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Friday, January 27, 2017 

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BY ISHAAN THAROOR

 

THE TAKEAWAY

British Prime Minister Theresa May's visit to the White House on Friday was always going to be more about optics than substance.

Here is the first world leader to call on President Trump — a Briton, a woman and a political conservative with a point to prove. And there is Trump, who has spent his first full week in office upending the status quo, clinging to conspiracy theories and falsehoods and confounding allies and enemies alike. He, too, may want to change the message.

The duo will preen about the renewal of the "Special Relationship," the phrase that clings like a barnacle to any discussion of British-American ties. They'll congratulate each other on last year's twin world-altering votes: Trump's shock election victory and Britain's approval of Brexit, a departure from the European Union that May initially opposed but now is entrusted to lead. If all else fails, they could fawn over the legacy of Winston Churchill, whose bust was restored to the Oval Office by Trump.

But beyond that, they will step into tricky terrain. May and Trump are not Reagan and Thatcher 2.0, no matter the British prime minister's own breathless allusions to the 1980s at a speech to Republican lawmakers on Thursday.

"May is everything that Trump is not: a careful, low-key and pragmatic member of the political establishment with a decades-long career in elective office," wrote the Post's London bureau chief, Griff Witte. "She holds mainstream positions on critical issues such as trade and security that put her sharply at odds with Trump’s protectionism and isolationism."

British Prime Minister Teresa May addressing Republican lawmakers in Philadelphia on Jan. 26. (Mark Makela/Reuters)

Facing a tough negotiation with Brussels over the terms of Britain's E.U. exit, May needs assurances over a favorable trade deal with the United States. She may get them from Trump in a soundbite, but the actual terms of any pact will only be sorted out as Britain gets closer to leaving the European Union. And hashing that out with the Trump administration — which has already announced numerous protectionist policies and has insisted upon being "America First" in every context — may be harder than it looks.

May's speech in Philadelphia to assembled GOP lawmakers pandered to Trump's populist narrative, praised the resurgent nationalism taking hold in both countries and hailed a Republican party that "swept all before" them in elections. She also did not have any meetings scheduled with Democrats, giving her trip an unusually partisan cast.

Yet in the same speech May also insisted on the importance of NATO — a military alliance Trump deemed "obsolete" — celebrated Britain's shared values with the European Union — whose unraveling Trump has cheered — and talked about the success of the nuclear deal with Iran — which Trump wants to tear up. She insisted on the distinction between radical extremists and hundreds of millions of Muslims who are adherents to a "peaceful religion," rhetoric you likely will never hear from Trump.

May, in effect, was defending a status quo Trump seems intent on dismantling.

"May’s strategy is clear," tweeted Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow at RUSI, a London-based think tank. "Embed the message in a pile of sycophantic schmaltz."

Not surprisingly, May's critics back home attacked her for "groveling" in front of Trump. Most people in the British political mainstream have been put off by the new American president and disturbed by his willful disregard for the institutions that uphold the Western liberal order. Over the past year, Trump's most visible ally in Britain has been the pro-Brexit agitator Nigel Farage, who remains a deeply polarizing figure on the fringe of his country's politics.

May's trip highlights the awkwardness of Britain's current place in the world. May can't sell Trump-style protectionism at home. She knows that Britain, a country of 60 million people, needs meaningful trade deals with the rest of the world in order to successfully detach itself from Europe. But her message of a "global" and "internationalist" Britain will fall on deaf ears at the White House.

"In the context of the newly developing U.S.-U.K. 'special relationship,' the very idea of 'global Britain' sounds bizarre," wrote Post columnist Anne Applebaum. "The U.S. president’s campaign made the word 'globalist' into an insult. ... May’s broader 'global' vision is doomed, at least as long as it is tied to a protectionist and isolationist U.S. president."

May's critics say the logical move in the face of Trump would be to turn closer to Europe by taking a leading role in shoring up NATO and countering Russia, a country whose ties to Trump alarm many European leaders. But the politics of Brexit mean she can't.

"The curious thing is that Brexit was supposed to be about taking back control: immunizing the country from foreign whim and interest, while asserting national dignity and independence," wrote the Economist this week. "Increasingly that looks like a bad joke."

• Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, issued what may be the most chilling articulation yet of the White House’s war with the mainstream American press. Bannon, the former editor of far-right Breitbart and a nationalist ideologue, said “the media here is the opposition party” in a phone call with the New York Times. Rather than address the numerous falsehoods repeatedly uttered by Trump and his spokesmen, Bannon attacked the press — singling out the Times and The Washington Post — for getting the election “dead wrong” and supposedly not understanding the electorate. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut,” said the man whispering into the ear of the most powerful politician on the planet.

• One organization not keeping its mouth shut is BuzzFeed, the news website Trump once deemed “a failing pile of garbage.” It’s keeping a running list of all of President Trump’s lies in office, beginning with his Jan. 21 statements about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. My colleagues Karen Tumulty and Juliet Eilperin have a delicious scoop on how Trump apparently pressured the acting director of the National Park Service to release more images that would somehow validate his belief in the size of the crowd. The evidence did not.

• Things have really escalated between the Trump White House and Mexico. Trump’s decision to go ahead with the construction of a border wall angered Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who again rejected any suggestion that his country would pay for the wall — and canceled a planned trip to Washington next week. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, then said the border barrier would be funded by a 20 percent import tax on Mexican goods, though he later tried to backtrack and say it was just “one idea.” My colleagues at Wonkblog offer the smart way to think about the U.S.’s trade deficit with Mexico — Hint: it’s not as simple as the way Trump frames it — and explain how Trump’s proposals may hurt American border towns.

• Trump’s anti-refugee plans — he is expected to sign an order at least temporarily halting the processing of refugees — has earned him widespread condemnation from rights groups and aid agencies around the world. Add to that list the Anne Frank Center For Mutual Respect, a U.S.-based organization established by the father of the famous Jewish girl who tragically did not escape the Nazis while hiding in Amsterdam. Its director expressed anger at Trump’s “discrimination” in a Facebook post.

The Franks failed to get documents to go to the United States at a time when Americans were deeply suspicious of Jewish refugees. The historical echoes of the present also troubled the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which issued a statement last year attacking a group of Trump-supporting white nationalists who had mobilized in the capital after the election. “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words,” the museum warned.

• But, in our current politics, memory of the past can slip away. My colleague James McAuley writes from France on the upcoming election, where far-right candidate Marine Le Pen stands a good shot of becoming the country’s president. The party was founded by her father, Jean-Marie, a fascist who once described concentration camps as a “detail of history.” But with nativist populism in the ascendance in France, too, “a political party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier has mounted a surprisingly credible bid for the French presidency.”

A student majoring in plant protection checks an insect specimen at Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University. (Reuters/China Daily)

The reality of immigration

Despite the Trump administration’s bluster about building a border wall with Mexico, the truth is that Mexicans have been leaving the United States in greater numbers than they are entering for almost half a decade now.

The Pew Research Center estimates that from 2009 to 2014 one million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S., while 870,000 Mexicans arrived, both with and without documents.

Meanwhile, immigration from Asian countries has begun to outpace immigration from Mexico. This would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when more than 10 times as many people from Mexico came to the U.S. as from China.

In 2014, roughly 136,000 people came to the U.S. from India, 128,000 from China and 123,000 from Mexico, according to census data. Between 2009 and 2014, 45 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. were born in Asia.

Even California, long the foremost destination for Mexicans, registered more Chinese immigrants than Mexican immigrants in 2014, with India not far behind.

There are many reasons for the shift. Mexico's own economy has improved, and growing opportunities there have drawn back many emigrants. The American economy also supports far fewer construction and manufacturing jobs than it once did; those jobs were a mainstay for the Mexican migrant community. Under President Obama, the U.S. also began more strictly enforcing immigration laws and greatly expanded its use of deportations, earning him the nickname “deporter in chief.”

Meanwhile, growing Asian economies have surpluses of young, educated people who are in high demand at American universities and companies.

In the Post's Wonkblog, Ana Swanson cites the research of Jed Kolko, the chief economist at Indeed, a job search engine, who found that "about half of immigrants 25 and older in 2015 who arrived in the U.S. in the last five years had a bachelor’s degree, up from roughly one-third of those who arrived between 2006 and 2010 and 27 percent of those who arrived in 2005 or earlier."

In other words, the demographic shifts in immigration that President Trump seems to favor have already begun, making his insistence upon the border — let alone the prospect of making American consumers foot the bill — seem all the more strange. — Max Bearak

Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions at President Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20. (Win McNamee\Reuters)

The big question

Yesterday's flood of signed (and leaked) executive orders indicate the Trump Adminstration will follow through on its promises to crack down on immigration and refugee programs. So we asked Matt Zapatosky, who covers the Justice Department for the Post: What's the future of immigration under attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions?

"Sessions has long advocated aggressive measures to stamp out illegal immigration. He has opposed efforts by even those in his own party to reform the U.S. immigration system, speaking out against a reform bill backed by then-President Bush in 2007 and leading the charge to kill a similar bipartisan effort in 2013. He also proposed a bill that would have imposed a mandatory five-year prison sentence on those found to have re-entered the country illegally. In fiscal year 2015, the sentence for such a crime was just 16 months.

"Sessions, a former U.S. attorney, has noted his experience as a prosecutor in advocating against immigration reform, but his view on the topic is not just a part of his law-and-order persona. Sessions favors moderating even legal immigration and takes the view that anyone coming to the U.S. should provide a benefit to this country.

"As attorney general, Sessions would wield immense power to turn his and Trump’s views into reality. He could turn up the prosecutorial pressure on people who enter the country illegally — prosecutors have huge influence over which immigrants are a priority for deportation — and he could defend in court legal challenges to some of Trump’s most controversial proposals, such as the refugee ban that seems to disproportionately affect Muslims."

After the White House seemed to float a tariff on Mexican goods on Thursday, experts quickly pointed out that a trade war would inflict heavy economic damage — on the United States. Unintended consequences also lurk behind President Trump's support of torture, his apparent plans to yank funding from the United Nations and even the tweeting habit he can't seem to kick. Even bigger than any of those potential surprises, however, might be the suggestion from the Telegraph's David Millward that the UK make Nigel Farage its ambassador in Washington after all.

Trump’s tough-guy talk on torture risks real lives Trump says he’s “always felt that I was in the military,” but real officers are drilled in the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions. By Jane Mayer | The New Yorker  •  Read more »

Trump's attacks on peacekeepers and women could end the UN as we know it Cutting off funds for crucial UN bodies could have disastrous consequences for the world order. By Rosa Freedman | The Conversation  •  Read more »

Why a tweeting president is so bad for our politics President Trump’s tweeting raises the prospect of a serious abuse of power. By Michael Gerson | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

It's time to send Nigel Farage to Washington Mr Farage's closeness to key players in the new administration would mean the UK would be well-informed. By David Millward | The Telegraph  •  Read more »

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Climate scientists in the US are on edge as President Trump’s climate skepticism threatens the country’s two largest sources of climate data: NASA and the NOAA. Vox pointed out that things may not be much better at the Environmental Protection Agency, either. Add all of that to Trump’s pro-nuke rhetoric and you begin to understand why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advanced the Doomsday Clock to 2½ minutes to midnight, with climate change cited as part of the reason for the adjustment.

Huge federal climate enterprise at stake as Trump team moves in The country's single biggest source of climate information is the federal government. What happens if a Trump administration tries to censor it? By Christopher Joyce | NPR  •  Read more »

What the hell is going on at the EPA right now? Media blackouts, website edits, public outrage. And we haven’t even gotten to any of the really important stuff yet. By Brad Plumer | Vox  •  Read more »

The Doomsday Clock just advanced, ‘thanks to Trump’: It’s now just 2½ minutes to ‘midnight.’ The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists singled out President Trump in noting that the symbolic clock has moved 30 seconds closer to the end of humanity. By Peter Holley, Abby Ohlheiser and Amy B Wang | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

The rubble this woman is looking at was once East Aleppo, the area of the Syrian city held by rebels throughout the country's civil war — until just a few weeks ago. Now that the rebels have withdrawn, pushed out buy a ground offensive and a punishing onslaught of Russian airstrikes, the Syrian government has restored train service to Aleppo, and this week saw the first rail journeys through the shattered cityscape in four years. (George Ourfalian/AFP/Getty Images)

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In his first major TV interview as president, Trump is obsessed with his popularity The lengthy interview revealed a man fixated on his following and eager to provide evidence of his likability, even if that information doesn't match reality. By Jenna Johnson  •  Read more »

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