardly colleagues to directly criticize Trump for urging China to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

Even the president’s closest ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has turned on him. On Monday, Graham phoned into “Fox & Friends” to denounce Trump’s decision to dump the Kurds and embrace the Turks. The move is “shortsighted and irresponsible” as well as “unnerving,” Graham said, and his anger was shared by other Republican legislators. Inside the Pentagon, the brass also appeared to favor Graham’s position over Trump’s.

At the rate all this bad news is surging, Trump must be pining for the good old days when a new development in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation was his greatest source of grief, and a nasty blast from his Twitter feed was potent enough to repel bad tidings. But suddenly Trump’s best-defense-is-a-good-offense talents are no longer sufficient to fend off the damage. In recent days, Trump has sought and failed to stall the impeachment express with tweets attacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., but the press has largely ignored these pathetic lines of defense. In the old days, journalists would have rushed to their keyboards to dissect the Pelosi and Schiff tweets and placed under their magnifying glass Trump’s Monday tweet about the Kurds and Turks in which he referred to his own “great and unmatched wisdom.”

But as the Smiths once sang, that joke isn’t funny anymore. These days, the press seems more interested in charting the course of impeachment and the accumulating evidence than playing “go fetch” with Trump’s tweets. Not even Pat Robertson, a Trump stalwart if ever there was one, wants to follow the president on this one. Trump “is in great danger of losing the mandate of Heaven” if he spurns the Kurds, Robertson said.

Trump’s old techniques are failing—and not just due to the volume of the bad news. What’s unique about this phase of his presidency is that he’s being attacked with so much damning information from so many directions and so many different power centers that he can’t keep up. Not even a street fighter with Bruce Lee’s skills could repulse this sort of pile-on.

As somebody who has never counted Trump out, I believe he could restore his good fortune with some self-discipline. Midway through the first year of Trump’s presidency, columnist (and doctor of psychiatry) Charles Krauthammer took to calling the “general hysteria” the press and the political classes expressed for the president “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” According to Krauthammer and others, this reflexive, partisan hatred for Trump crippled people’s judgment of the man. Krauthammer urged us to stop listening to Trump’s id and pay more attention to what Trump was doing and what he had done. Finally, it appears, the press and Democrats have independently taken Krauthammer’s advice. As we enter impeachment autumn, the only principal still acting deranged is Trump himself.

How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight

She was Betsy to her mother, who expected her to marry. Liz to fellow high school debaters, whom she regularly beat. Now, the lessons of an Oklahoma childhood are center stage in the presidential race.

OKLAHOMA CITY — It was 1962 in Oklahoma City and Liz Herring, a new student at Northwest Classen High School, was feeling insecure. She was good at school, had skipped a grade, and now, as a skinny freshman with glasses and crooked teeth who had grown up in a town south of the capital, she was hungry to fit in.

She joined the Cygnet Pep Club to show her school spirit and the Courtesy Club to help visitors find their way around the school. She became a member of the Announcers Club, reading messages over the school’s central sound system. But it was the debate club where she really found herself. At a time when Home Ec and preparing for marriage were priorities for young women, debate was a place where they could compete on equal ground.

She loved learning about the big topics of the day — Medicare, unions, nuclear disarmament. She began carrying around a large metal box with hundreds of index cards with quotes and facts written on them.

She was competitive and had extraordinary focus and self-discipline, spending hours after school each day practicing. Joe Pryor, a high school friend and debate teammate, remembers her “ruthlessness in preparation.” By the time they were juniors, he said, “she was just flat out better than me.”

Mr. Pryor still recalls that even among good high school debaters, there was something different about his teammate Liz. “She wanted to be the best,” he said last month. “She wanted it more than I did. She wanted it more than anybody did.”

It has been over 50 years since that time and Liz Herring has become Elizabeth Warren, one of the 24 women and men vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

Her ferocious command of details on a debate stage once earned her a college scholarship. Now she is deploying that skill in town halls across the country and on Wednesday in the Democratic National Committee’s first debate for the 2020 election.

While her prowess in debate has remained a constant, her political views have not.

Since rising to national prominence after the 2008 financial crisis, Ms. Warren has been seen as a pugilist on the left, a fighter against an economic system that she sees as fundamentally unfair. But in her early life and as a young adult, Ms. Warren was not bucking the system or the conservative community she inhabited. She was striving within it, using it to launch herself out into the world.

“She needed it,” said Judy Garrett, her sophomore year English teacher. “She needed it to get where she is.”

That was not easy in 1960s Oklahoma. There seemed to be only one option for an ambitious woman: becoming a teacher. Ms. Warren set her sights on that. Her mother, the driving force in the family, spent her time making sure that her only daughter knew any professional aspiration should come second to marriage.

Ms. Warren’s path to success was not direct, but a circuitous journey of starts and stops. She fought to go to college out of state, but dropped out at 19 when her high school boyfriend reappeared with a proposal for marriage. That moment reflects the central struggle of her early life, a tension between her ambitions in the world versus her understanding of a woman’s role in the home.

Even now, her old friends and acquaintances express some surprise at her presidential run. Her high school debate partner, Karl Johnson, a star student, used to have aspirations for higher office, they said. And while Ms. Warren was his equal in talent and drive, they had not imagined that she, a woman, would be the one to try.

“It’s a real commentary on our generation,” said Gary Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s younger brother. “No one ever thought it would be Liz.”

The Herrings of Wetumka

Ms. Warren’s family has been in Oklahoma as long as it has been a state. Her parents grew up in the tiny town of Wetumka, where the western prairie meets the eastern hills, and eloped in 1932.

The Herrings, her father’s family, opposed the match because her mother’s family, the Reeds, were part Native American, according to Ms. Warren’s account in her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance.” In an interview in The New Yorker, Ms. Warren said she learned of the elopement after pestering her mother about her wedding dress, only to be told that she never had one.

Her father’s family owned a hardware store, and he went from working there to a failed car sales venture in the town of Seminole to selling carpet for Montgomery Ward in Norman, a town about 20 miles south of the capital.

He and his wife, Pauline, had three boys, Don Reed, John and David, and eight years later, a little girl, Elizabeth, who was born in June 1949. She was a surprise that her mother was fond of saying made her a member of the PTA “longer than any woman on God’s green earth,” Ms. Warren wrote in “A Fighting Chance.”

As a child, Betsy, as her family called her, liked to have things go her way, a childhood playmate from her street in Norman remembered.

“Have you ever been around someone who has to be in charge, who has to be the one that everybody looks up to?” said Danice Bowers, who now works in a school library in Shawnee, Okla. “That was Betsy Herring.”

She was also smarter than the rest of the children, Ms. Bowers said, and when she reached sixth grade, she skipped it. Her mother pressed for the family to move from Norman to Oklahoma City so their daughter could attend what she saw as the best school around. That was Northwest Classen, a modern building of glass and brick that had a reputation for academic excellence. It had a German club, a Spanish club and a Great Books club, even its own amateur radio station. The Herring family settled just a few blocks away.

Ms. Warren didn’t grow up with the politics she has today, but came to them later through her research on why people declare bankruptcy. But a seed was planted early in the form of financial distress that shook her own family.

When she was 12, her father had a heart attack. Ms. Warren describes what happened next in “A Fighting Chance.” He came home from the hospital changed. He ate poached eggs with the yolks taken out and got yelled at if he tried to lift grocery bags. His job as a salesman for Montgomery Ward was downgraded to commission-only. Pauline, who was 50 then, had to go to work for the first time in her married life. The episode is now a staple of her daughter’s stump speech.

Her parents drank, her mother yelled and her father seethed. One day, her mother, crying in an upstairs bedroom, jammed her body into a formal black dress that no longer fit, and walked to a job interview at Sears.

“I stood looking at her while she tugged on the zipper,” Ms. Warren wrote. “She rubbed her eyes with another Kleenex and blew her nose. She stood still for a while. Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight at me. ‘How do I look? Is it too tight?’”

Writing about it as an adult, Ms. Warren would show that the experience had left her with a deep understanding of working-class pain: At its root is a feeling of worthlessness and an instinct to hide from the world.

Her father, she recalled, told her that the shame of failure had nearly killed him. “He wanted to die,” she wrote. “He wanted to disappear from our lives and from the earth and from everything that had gone wrong.”

‘All a Bunch of Cheaters’

The experience at age 12 left Ms. Warren with the belief that honest people help themselves — that when trouble arrives, they tug on the dress, blow their nose, and walk to Sears. That assumption guided her research on personal bankruptcy in her early years as a law professor.

“I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she said in a 2007 interview, describing to a Berkeley historian her views of families who declared bankruptcy. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay.”

That is the sort of sentiment that Ms. Warren’s high school friends might have expected to hear from her. As a teenager and young adult, Ms. Warren was conservative, said Dr. Katrina Cochran, a close high school friend who would go on to become a psychologist.

The two women sat next to each other for years in desks arranged alphabetically by surname, and Dr. Cochran, who was Katrina Harry in high school, remembered talking about politics at lunchtime. She adored her friend, but their political views differed. Ms. Warren believed government’s role in American life should be limited.

“She was extremely conservative at the time,” said Dr. Cochran, whose father was working in Democratic politics. She said Ms. Warren would joke about her friend’s Democratic leanings. “She would ask me what other subversive organizations I was a member of besides the Democratic Party.”

Oklahoma, which became a state in 1907, had been a crazy quilt of political impulses, from the prairie populism of the 1890s to the election of socialists in the 1910s.

By the early 1960s, when Ms. Warren started high school, the Republican Party was beginning to take the state back from decades of Democratic control. The dominant culture, regardless of political party, was conservative — a pride in country and an emphasis on family that Ms. Warren was steeped in.

“The Summer of Love hadn’t reached us,” Mr. Pryor, a high school debate teammate, said of Oklahoma in the 1960s. “When you saluted the flag, it was emotional. You believed we were right to fight the Communists in Vietnam. It was not right to doubt the government. This was the era we grew up in. We were true believers at that point.”

That was precisely how Dr. Cochran — who has recently been back in touch with Ms. Warren and even spoke in a campaign ad — described her friend, wondering aloud in the interview “how someone who was so rich in the idea of nationalism and conservatism and capitalism could have such a significant turnaround politically.”

Karl Johnson, Ms. Warren’s debating partner, said in an interview in May that he had started to “become radicalized around the Vietnam War and protest music,” in their junior year. He remembered being “pilloried for weeks on end as a traitor and a communist,” in the local media after telling reporters he opposed the war, and being called into the principal’s office because he refused to cut his hair.

“Liz was not a member of that group that talked politics a lot and was antiwar,” Mr. Johnson said. “She wasn’t put off by my political views. She just didn’t share them.”

By Ms. Warren’s own account, her parents were not the types to talk politics around the dinner table. As for the war, it was personal for them in another way: Don Reed, Ms. Warren’s oldest brother, was flying combat missions in Vietnam.

When asked whether Ms. Warren identified as a Republican in those years, her campaign said she would not give an interview. An attempt to find out from her brother, David Herring, who still lives in Norman, was unsuccessful — he politely declined to talk after answering his door.

Not an ‘Old-Maid Schoolteacher’

The conflict between her ambition and her family’s expectations came to a head in her senior year of high school. Her friends were all applying to college and she wanted to go, too. But her mother was against it.

“She had been yelling at me,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “This Fight Is Our Fight,” recalling an argument she had with her mother. “Why was I so special that I had to go to college? Did I think I was better than everyone else in the family? Where would the money come from?”

Mrs. Herring had been the one to lobby for the family to move to Oklahoma City for her daughter’s education. But she was also trying to protect her daughter in a world she knew was harsh to women who did not conform. In that social order, marriage was more important than college.

“Mother was suspicious of women who had families and worked,” Ms. Warren wrote. “Working was for women who weren’t lucky enough to have a husband and children.”

Ms. Warren had been preparing for both.

By her senior year, her classmates recalled, she was a debate team star. Her exceptional ability to focus, rare among the teenage boys she was going up against, had made Northwest Classen one of the best teams in the state. Ms. Warren and her partner, Mr. Johnson, would go on to win the state championship their senior year. She was particularly good at rebuttal — taking apart the other side’s argument in four minutes.

“I’ve seen her work miracles in that slot,” said Mr. Johnson.

But she took her home economics studies seriously, too. As a senior, she won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award, memorizing the butterfat content of heavy cream and how to tie off a lazy daisy stitch, according to “A Fighting Chance.”

When she would tell someone she wanted to be a teacher, her mother, who called her Betsy long after she became Liz, would interrupt.

“My mother would break into the conversation and explain to whomever I was talking to, ‘But she doesn’t want to be an old-maid schoolteacher,’” Ms. Warren wrote. “Then she would turn to me, pause, and narrow her eyes. ‘Right, Betsy?’”

Ms. Warren eventually won the argument. Her debating skills earned her a full scholarship to George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,“sort of the equivalent of an athletic scholarship, only this was one that actually a girl could get,” she said in the 2007 Berkeley interview. She paid for the application fees with money she made from babysitting and waitressing.

But two years later, when her old high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, popped back into her life with a marriage proposal, it was her mother’s values that moved her. She dropped out, and at 19, got married in the same Oklahoma City church her family had attended for years.

“For nineteen years I had absorbed the lesson that the best and most important thing any girl could do was ‘marry well,’” she wrote. “Somewhere deep in my heart, I believed that no man would ever ask me to marry him. When Jim popped the question, I was so shocked that it took me about a nanosecond to say yes.”

‘She Was Becoming Elizabeth’

That decision would set her life on a different track — at least for a while — and would perpetuate her central struggle: The young woman who bucked social expectations by fighting to go 1,300 miles away to college was also the woman who bent to them, putting her marriage and motherhood before her career.

Her decision to marry brought happiness and two children, but also, she has written, years of challenges as her career crept along, knocked off course every time her husband had to move for his — from Texas to New Jersey and back again.

They eventually divorced in 1980. Dr. Cochran said she divorced in that era, too, as did a number of other friends from Northwest Classen who were ambitious women at a time of shifting expectations. She said Elizabeth was loyal, and she believed she would have stayed married to Jim if he had been more flexible.

“She was becoming Elizabeth,” Dr. Cochran said of her friend, “and Jim didn’t know what to do.”

Eventually, her drive dominated and she became Elizabeth Warren, Harvard professor, Massachusetts senator, candidate for president.

Her voice is different now. She is no longer the young law professor researching bankruptcy cheats, or the freshman debater who called her Democratic friend subversive. She now sees government solutions to working-class problems. She is making that pitch to voters, hoping it will appeal to the men who might tell their daughters they feel like failures when work doesn’t go their way, or the women who find themselves in an ill-fitting dress on a job interview they didn’t expect to have to take.

Ms. Warren never moved back to Oklahoma after she left for college, but she carries a piece of it with her today — her time on the debate stage at Northwest Classen and everything she learned there.

[We asked Elizabeth Warren and 20 other Democratic presidential hopefuls the same set of 18 questions. Watch them answer.]

Judy Garrett, Ms. Warren’s sophomore English teacher, who remembers her as “the smartest student I ever had,” went on Ms. Warren’s website after she realized what her star pupil had gone on to do. Ms. Garrett sent her an email. To her surprise, she got a reply.

Ms. Warren thanked her for her note, and said it brought back memories of “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Julius Caesar” and the Beatles and of the December day that a boy had asked her to be his girlfriend in the custom of the day: by giving her a “drop,” a kind of charm necklace.

“Great teachers inspire students in so many ways,” she wrote. “I was skinny and young (I’d skipped a grade) and so sure everyone else had something I didn’t have and didn’t understand. I remember how you taught foreshadowing and how you said I didn’t have to go steady with a boy to be someone (a lesson I didn’t learn for about another 15 years). You were pretty and confident and calm. I so much wanted to be a teacher, and you were part of the reason.”

She concluded: “It really is good to hear from you. Please stay in touch. Liz.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

The Jordan Peterson Moment

My friend Tyler Cowen argues that Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, and he has a point. Peterson, a University of Toronto psychologist, has found his real home on YouTube, where his videos have attracted something like 40 million views.

In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.

.. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions. The strong get the spoils and the weak become meek, defeated, unknown and unloved.

For much of Western history, he argues, Christianity restrained the human tendency toward barbarism. But God died in the 19th century, and Christian dogma and discipline died with him. That gave us the age of ideology, the age of fascism and communism — and with it, Auschwitz, Dachau and the gulag.

.. Since most conflict is over values, we’ve decided to not have any values. We’ll celebrate relativism and tolerance.

.. Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. … Most men do not meet female human standards.”

.. Life is suffering, Peterson reiterates. Don’t be fooled by the naïve optimism of progressive ideology. Life is about remorseless struggle and pain. Your instinct is to whine, to play the victim, to seek vengeance.

.. “The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike.”

.. Instead, choose discipline, courage and self-sacrifice.

.. Much of Peterson’s advice sounds to me like vague exhortatory banality. Like Hobbes and Nietzsche before him, he seems to imagine an overly brutalistic universe, nearly without benevolence, beauty, attachment and love. His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.

Why Trump’s White House Won’t Stop Leaking

Sorry, Anthony Scaramucci. Your mole hunt is doomed.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve worked in dozens of political organizations that all leaked to varying degrees. In 2008, I was the national press secretary for the Republican National Committee when internal concerns about vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin turned the final weeks of John McCain’s presidential campaign into a gusher of leaks.

.. In contrast, last year I was the communications director on Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, an organization that proudly rarely leaked.

.. To borrow from Tolstoy: Political organizations that don’t leak are all alike; every one that does leak is leaky in its own way. In some leaky organizations, people leak to advance agendas or undermine opponents. Some leakers seek to enhance their egos or curry favor with reporters. Sometimes people leak without even realizing it, speaking carelessly to journalists or lobbyists, who then repeat the story to others. The common thread is that unauthorized leaks are a symptom of political organizations that have a broken culture: They lack unity, trust and self-discipline.

.. But mole hunts inevitably lead only to more moles, and more leaks.

.. Trump’s White House is not leaky because of a few bad apples. The No. 1 reason why it leaks is because his team lacks unity. It’s not without irony that many of the leaks are about the very staff infighting that is causing the leaks.

.. in the White House, Trump has failed to unite his team (let alone the American people) around an organizing principle that is larger than defending the president’s own reputation. Without a common purpose, factions feel the need to leak against one another.

.. If Trump wants loyalty from his Cabinet and staff, he must recognize that loyalty is a two-way street and show them more respect than he has to date. With his attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he’s demonstrating precisely the opposite: Even his most loyal supporters cannot expect loyalty in return.

.. The temptation to curry favor with powerful influencers is real, especially for aides with big egos or little experience. Obviously, this White House has plenty of both, which makes it even more important that Trump model the behavior he wants to see in others.

.. Instead, the president’s tweets and interviews show a lack of discipline. It is no secret that he continues to have off-the-record conversations with the news media and sometimes shares more than he should. In this environment, it’s not realistic to expect discipline from staff when the boss sets a poor example.

.. However, his presidential campaign leaked like a sieve for many of the same reasons that his White House does. The problems are more acute now only because his team lacks the shared goal of winning an election.

.. “You are either going to work inside the culture the way the president wants it or you’re gonna be on Pennsylvania Avenue out here selling postcards to the tourists,” Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, said on Fox News this week.

With all due respect, he has it backward. The leaks will stop only if President Trump instills a culture of unity, loyalty and self-discipline in his administration.