Timothy Egan

But the ceremony also marked the latest, and one of the most joyous, of the not-so-subtle ways in which the West Coast continues to live free and prosper under a president doing everything he can to hurt the 51 million Americans in the three lower-48 states that hug the Pacific shore.

President Donald Trump hates the West Coast. He has called California “out of control” and boasted about “my sick idea” to dump migrants into the progressive cities in this time zone. Worst of all, his administration is actively working to take away health care from more than 5 million people in California alone.

He appears to have warmer feelings for Kim Jong Un, the thug who starves his own people — “We fell in love,” Trump once said of North Korea’s dictator — than for a majority of citizens under his rule on the West Coast. He has higher praise for a traitor and slaveholder, Robert E. Lee — “a great general” — than for the states working under a hostile administration without seceding from the union.

His energy and environmental policies would hasten the collapse of some of nature’s finest handiwork, from a pristine coastline that he tried to open to oil drilling, to forests that will soon be aflame again because the president will not do anything to stall climate change.

His trade war is a bullet that could wound the nation’s most trade-dependent state, Washington, which produces apples and wine and software and coffee and jetliners and trucks and global health care for the world.

To Trump, everything “Out West” is like occupied territory. Almost daily, he issues legal missives and executive orders intended in some way to make life worse on the West Coast.

But here’s the good news for E Pluribus Unum: He’s losing. Badly. The West Coast is crushing it against Trump. Using the law to fight a bully, the Constitution to challenge an authoritarian, and facts against Fox News-driven fantasy, California, Oregon and Washington have stalled some of the most despicable of Trump’s retrograde policies.

And this is the place to say that, yes, Trump loathes the rest of Blue America as well, and many of those states are on the front lines against Trump.

But this president has a particular strain of hatred within his tiny dark heart for the Pacific states. And they hate him back. After the wipeout in last year’s congressional elections, only a mere 38-mile strip of the Pacific shore in the Lower 48 states, in Washington, remains in Republican hands.

In California and Washington, the ranks of the uninsured have fallen to record lows because of Obamacare. Would any other sitting president go out of his way to reverse that lifesaving progress? He recently directed his Justice Department to try to kill the entirety of the Affordable Care Act.

If the law stands, and the 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions keep their legal protections, you can thank California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, for leading an aggressive coalition to defend Obama’s greatest legacy.

Federal judges have repeatedly sided with California against Trump on air pollution, toxic pesticides and oil drilling. In April, the Interior Department was forced to suspend a plan to drill off the Pacific shore. And a federal judge in Oregon has so far backed a far-reaching attempt to hold Trump’s government responsible for averting climate change.

West Coast governors have defied Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military; they’ve opened their National Guard ranks to the people Trump is trying to shun from service.

Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, has filed 36 lawsuits against the Trump administration and has not lost a case. His first takedown of the tyrant halted, nationwide, the initial Muslim ban.

Last week, Trump went to bat for social media extremists and conspiracy theorists, issuing a warning to the Silicon Valley companies that are trying to banish the hatemongers: “We are monitoring and watching, closely!” Actually, they’re monitoring and watching him — closely. It’s, um, what they do in Big Tech.

Under Trump’s guidance, the United States is running up debt faster than one of his bankrupt casinos. It’s what he does. By contrast, California, after raising taxes on the rich and wages for the poor, after extending family leave and health care, is projecting a $21 billion budget surplus for the coming fiscal year.

Talent and capital can go anywhere. It’s drawn to the West Coast, because creativity doesn’t grow well in nurseries of fear and tired thinking. Washington was named the best state for business in 2017, and the best place for workers in 2018.

We’ll soon look west for a replacement for Trump. By moving their presidential primaries up to March, California and Washington have assured that the one-in-seven Americans who live in those two states will have an early say. It’s only fitting, given how much they’ve contributed to the fight against the Trump blight on the Republic.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/trump-california.html" id="b1436db8-2731-3434-a671-5023df2034dd">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — A big crowd showed up for the festive unveiling of President Barack Obama Boulevard here last weekend, at the intersection of “hope and resistance,” as one news outlet put it. Sure, it’s just a 3 1/2-mile stretch of road, a living ex-president’s name added to streets honoring Jefferson and Washington.

Revenge of the Coastal Elites

You wanted grandkids. Now you’ve got identical twins — boys, born small and early and needy, but healthy enough when they’re finally released from the preemie ward that you start asking the questions you should have asked earlier.

Like: Why is the United States the only developed nation in the world without mandated paid leave for new parents?

Like: Why is child care so expensive in this country? The fertility rate has fallen to the lowest level since the United States began tracking births more than a century ago. One big reason is the enormous financial burden placed on working parents.

Like: What about a boy? Or what about two boys? At school, they’re falling behind girls at every level. Boys are broken, they’ve been left behind, goes the cultural lament.

And this one: What kind of world are we bequeathing these 6-pound humans? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was mocked by the usual hate trolls when she wondered whether, given what we know about climate change, it is “still OK to have children?”

She didn’t say, “Don’t have children.” She noted the scientific consensus that the lives of those born today will be fraught with danger from a violent and unstable climate. We have only a few years left to reverse the trajectory of this befouled planet before a nearly irreversible hell befalls us.

Scary thoughts, much of the above, but none of them should be joy-killing, not at first. Playgrounds are the true geography of hope, to steal from Wallace Stegner, for nothing is more renewingthan innocence in a tiny package.

As a new grandparent, you may be lucky enough to do some of the advocating that your overworked children cannot. I say “may” because many of the new grandparents I know have been drafted into full-time day care, with time for nothing else. In more than half the states, child care costs more than tuition at a public university, which is already too high to launch a life.

You can blame millennials for ruining many things — breakfast, conversation, sex — but this one’s on the boomers and above. Only 9 percent of the federal budget is spent on children. As a nation, weallocate about four times as much on retirement and health benefits for aging adults. We’ll soon be spending more paying interest on the debt — a crater created by a tax cut benefiting mostly rich, older Americans — than on children. This is Donald Trump’s only legislative legacy.

History holds some answers. During World War II, the federal government subsidized nationwide day care centers to help the 6.5 million women who joined the work force. These places included doctors, nurses, even personal grocery shoppers. It would make the French — who put us to shame with their way of raising de-stressed, minimally fussed-over, healthy children of parents on expansive maternity and paternity leaves — envious.

When President Barack Obama sketched a proposal for universal child care and expanded parental leave, Republicans derided it as a liberal fantasy — ensuring that the United States would remain the most backward developed nation for families. And a plan by Sen. Elizabeth Warren to tax the wealthiest Americans to pay for universal child care has been met with similar scorn by the GOP.

So long as good ideas will die in vitro from a party ruled by men, women will continue to pay a steep penalty for having children. For now, you turn to small acts for the new babies and work to oust the man-baby in the White House.

Being a grandparent is not a do-over, not a chance to make up for your mistakes. You get to read “Hop on Pop” and “Goodnight Moon” again. You overlook the mild cultural insensitivity of “Curious George” to cheer on his adventures beyond the reach of the Man With the Yellow Hat. When the kids start to spout opinions of their own, you’ll point them to the most timeless American role model for a boy — not Bart Simpson, but Huck Finn. And they’ll know where to find a sugar high in your house.

But the ultimate responsibility is not yours, unless forced on you by tragedy or circumstance. You will roll your eyes at the imperious certainty of new parents. You’ll recall your own mother, who produced seven children, dismissing baby boomers acting like the first generation ever to raise kids. And you’ll shock your children with your parents’ solution to all the postnatal stress — early cocktail hour.

You can do one big thing, as a wise friend told me some time ago. That is: With every action, political and personal, try to ensure that you will be thought of, after you’ve passed, as a great ancestor.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/parental-leave-day-care.html" id="e053001e-a93a-3596-a323-ee01e1e5b1bc">The New York Times</a>.

You forget that they have no neck muscles, that they can’t see beyond a couple of feet, that someone who is now the size of a zucchini may one day pivot and stuff a basketball over your head. You’ve already forgotten the sleepless nights that you had, the marital strife, your uneasy acquaintance with baby poop.

The Best Thing Experienced Parents Can Do for New Parents

You may know this area, more than 500 million acres of empty vales and thick forests, high plains and diamond-cut peaks, as something you saw on a screen saver, or marked as a distant bucket list destination. It’s your American public land endowment, your birthright at citizenship.

What you may not know is that while you were sleeping through the white noise from the White House, your public servants were put under the control of the oil and gas industry. They have been busy giving away drilling rights on your land for next to nothing. More precisely — per acre, for even less than the cost of a Bacon McDouble, which of course you should eat only in moderation.

And they’re doing this in the face of considerable evidence that the rush into industrial plunder of these lands is a huge source of planet-convulsing carbon emissions.

But behold: A history-making lawsuit on behalf of children who will inherit this mess could put an end to the Trump administration plan to drill till we drop. Although the courts have never recognized a constitutional right to a livable environment, the lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, has been given a green light to pursue just that.

“This is no ordinary lawsuit,” wrote federal judge Ann Aiken of Oregon in allowing the case to proceed. “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”

If that judicial statement was a stunner, what happened this month in another case was equally extraordinary. For the first time, a federal judge temporarily halted drilling on federal land because the government did not take into account the climate change impact of that drilling.

Forget about the unworkable Green New Deal, which Republicans are using as a prop to show how silly both parties are. Cow flatulence! No air travel! The end of “hamberders!” It’s been a gift to right-wing demagogues, looking to further dumb down a Republican base that doesn’t believe anything a wounded earth is trying to tell them.

The real action is unfolding now, on federal land. Prior administrations allowed for considerable oil and gas drilling in swaths of the public domain in the West. But President Donald Trump is holding a fire sale for his fellow fossil fools. The amount of federal land offered for drilling is three times what it was under President Barack Obama.

It would be one thing if we needed this oil. We don’t. The world is awash in cheap crude. And it would be another if these lands weren’t being used for something that poses an existential threat. They are. Almost 25 percent of American earth-warming emissions originate from industrial action involving public land or offshore leases.

The United States is the biggest carbon polluter in history, and now ranks behind only China in greenhouse gas emissions. As well, we’re now the largest crude oil producer in the world. And we’ve become a leading exporter of that oil, just to show how bad of a global citizen we can be.

If you force the Trump administration to stop bingeing on public land, you can make an immediate impact on the amount of earth-warming carbon the United States spits into the atmosphere.

Such an injunction is what the children represented by a trust in the Juliana lawsuit are trying to do. And it was that sort of injunction, acknowledging the role of drilling on public land in harming us all, that temporarily shut down new leasing on 300,000 acres in Wyoming this month.

Another big step is to prevent David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, from becoming interior secretary. A stooge for his former clients, this Trump nominee was the deputy secretary, while the top job was held by a strange man, Ryan Zinke, who paraded around on a horse named Tonto.

It was Bernhardt who tried to block release of a federal analysis showing that two widely used pesticides were so toxic that they “jeopardize the continued existence” of more than 1,200 species of birds, fish and other life-forms without lobbyists, as my colleague Eric Lipton reported this week.

You can see who Bernhardt is working for: It’s not all the living things under the domain of the emperor of the outdoors. Nor is he looking out for the interests of children, who will have to live with the consequences of action taken by adults in service to carbon pollution.

About those kids: Sen. Mike Lee of Utah recently took to the floor of his chamber to say that the best response to the mounting chaos of epic floods, searing wildfires and other symptoms of a sick earth is to get married and have children.

What he didn’t say was that we hold our public land in trust for the Americans of tomorrow. The least we can do is stop using it to imperil their world.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/trump-climate-lawsuit-juliana.html" id="9a891fec-14c9-3cda-a0b1-dcc6d964e5e9">The New York Times</a>.

Out in the way beyond, the open land on the far side of the Mueller report and cable news obsessives, is a vast kingdom now being used to hasten the demise of the planet.

Your Public Lands Are Killing You

Then came Howard Schultz, a billionaire times two, insisting that people not use the B-word in describing him. Better to refer to the 540 Americans in his sensitive class as “people of means.” For this he was roundly mocked, and rightly so.

The pushback to the pusher of our favorite South American drug is a fair start. But there is much more to clean up. For we live in a time when language has been weaponized for high crimes and petty cruelties, while neutralized when it should state the obvious. Democracy may die in darkness, as the slogan of a rival newspaper has it, but it also slips away under cover of euphemism.

You can date it to Republican repackaging of the estate tax as a “death tax,” or tax cuts for the rich morphing into “tax relief” for the overly burdened. And were French fries really “freedom fries” during a spasm of faux-patriotism?

Maybe the food marketers started us down this road when “natural” was slapped onto any label — turpentine, for example, which also happens to be gluten-free. Or Big Pharma, using “wellness” to describe treatment by drugs with names from a dance party: Lyrica, Celebrex, and then the Cialis gets passed around.

All of that can be excused as framing to get an advantage. The Democrats are doing it now with the Green New Deal and Medicare for All — both of which sound pleasantly pie-in-the-sky and historically resonant until you look at the details, which their sponsors didn’t bother to do.

The most egregious of political language fraud, as George Orwell noted in his seminal essay on the subject, is used for “the defense of the indefensible.” To that end, the Trump administration has been a fount of criminal circumlocution.

We all know about “alternative facts” and “truth isn’t truth” and “fake news” — used by the administration to describe reality. But less attention has been paid to this government’s description of cages for young children separated from their parents. The Trump administration has invented “tender age” shelters to defend the indefensible. It sounds so caring.

And Trump is downgrading “national emergency” from something that comes with a siren for a soundtrack to just another term for cheap political expediency.

It used to be a big deal for a reputable news organization to flat out call the president a liar. Now, liar must be the most-used descriptor linked to this president. It’s also the right word. But “liar” has lost its sting, because Trump clearly doesn’t care about telling the truth. As a journalist, I’d get in more trouble if I said the president is fat — my bad, I mean plus-sized.

The word “socialist” is back in play. This term also used to sting, evoking Cold War authoritarians and empty store shelves. That was true then. What’s true now is that socialist “has lost its meaning,” especially among millennials, as Peter Buttigieg, the young presidential aspirant and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said.

If used to describe help for the elderly, subsidized college or affordable health care, socialist is a net plus. If it implies total government control without choice, it’s a loser. We’ve only just begun the modern reframing of this power word.

At the White House, “executive time” is the bogus term for the majority of the president’s day spent watching Fox News hosts praise him, tweeting insults or playing virtual golf in the new room-sized simulator just installed in the house where Lincoln slept. Kramer did more work in the “Seinfeld” episode where he pretended to have a job.

The border “wall” is a “complexifier,” to use the odd word that multibillionaire Jeff Bezos introduced, but also central to Trumpian Newspeak. The wall doesn’t exist, not in the form Trump has described it — “a great, great wall” made of “hardened concrete.” And yet, it’ll soon be finished. How so?

In a masterstroke of up-is-down, Trump’s rally in El Paso this week switched the “Build the Wall” slogan of his cult to “Finish the Wall.” Trump keeps weaseling out of his wall promise by changing the wording — a fence, a barrier, some German shepherds.

The language is crucial here, because it’s the central lie of his presidency. Like Schultz, Trump wants to use his own verbal wallpaper to cover the truth.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/language-euphemisms-trump.html" id="075fbda4-bc15-3218-afcc-52be507be15a">The New York Times</a>.

You could always slight the very rich by calling them moneybags, robber barons, fat cats or plutocrats. Billionaire was a neutral word, grounded in math: Such a person could spend $10 million a year, for 100 years, before the pile was gone.

How Words Become Weapons, and Wimps

How J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Tara Westover, who wrote “Educated,” escaped physical and psychological horror is the dose of Charles Dickens that makes these two memoirs so memorable.

Vance was raised by grandparents from Kentucky in a declining steel town in southwest Ohio. His mother was a drug addict who married several times. It was doubtful he would finish high school. Now he’s a venture capitalist who hobnobs with One Percenters in gilded hollows, and Ron Howard is making a movie of his life. He’s closer to a Beverly Hillbilly than one from Appalachia.

Westover, a self-taught writer of incandescent insight, came from a clan of survivalist end-timers in rural Idaho, was badly beaten by her brother and was nearly killed when forced to work at the family junkyard. Her parents didn’t believe in birth certificates, school or safety regulations. She is now Dr. Westover, with a Ph.D. in history, after stops at Harvard and Cambridge. Of late, she glam-posed for Vogue from her home in Britain.

These are two stories of triumph, and I have not a quibble with the magnificent telling of how their authors got from there to here. Hurrah for them. Both books, now circulating on college mandatory-read lists, have been sold in part as anthropological guides to a Trumpland that is terra incognita to most Americans.

On the surface, this is true. Vance’s ragged Middletown, Ohio, went for Trump two to one. And Franklin County, Idaho, where Westover grew up, gave Hillary Clinton just 7 percent of its vote. Trump got 10 times as much. The people we meet in both places are poor, white, undereducated, violent and evangelical in the extreme.

But as much as these folks were all-in for the oft-bankrupt developer, Trump’s presidency has been a kick in the teeth for them. A con man in business turned out to be an even greater con man in office. The policies he has promoted — taking health care from the poor, trying to slash aid for people unable to afford college, gutting regulations that save lives in mills and scrapyards — have made life more hazardous in Trump-won ZIP codes.

Beyond that, the surprise takeaway from these books is that we have the tools at hand to ensure that demography is not destiny in Forgotten America. One common thread of both memoirs is distrust of institutions. And yet it was institutions — the military in Vance’s case, college in Westover’s life — that saved them.

That, and a handful of people who showed them enough love and an escape route from places where “family dysfunction” is too kind a euphemism.

Their cultures are toxic and intransigent. As Vance writes, “poverty is in the family tradition,” as is “learned helplessness.” In other words, the hillbillies of his book have no one but themselves to blame for being hillbillies. Many of his neighbors are painted as lazy dependents of opioids and government handouts. There’s plenty of fighting, fornicating and fact-denying.

He is scornful of government help programs. “I am a conservative,” he writes in a new afterword, “one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams.”

But it was a government hand up — the great meritocracy of the Marine Corps and federal aid to get through college — that sent Vance on his way. To his credit, he has recently helped raise more than $150 million in venture capital to encourage new businesses in overlooked communities.

Tara Westover’s story is more harrowing. It’s not just the dark cave of ignorance in which she was raised. She says she was beaten senseless by her brother, in a family that enabled domestic abuse. Her father believed that doctors were “minions of Satan,” and public school was a plot of the Illuminati.

College was her lifeline. Between battering from her brother and serious injuries at the old man’s junkyard, she taught herself enough to get into Brigham Young University. There she first heard about the Holocaust and bipolar disorder, among many revelations.

College is certainly no panacea for all 16 million whites living in poverty, among Trump’s strongest backers. But it is for enough of them. And what Trump offered these people, in his proposed budget for last year, were proposals to cut education aid by $200 billion over the next decade. He would have made it harder for the poor to stay in college.

When Westover’s father visited her at Harvard, he told her, “You have been taken over by Lucifer.”

She saw it differently. College gave her a life of the mind, a new self. “You could call this selfhood many things,” she writes at the end of a fabulous story. “I call it an education.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/vance-westover-trump.html" id="a334ec8e-a21e-3885-ac76-3408e6d75f2e">The New York Times</a>.

The two great literary bookends of President Donald Trump’s half-term of grift and chaos have come from survivors of the most broken white communities that helped put him in office. They also show us the best way out of the basement of American despair.

A Hillbilly and a Survivalist Show the Way Out of Trump Country

Such is the happy problem that may soon be facing MacKenzie Bezos, one-half of the richest couple on earth. She and her husband, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, recently announced plans to divorce after 25 years of marriage.

With half of the family fortune, Bezos would be worth about $70 billion, solidifying a title she may already hold — the richest woman in the world.

We don’t know her politics or her intentions. The Bezoses have spent money supporting same-sex marriage, early education and help for homeless families. Jeff Bezos is a quirky libertarian, and his Washington Post has been a scrappy counter to a president who has made a punching bag out of the Constitution.

But it’s crucial that the Democratic Party, now going through another torturous fight between its soak-the-rich side and the progressive pragmatists, remain open to enlightened people of wealth.

“No to the billionaires,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in the first days of her campaign for president. “We are the Democratic Party and that is the party of the people.”

Her brushback pitch was aimed at candidates rich enough to self-fund their campaigns, like Michael Bloomberg. But this kind of binary thinking is a slight to history. The best president of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt, was a product of dynastic family wealth, as was John Kennedy. The Obamas, with their newfound riches from books and ventures into the entertainment industry, will soon have the kind of money to draw snark from the socialist wing of their party.

And Warren may have missed the announcement of another rich guy running for president as a Democrat, the venture capitalist Andrew Yang. He’s campaigning on a plan to guarantee every American aged 18 to 64 a basic income of $1,000 a month, paid for by a new tax on companies benefiting most from automation.

I know, I know: The last thing a country struggling with Neo-Gilded Age inequality needs is more influence from billionaire supercitizens. It’s bad enough that the Koch brothers bought themselves a budget-busting tax cut and an energy policy hatched in their corporate boardroom. An 85-year-old casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, now has more influence on U.S. foreign policy than even the secretary of state, the Koch tool Mike Pompeo.

But the Kochs pay for politicians in order to enrich themselves and to gut regulations affecting the polluting industries that made them billionaires. Adelson got a similar tax windfall for the millions he put into electing Republicans, with the added benefit of controlling the State Department’s view of Israel.

The progressive billionaires — Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett — are a different breed of fat cat. Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has been saying “Tax me more” for years — or at least, “Tax me at the same rate as my secretary.” Like Bill Gates, who is the second-richest man in the world, he has pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune.

Last year, Tom Steyer spent more than $100 million of his own money helping Democrats get elected, and he says he will drop another bundle on Senate races in 2020. Look what he got for his Democratic House: new members calling for a 70 percent tax rate on earnings over $10 million. Steyer, Gates and Buffett are going to get soaked for their political passions. And good for them.

The same goes for Bloomberg. He also spent more than $100 million last year on behalf of Democrats, and ballot initiatives on gun regulations and climate change. This got him a kick in the teeth from the Warren crowd.

God knows why George Soros continues to pour millions into promoting democracy abroad and going after hate speech at home. For that, he’s a target of crazed bombers and a victim of verbal poison from the likes of people such as the actor James Woods. Just a few days ago, Woods called Soros a “grizzled old Nazi prick” in a tweet. As a Hungarian Jew, Soros the boy had to hide from the Nazis.

The ideal financing model is one perfected by Beto O’Rourke. He raised $80 million, without sucking up to PACs or corporate donors, and nearly knocked off the most hated man in the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. Which brings us back to MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist of some acclaim. She may well follow the lead of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple co-founder, whose political spending has been aimed at recruiting Democratic female candidates.

I would bet that the time Bezos spent studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison did not make her want to build a wall or turn a blind eye to climate change. If her heart is open to benevolence for the greater good, then the least the Democrats can do is not close the door.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/crazy-rich-progressives.html" id="92899761-8f94-3522-a97b-9eca8846f27d">The New York Times</a>.

What would you do if you could spend $1 billion a week on any cause, political movement or society-improving innovation of your choice and still have almost $20 billion left over after a year?

Crazy Rich Progressives

We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.

We need to restrain a toddler-in-chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Donald Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.

There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a Cabinet meeting?

Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.

People, this our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone. A Scot called Trump a “tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing . . . gibbon.”

Or take it from the Finns. When the president suggested that wildfires could be prevented by raking our forests, as he imagined the Finns did, these people showed that their reputation for humorlessness is wrong. Among the best pictures tweeted out by the Finns was that of a woman taking a vacuum to the forest floor.

Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It’s the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Trump.

The mockery gets to him because deep down, he knows he’s a fraud. “The Art of the Deal” was the invention of its ghostwriter. “The Apprentice” was complete fiction. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, recently told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king.”

The jesters are having their day. What was the best venting of Trump frustration in 2018? Hands down, it was Matt Damon doing the brewski-loving, head-steaming, boy-calendar-obsessed Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Nobody can order a beer without thinking of the skit.

The best comedy makes fun of the powerful and the ridiculous. Oddly, the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided this is not a year to be funny. The grim-faced hosts of the nerd prom will have a fine historian, Ron Chernow, as their speaker at the annual dinner, but no laughs, please — they’re serious journalists, after all.

In the same dour cast, colleges are no longer a source of good political satire. Lenny Bruce, now getting a revival in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” was a god with students. Today’s campus environment is a humor desert. The kids are too fragile. Bruce, who was criminally prosecuted for telling a joke about Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts, would surely be banned.

Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, “Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?” Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.'”

Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless ‘em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.

So it’s encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall — please, it’s the source of our government shutdown. It’s not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It’s nothing, at this point. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” as Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.

Nancy Pelosi, the new — and this time around, well-fortified — speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. “He’s now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.” Not bad. Keep it up.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/opinion/trump-humor-political-satire.html" id="0dd6b403-0d71-3117-ad6c-7d37d602cc00">The New York Times</a>.

We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.

We Need to Keep Laughing

<h1>He’s right, this angry old man in melting bronzer shouting in the July heat: Those of us who don’t like what’s going on in this country should get the hell out. “Go back,” as he said, to the “crime-infested places from which they came.” A fine idea.</h1>

For me, as with more than 30 million other Americans with my hyphenate, that’s tiny Ireland, the country once so infested with crime, famine, disease and assorted horrors of foreignness that its British overlords said a merciful God was doing a favor by killing off the starving masses.

So back I went to have a look. This, mind you, was just before President Donald Trump’s suggestion to his fellow citizens to get out. And also, generations after someone on my father’s side made the choice to flee for life itself, rather than fall into the cold Irish ground through the bottom of a reusable coffin.

What I found on that island where typhus once took entire families as they shivered on floors of mud, where, by one medical estimate, 50% of the children in Dublin once died before their first birthday, is now a land of universal health care.

Health care for all residents: It’s still a surprise to someone from a nation where the number of uninsured Americans has gone up by 7 million under Trump. I had left a place where nearly 1 in 7 people are left to fend for themselves when sick, to a fully covered country, the norm in most of the industrialized world.

What I found in that place where barefooted, Gaelic-speaking hordes once could not read an English sign are colleges nearly free to its citizens — good colleges, at that. Imagine, a family not having to bankrupt itself to help a child off to a better life.

What I found is a republic where nearly 1 in 8 people were born abroad, nearly as high a percentage as the foreign-born population of the United States. The prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is himself a son of an Indian immigrant. His father was born in Mumbai, while his mother hails from County Waterford, the home also of my mother’s distant family.

That 19th-century hellhole has become a 21st-century heaven. The Irish have become us — what we wanted and aspired to. They are living our national narrative, a country open to those fleeing oppressors and lack of opportunity. Its prime minister would never gloat over a “send her back” chant at a hatefest directed at new members of the republic.

Back home in America, the unimaginable is the new norm: a fully blossoming fascism. We’re stuck in a hideous loop of hate. But it‘s also an idiocy loop.

Why are we arguing about something any second grader has already settled after looking around the classroom and realizing that nearly every other child is a descendant of someone from a foreign land?

Read the resolution the House of Representatives passed on Tuesday, citing Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Benjamin Franklin, and quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s call to “remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” It’s the kind of immigrants-make-a-nation-stronger boilerplate that would normally pass the House with unanimous consent, but it drew only four Republican votes.

This is how low Trump has taken us. We are a debased nation fighting over the scraps of our former principles. Should someone offer a resolution saluting the “purple mountain majesties” of the United States, every Republican would vote against it if Trump tweeted against a color that is not orange. Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose immigrant wife is indirectly a target of this sludge, would say, as he did about the “send-her-back chants,” that the president is “on to something.”

I’m against the dismissal of others with the pre-emptive pejorative of “white privilege.” It closes minds and ends conversations. But this is one case where white privilege applies. For Trump’s tweet wasn’t aimed at me. Nor was it directed at his vice president, the cipher and coward Mike Pence, himself an Irish-American.

Trump’s hate blast was directed solely at people of color.

His tweet was the textbook definition of racism. And I should add in the interest of full transparency, I disagree with much of the policy initiatives of the four left-wing congresswomen targeted by Trump. It was wrong and incorrect for them to make Nancy Pelosi’s disagreement with them about race. That episode was another textbook illustration of why the far left has trouble winning a majority.

But let’s leave that discussion for another day. Back in the country from which I came, the Irish appear genuinely perplexed at this American vomiting of principle. Writing in “Irish Times,” Oliver Sears, a British-born resident of Ireland and son of a Polish holocaust survivor, wondered how any immigrant could ever vote for Trump.

I heard a similar thing when I went back: How could Irish-Americans vote for this awful man without becoming traitors to their heritage? For this Ireland has become what America used to be. If only America could be more like this Ireland.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/send-her-back-ilhan-omar.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

For me, as with more than 30 million other Americans with my hyphenate, that’s tiny Ireland, the country once so infested with crime, famine, disease and assorted horrors of foreignness that its British overlords said a merciful God was doing a favor by killing off the starving masses.

Send me back to the country I came from

But perhaps it made those who tore apart families, who whipped insubordinates until they passed out, who sold children and cotton bales as similar commodities feel better to know that the monstrous crime of their daily enterprise could be a blessed act.

These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”

She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that rise from the rot of the Trump presidency on a daily basis. But in blaming God for Trump, Sanders echoed a widespread Republican belief that the most outwardly amoral man ever to occupy the White House is an instrument of divine power. He’s part of the master plan.

Mocking Sanders and the many Ned Flanders of the GOP team is unlikely to make much of a dent. Nearly half of all Republicans believe God wanted Trump to win the election. To them, secular snark is a merit badge on the MAGA hat.

But there is a better way to sway the electorate of faith, as the rising Democratic stars Pete Buttigieg and Stacey Abrams have shown us. They apply something like a “What Would Jesus Do?” test to rouse religious conscience on the political battlefield.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar, married to a junior high school teacher. He’s gay and, more surprising for a modern Democrat, he is an out Christian, as quick to quote St. Augustine as Abraham Lincoln. On Sunday, he is expected to formally announce his run for president.

Like Abrams and Sen. Cory Booker, Mayor Pete says his faith made him a progressive. Scripture directs him to defend the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the societal castoffs.

But Buttigieg goes much further than mere Bible-citing. He’s taking it directly to Trump and to Vice President Mike Pence, who flashes his piety like a seven-carat diamond on his pinkie finger. It’s hard to look at the actions of Trump, Buttigieg said, “and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.”

The mayor calls Pence the “cheerleader of the porn star presidency,” and he wonders whether the vice president “stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump.”

Buttigieg’s marriage to Chasten Glezman “moved me closer to God,” he said in a speech last Sunday. To the “Mike Pences of the world,” he said, “your quarrel is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

Abrams, who narrowly lost her race for governor of Georgia last year, also uses faith, part of a long African-American tradition, to marshal Christian principles against the repulsive acts of man. The daughter of two Methodist preachers, she said in one of her television ads, “My reading of the Bible says that Jesus Christ was a progressive.”

We should wince at any claim of providential partisanship. The founders were explicit about this in writing a strictly secular Constitution. George Washington’s Treaty of Tripoli, passed unanimously by the Senate, contains language stating that “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

But when a president is held up by his own spokeswoman as an extension of divine will, and that president is embraced by the evangelical community as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it’s fine to use the source material to fight back.

The best Christian argument against Trump comes from Christ. The essence of Christianity is his exhortation that people treat the sick, the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned as they would treat him. “Whatever you did to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.”

No one can know what’s in Trump’s heart. But his policies are inhumane in the extreme. Cursed are the meek, for under Trump’s command, children have been put in cages, and the poor in red states are denied the health care that should be available to them under Obamacare.

Pope Francis, an authority I would trust more than Sarah Sanders in this realm, said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not a Christian.”

Trump is all about self. His bigotry, his boasting, his lies, his pride, his scams of the vulnerable, his worship of materialism, his insults of the dead, his turning a blind eye to refugees, his bragging of adulterous behavior, his treatment of “the least” among us — all of this is antithetical to Christian philosophy.

Buttigieg is right to call him on this. He’s right to attack Pence’s hypocrisy. But the moral high ground is a fragile perch, best visited on rare occasions. He’s thrown down a needed challenge. Now let Trump and Pence try to prove him wrong.

This article originally appeared in <a id="1097be7e-8cd3-3332-af16-bdfa88eec1ea" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/opinion/stacy-abrams-pete-buttigieg.html">The New York Times</a>.

We know that slaveholders in the American South used Scripture to justify keeping their fellow humans in bondage. They could find no words from Christ on this, for there are no words from him. Just a line in the New Testament from mere mortals presuming to speak for him.

How to break the Republican lock on God

<h1>And really, who cares? Those who believe that history has a wicked sense of humor should care. </h1>

From the depths of British bungling, hubris and incompetence is emerging a St. Patrick’s Day miracle: the real chance of a united Ireland.

After more than 800 years, it’s not just possible but also seems inevitable that London’s ruling reach will no longer extend to part of the island west of the Irish Sea.

All of the centuries when borders from India to Africa, from the Middle East to British Columbia, were drawn by besotted and bewigged Englishmen may end with the whimpering last gasps of Brexit.

Delay Brexit, redo Brexit, no-deal Brexit. It hardly matters. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall, you can sense the acceleration toward the inevitable.

Don’t wait for Her Majesty’s government to resolve the sovereignty issues of Northern Ireland, which are now holding up the divorce between Britain and the European Union. There is no solution.

Bear with me while I walk through the Groundhog’s Day of this muddle. When Britain voted narrowly in 2016 to leave the union, it did so in a fit of nationalism and xenophobia, and against the will of majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Voters were promised a migrant-free Britain, unfettered from evil globalists. Instead, they are getting a Balkanized Britain, its stagnant economy at the mercy of forces they will no longer be able to influence in Europe. The vote was a Trump-level temper tantrum that revealed the fraudulence of conservative populism.

What has bollixed the formal exit — and is the root cause of all of the rudderless rumblings in Parliament this week — is Northern Ireland. As always, the most vexing of Britain’s old colonial possessions is the one closest to Westminster.

The Brexit vote roused the ghosts from bloody eras past, those centuries when it was a crime to be Irish in Ireland. The Troubles, three decades of late-20th-century sectarian terror that took at least 3,500 lives, was the latest iteration of that dead weight of memory.

“It almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there,” Patrick Radden Keefe writes in “Say Nothing,” his magnificent new account of the awful years in the north.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — an instance when “hope and history rhyme” in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney — ended the Troubles. Remarkably, it has held the peace, while essentially erasing the border between the Republic of Ireland and the swath of historic Ulster belonging to Britain.

No one wants to put up guard stations and customs checks along the invisible 310-mile line separating prosperous Ireland, a member of the EU, from the shakily peaceful six counties of the north, which would exit. And only the most hateful elements on both sides want a return of violence that is sure to come with a hard border.

The solution? It’s there in the not-so-fine print of the peace agreement. Should a majority of Northern Ireland residents desire to leave Britain, it is required to call for a vote of those people.

That majority is fast approaching. What Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain calls “our precious union” is held together by 10 members of Parliament representing the old hatreds of North Ireland — the Democratic Unionist Party. It was founded by Ian Paisley, a bigot with a Bible, who opposed the peace agreement and referred to Catholics as scum who “multiply like vermin.”

Keefe quotes an English journalist as saying that the unionists are “more British than the British, about whom the British care not at all.”

Paisley is no longer with us. Nor is most of the dark sentiment he stirred up. When the borders came down, so did many of the walls of religion and nationality. Catholics, long a persecuted minority, will soon be a majority in Northern Ireland if demographic trends continue.

But the conflict is less about one Christian sect against another. It’s more about how to thrive in an interconnected world. The Republic of Ireland is proudly progressive, led by an openly gay taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who is of Irish and Indian heritage. After a series of scandals, the influence of the Catholic Church has greatly diminished. Last year, Ireland had the fastest-growing economy in Europe.

Given a choice, a majority in Northern Ireland could well be persuaded to ditch what is left of feckless and intemperate Britain and form a single Irish nation — if for no other reason than they like the benefits that come with being a small country in the EU. Of course, many things would still have to fall in place. But the stars are aligning.

Remember: This was all Britain’s doing, unintentional though it was. Hope and history don’t usually rhyme. More often, they bump into each other. That happy accident could result a single Irish nation finally free of foreign rule.

For going on three years now, Britain has taken a holiday from sanity. A tiny island kingdom whose people once ruled nearly a fourth of the world’s land area squabbles over the terms of its self-inflicted diminishing and isolation.