President Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Dana Milbank

Dana Milbank

Op-ed columnist covering national politics

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June 25 at 7:54 PM

Can’t anybody here play this game?

The Trump administration, if you haven’t noticed, is undergoing one of its frequent paroxysms of incompetence.

On the border, the administration holds hundreds of migrant children in deplorable conditions: filthy, frightened and hungry. The president ordered and then called off a massive immigration raid, and, in the middle of the chaos, the administration’s top border security official resigned Tuesday. 

Overseas, the administration is stumbling toward war with Iran, ordering and then canceling an attack. Iran on Tuesday said the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation,” and Trump responded by threatening Iran with “obliteration.”

Here in Washington, Trump just appointed a new press secretary for the third time and a White House communications director for the seventh time. He refuses to say whether he has confidence in his FBI director, his third, and he’s publicly feuding with the Federal Reserve chairman he appointed over whether Trump can fire him. Meantime, Trump is defying a Trump-appointed watchdog who called for the firing of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for illegal political activities, and he’s brushing off the latest credible accusation of sexual misconduct by saying the accuser is “not my type.” And Trump’s protocol chief is quitting on the eve of the Group of 20 summit, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, amid allegations that he carried a whip in the office. 

The chaos takes on many forms, but most of it stems from a single cause: Trump’s determination to run the country like “The Apprentice.” 

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President Trump discussed escalating tensions with Iran at a signing of an executive order on affordable housing on June 25. (The Washington Post)

The common thread to the mayhem and bungling is Trump’s insistence on staffing his government with officials serving in temporary, “acting” roles at the pleasure of the president and without the stature or protection of Senate confirmation. This allows Trump to demand absolute subservience from appointees. Because he can replace them at will, they don’t contradict him. But this tentative status also means they lack authority within their agencies and the stature to stand up to Trump when he’s wrong. 

It’s no mere coincidence that the border debacle is the work of Trump’s Homeland Security Department, where every major border- and immigration-related agency is led by an “acting” official. Trump’s acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, just resigned after only two months on the job. The Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report that he will be replaced by the current acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mark Morgan (who got the job after praising Trump’s policies on Fox News). Morgan, in turn, has only been on the job for a couple of months since Trump fired yet another acting director of ICE. Trump had also ousted his DHS secretary and his head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and he has tabbed an “immigration czar” who has not yet accepted the job.  

It’s no mere coincidence, either, that the Iran debacle is occurring at a time when the Pentagon has been leaderless since Jim Mattis resigned as defense secretary in December. Patrick Shanahan had been the longest-serving “acting” defense secretary in history until last week, when Trump named another acting secretary, Mark Esper. Both men were reportedly with Trump when he ordered the Iran attack, which he later canceled after learning about possible casualties. It’s hard to imagine Trump ordering up a military attack on Mattis’s watch without first getting a casualty estimate. 

And it’s no mere coincidence that the man at the fulcrum of chaotic White House decision-making, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, also serves in “acting” status. Politico’s Nancy Cook reports that Trump is tiring of Mulvaney (he had the nerve to cough during a Trump TV interview), though he might not yet replace him with a fourth chief of staff, because he likes Mulvaney’s “hands-off approach” to Trump’s “whims and decision-making style.” If he weren’t “hands-off,” he’d be fired. 

Trump is unabashed in his preference for this “Apprentice”-style, “you’re fired” leadership. It’s a theme of a new book about Trump’s Cabinet, “The Best People,” by Yahoo News national correspondent Alexander Nazaryan. Of his fondness for acting officials, Trump told Nazaryan: “It gives me a lot of leeway. It gives me great flexibility. I do like it. It’s such a big deal to get people approved nowadays. . . . We have actings, and we’re seeing how we like them.” 

In other words, the administration is run by people on perpetual tryout, perpetual probation, unable to make long-term plans or to command the respect of those they (nominally) lead. The Federal Aviation Administration, which botched its handling of the Boeing 737 Max crashes, has been led by acting officials. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which bungled the recall of Fisher-Price’s Rock ’n Play bassinet, has been run by an acting chairwoman. (She announced last week she will step down at the end of her term in October.)

Now, Trump’s “actings” are causing babies to go hungry, and they may soon bumble us into war with Iran. But that’s okay, because Trump likes the “flexibility.”

GREEN BANK, W.Va. — A few weeks ago, I drove down a back road in West Virginia and into a parallel reality. Sometime after I passed Spruce Mountain, my phone lost service — and I knew it would remain comatose for the next few days. When I spun the dial on the car radio, static roared out of every channel. I had entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain with few cell towers or other transmitters.

I was headed toward Green Bank, a town that adheres to the strictest ban on technology in the United States. The residents do without not only cellphones but also Wi-Fi, microwave ovens and any other devices that generate electromagnetic signals.

The ban exists to protect the Green Bank Observatory, a cluster of radio telescopes in a mountain valley. Conventional telescopes are like superpowered eyes. The instruments at Green Bank are more like superhuman ears — they can tune into frequencies from the lowest to the highest ends of the spectrum. The telescopes are powerful enough to detect the death throes of a star, but also terribly vulnerable to our loud world. Even a short-circuiting electric toothbrush could blot out the whisper of the Big Bang.

Physicists travel here to measure gravitational waves. Astronomers study stardust. The observatory has also become a hub for alien hunters who hope to detect messages sent from other planets. And in the past decade, the town has become a destination for “electrosensitives” who believe they’re allergic to cellphone towers — some of them going so far as to wrap their bedrooms in mesh in hopes of screening out what they believe to be harmful rays.

This town, in other words, calls out to many kinds of eccentrics. And I guess I am one of them.

I came in hopes of finding a certain kind of wildness and solitude. I live in Massachusetts, and I often disappear into the forests and rivers to clear my head. I’ve always loved the moment when the bars on my phone disappear. When I’m out of range entirely, floating along in a kayak, time grows elastic. I stare down into that other kingdom below me, at the minnows darting through the duckweed, and feel deeply free — no one’s watching; no one knows where I am.

In theory, I could achieve this kind of freedom anywhere by shutting off my cellphone and observing an “internet sabbath.” But that has never worked for me — and I suspect it doesn’t for most other people either. Turn off your phone and you can almost hear it wheedling to be turned on again.

To experience the deepest solitude, you need to enter the land where the internet ends.

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Ten years ago, it was easy to do that. But lately, even in the backwoods, my cellphone springs to life, clamoring for attention.

The off-grid places are disappearing. And that’s as it should be. We must wire up rural America; cell service is now a utility almost as essential as electricity or heat. In April, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it will hold the biggest auction of radio spectrum in this country’s history; the auction, scheduled for late this year, is part of an effort to spread cell coverage to even the most remote towns ahead of the rollout of 5G networks.

Unfortunately, ownership of the telecommunication grids will go to corporate giants rather than to the communities themselves. But even so, small towns are fighting to be wired up. It’s likely that in 10 or so years, the country will be blanketed with signal, from sea to shining sea.

I’m hopeful that when that happens, we might retain just a few quiet places where it’s still possible to disconnect.

Activists have already created “dark sky reserves” to protect wilderness from artificial light. In the future, might we also create “privacy reserves” where we can go to escape the ubiquitous internet?

I wanted to find out what it was like to disconnect in the quietest town in America, so here I was, hiking down a dirt road behind the Green Bank observatory campus. I wandered through a meadow and into an abandoned playground. The rusted swings creaked in the wind.

In the distance, the largest of the Green Bank telescopes reared up over a hill like a shimmering apparition, with its lacy struts and moon-white dish. The telescope is so freakishly huge that it looked completely unreal, as if it had been C.G.I.-ed into the sky.

But the quiet was even eerier. Not just radio quiet, but the kind of silence that I hadn’t heard in years: no buzz of the highway, no planes overhead, just the rush of wind through the grass. That — along with the lonely playground — made me feel as if I had stumbled onto the set of an apocalyptic TV series.

The spell broke when a truck bumped down the road and disgorged three dogs. A gray-haired fellow stepped out. I hurried toward him and asked if he lived here. He introduced himself as Stephen McNally, a retiree who’d lived in Green Bank for 12 years.

While his dogs chased swallows, I peppered Mr. McNally with questions. Did he own a cellphone? He told me he never had. But, he said, lately whenever he ventures outside of the quiet zone, “people tell me you have to get one.” Recently, at a hardware store a hundred miles from here, he tried to pay with a credit card that he hadn’t used in years. That must have tripped some security alert, because the store clerks said that they needed to verify his identify by calling the phone number listed on his account. “They wanted to call me to make sure that it was really me,” Mr. McNally said. He tried to explain that his phone wasn’t in his pocket. It was back in Green Bank, because it was a landline. The clerks couldn’t seem to grasp this.

Mr. McNally seemed to be of the opinion that the rest of the country, out there beyond the mountains, was losing its mind.

Noreen Prestage, a tour guide at the observatory, agreed. She told me that she had lived in Green Bank for 17 years, happily, without a cellphone. But just the week before, she’d felt it necessary to buy a basic mobile phone so that she could rendezvous with friends and her son when she went outside the zone. “I don’t want it,” she said of the phone, but if you’re going to make plans out there, you have to have it.

“When I walk around my house, I’m silent,” she said. “I think people have lost the ability to be present with themselves. There’s nothing wrong with sitting on your deck looking at the hills. I don’t even have an answering machine.”

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Because they’re hard-wired, answering machines are allowed here, if you want one. And though homeowners must agree to do without Wi-Fi, they can connect to the internet through an Ethernet cable. So when I arrived at my rental cottage in the late afternoon, I found it equipped with a thingamabob to plug my laptop into the Ethernet line. It took me a moment to remember the name of that thing: a dongle. I hadn’t needed that word since the ’90s.

Also reminiscent of the ’90s: I could enter the internet only from one corner of a room — and it was so slow that I half expected to see an AOL logo materialize on the screen.

Nowadays, I often flick on a news podcast when I’m eating alone, but that would have taken too much work with the retro setup, so instead I chewed in a reverie. I began to imagine an alternate reality in which smartphones had never existed. What if, instead of going all-in on mobile phones in the early 2000s, we just hadn’t?

Social media would probably have remained in the Second Life phase — with people creating clubhouses and personalities that they played around with on the weekends — instead of smartphones fusing together our first and second lives until we couldn’t tell them apart.

Now the phone is a magic wand that can summon pizza, or a car, or a friend, or a booty call. We can ruin our lives in the space of a few moments — by buying drugs from China, or with an ill-advised comment at 3 a.m., or by getting tangled up in a stranger’s fantasies. Sometimes, pulling my phone out of my pocket, I feel the way I do when I’m standing on the rooftop of a tall building, like maybe some impulse will send me hurtling into the air. It’s glorious, to be equipped with all of this magic and danger every moment of the day. It’s also exhausting.

At twilight, I parked near a long, low laboratory building and walked through the gates of the observatory, beyond which no gas-powered cars are allowed (because spark plugs). I passed the row of telescopes and found a dirt path into the woods. The darkness dropped, and the outlines of my body disappeared. Baby frogs — peepers — chirped and creaked, filling the air with their own static. Deer crashed around the brush or scooted across the path in front of me, invisible in the dark but for their white tails.

My fingers twitched for the cellphone that wasn’t there. And then I remembered a moment years ago, maybe in 2011 or 2012, when I first switched from a “dumb phone” to a smartphone and brought the internet with me into the woods.

That day, I had discovered a rusted “No Trespassing” sign nailed into a pine tree; the sign had been there so long that the bark had grown around it. It was as if the tree-jaws were munching it up, slowly swallowing it. If I hadn’t had a smartphone, I would have simply observed this, making a wry joke to myself. But now that I did have the internet itching at me, all I could imagine was the eye-catching photo this would make on Twitter.

Then I stopped myself. What the hell? By turning this thought into a post, I was trespassing on my own most precious solitude.

When we talk about privacy, we tend to think about people spying on us online and harvesting our data. But just as dangerous — perhaps more so — is the way that the omnipresent, in-your-pocket internet can coax us into destroying our own inner wilderness.

That day, the urge to tweet was so acute that I had to wrestle with myself for a moment. And then I decided, “I’m just going to tweet this thought back to myself.” And so rather than snapping a photo, I “posted” the image to my own mind. Since then, I have taken innumerable imaginary snapshots.

I’m not the only one struggling with this urge. In many of our national parks, you can yak on the phone as you climb a mountain, post selfies as you dangle precariously over a cliff and live-tweet your encounter with an osprey. In 2017, Outside magazine reported that Instagram had lost its mind over a particularly photogenic canyon in Arizona called Horseshoe Bend. The red-rock outcropping went viral, and now thousands of people a day swarm over it. Can such places truly be called wild anymore?

About 150 people live in Green Bank, in houses scattered around a two-lane highway or tucked back in the woods. You can get basic groceries at Trent’s General Store, but if you want something to go, your best bet is Henry’s Quick Stop, a gas station with a supermarket, pizza counter and red-white-and-blue box where you can leave your tattered American flag for proper disposal. So that’s where I went for coffee the next morning.

“Beautiful day,” I said to the man in front of me in line. In response, he poured out his life story. He’d been a long-haul trucker until a brain aneurysm put him in a coma; the doctors thought he’d never walk again. But now here he was on his own two feet buying a doughnut, so, yeah, it was a hell of a beautiful day.

The man carried himself oddly, with his chest puffed out and his head swiveling as if to scan everything in the store, from the hunting gear to the Little Debbie display case. I thought his posture must have been a remnant from his brain injury, but then realized everybody seemed to be walking around with the same heads-up attitude. Take away the cellphones, it turns out, and you also take away the cellphone hunch. And with nothing else to do but meet one another’s eyes, people talk.

Later in the day, I fell into conversation with a woman who was unusual for a Green Banker, in that she had owned a cellphone for years. Before she moved here, she told me, she’d been the workaholic assistant to a workaholic manager, and “I was 24/7 on call all the time.”

“I slept with the phone next to my bed in case my boss had to get ahold of me,” she said. “I was tethered to that phone. I didn’t realize how much I was on it until I looked at my vacation pictures. All the pictures I was in, I was staring at my phone.”

Then, about a year and a half ago, her husband had persuaded her to move here — he’s a Green Bank man, “born and raised,” and yearned to return home. Nowadays, “My husband and I go to dinner, and we talk all through the night” with no interruptions, she said. Her husband rattles around in an old truck, knowing that if it breaks down, somebody will stop and pick him up. If you need to make a call, you can always stop into the Dollar General and ask to use their landline — but really, when do you need to make a call?

This life is not for everyone, she told me, and she has seen a lot of people up and leave. Maybe 80 percent of people just can’t hack it.

I know I’m part of that 80 percent. I belong on the outside. But at the same time, I feel as if something essential to my sanity depends on the existence of places like this.

On my third and final day in town, the observatory’s largest instrument, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, shut down for maintenance, and I was allowed to summit it. The telescope is taller than the Statue of Liberty and one of the largest manufactured, steerable objects on the face of our planet. An elevator that jerked like an amusement-park ride took us to the top, where a steel walkway led out onto the surface of the dish, a two-acre white expanse. I watched a maintenance worker moon-walk across its bouncy surface. He appeared to be lost in a white desert, the blue sky hanging below him like a lake.

Mike Holstine, the business manager and spokesman for the Green Bank Observatory, told me there’s so much we can learn from the telescope — from the location of near-Earth asteroids to the way that matter first began to congeal into stars. Such scientific observations depend on signals as weak as “a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a watt,” he said.

For years, microwave ovens have been tightly regulated in Green Bank because they can obliterate those barely detectable signals from billions of years ago. But what are scientists supposed to do now that just about every household object — from toaster to battery — is chattering to the internet? Even car tires are beaming out status updates about their air pressure. “That makes quiet an increasingly valuable resource for science,” Mr. Holstine said. And increasingly rare.

The situation has become so dire that scientists are preparing for what you might call The End of Quiet. Ellie White, a student at Marshall University who has been volunteering and doing research at the observatory since she was 14, told me that experts at the observatory are working on ways to detect and remove unwanted interference caused by, say, a tourist speeding through town in a car equipped with Bluetooth. The idea is to be able to identify the human-made signals and strip them out of the data, so that it’s still possible to tune in the most subtle emanations from light-years away. Imagine noise-canceling headphones for the universe.

But who will save the endangered Quiet Zone inside our own heads? What about the thoughts as subtle as the static caused by the Big Bang and the transmissions from the remote galaxies of our memories? Is the ever-present hum of the internet drowning those out, too?

Mr. Holstine said that here in Green Bank, “I use the internet, and then I walk away.” But on the outside, people are “connected all the time,” he added. “They get a text and have to look at it. For a lot of people, the choice seems like it has disappeared. The phone is part and parcel to everything they do, including work. It’s the tail wagging the dog.”

After a few days here, almost entirely offline, I felt I knew what he meant: The world outside the mountains now seemed mad to me, too.

How can we protect resources like starlight, quiet and obscurity that have little value in the marketplace?

Astronomers have been thinking about that question for decades, and they have come up with an answer: International Dark Sky Places. In these protected areas, you can wander under a splatter of stars and grapple with the evidence of your own insignificance in a vast universe. The Central Idaho reserve became the United States’ first International Dark Sky Reserve in 2017. With 1,400 square miles protected from artificial light, it attracts astro-tourists from around the world.

But we have no similar protections for disconnection, privacy and offline communities. And if no one advocates for these intangibles, the last quiet places will soon be gone.

In 2012, the National Science Foundation considered a proposal to shut down the Green Bank observatory — and ended up slashing its support by about 40 percent. Nowadays, the observatory depends on private foundations and universities to make up the shortfall.

If the observatory were to disappear, then so too, presumably, would the National Radio Quiet Zone.

When I packed up the car and drove out of Green Bank, I was confident that I knew how to find my way. But almost immediately, I turned the wrong way at a fork in the road and realized I was lost. I decided to savor the experience. After all, how often these days do you have a chance to be lost? The road led me past old rail yards and toward a river, where I plunged in and waded, slip-sliding on the rocks.

Soon I would cross into the land where the internet begins. But for now, I was on this side of the line. For now, I was dark.

Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, have documented the prevalence of bone spurs at the back of the skull among young adults. (Scientific Reports)

By Isaac Stanley-Becker

Isaac Stanley-Becker

Reporter based in the U.K.

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June 20 at 4:40 AM

Mobile technology has transformed the way we live — how we read, work, communicate, shop and date.

But we already know this.

What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit.

New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.

The result is a hook or hornlike feature jutting out from the skull, just above the neck.

In academic papers, a pair of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, argues that the prevalence of the bone growth in younger adults points to shifting body posture brought about by the use of modern technology. They say smartphones and other handheld devices are contorting the human form, requiring users to bend their heads forward to make sense of what’s happening on the miniature screens.

The researchers said their discovery marks the first documentation of a physiological or skeletal adaptation to the penetration of advanced technology into everyday life.

Health experts warn of “text neck,” and doctors have begun treating “texting thumb,” which is not a clearly defined condition but bears resemblance to carpal tunnel syndrome. But prior research has not linked phone use to bone-deep changes in the body.

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“An important question is what the future holds for the young adult populations in our study, when development of a degenerative process is evident in such an early stage of their lives?” ask the authors in one paper, published in Nature Research’s peer-reviewed, open-access Scientific Reports. The study came out last year but has received fresh attention following the publication last week of a BBC story that considers, “How modern life is transforming the human skeleton.”

Since then, the unusual formations have captured the attention of Australian media, and have variously been dubbed “head horns” or “phone bones” or “spikes” or “weird bumps.”

Each is a fitting description, said David Shahar, the paper’s first author, a chiropractor who recently completed a PhD in biomechanics at Sunshine Coast.

“That is up to anyone’s imagination,” he told The Washington Post. “You may say it looks like a bird’s beak, a horn, a hook.”

However it is designated, Shahar said, the formation is a sign of a serious deformity in posture that can cause chronic headaches and pain in the upper back and neck.

Part of what was striking about the findings, he said, was the size of the bone spurs, which are thought to be large if they measure 3 or 5 millimeters in length. An outgrowth was only factored into their research if it measured 10 millimeters, or about two-fifths of an inch.

The danger is not the head horn itself, said Mark Sayers, an associate professor of biomechanics at Sunshine Coast who served as Shahar’s supervisor and co-author. Rather, the formation is a “portent of something nasty going on elsewhere, a sign that the head and neck are not in the proper configuration,” he told The Post.

[As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines]

Their work began about three years ago with a pile of neck X-rays taken in Queensland. The images captured part of the skull, including the area where the bony projections, called enthesophytes, form at the back of the head.

Contrary to conventional understanding of the hornlike structures, which have been thought to crop up rarely and mainly among older people suffering from prolonged strain, Shahar noticed that they appeared prominently on X-rays of younger subjects, including those who were showing no obvious symptoms.

The pair’s first paper, published in the Journal of Anatomy in 2016, enlisted a sample of 218 X-rays, of subjects ages 18 to 30, to suggest that the bone growth could be observed in 41 percent of young adults, much more than previously thought. The feature was more prevalent among men than among women.

The effect — known as enlarged external occipital protuberance — used to be so uncommon, Sayers said, that one of its early observers, toward the end of the 19th century, objected to its title, arguing that there was no real protrusion.

That’s no longer the case.

Another paper, published in Clinical Biomechanics in the spring of 2018, used a case study involving four teenagers to argue that the head horns were not caused by genetic factors or inflammation, pointing instead to the mechanical load on muscles in the skull and neck.

And the Scientific Reports paper, published the month before, zoomed out to consider a sample of 1,200 X-rays of subjects in Queensland, ages 18 to 86. The researchers found that the size of the bone growth, present in 33 percent of the population, actually decreased with age. That discovery was in stark contrast to existing scientific understanding, which had long held that the slow, degenerative process occurred with aging.

They found instead that the bone spurs were larger and more common among young people. To understand what was driving the effect, they looked to recent developments — circumstances over the past 10 or 20 years altering how young people hold their bodies.

“These formations take a long time to develop, so that means that those individuals who suffer from them probably have been stressing that area since early childhood,” Shahar explained.

The sort of strain required for bone to infiltrate the tendon pointed him to handheld devices that bring the head forward and down, requiring the use of muscles at the back of the skull to prevent the head from falling to the chest. “What happens with technology?” he said. “People are more sedentary; they put their head forward, to look at their devices. That requires an adaptive process to spread the load.”

Michael Nitabach, a professor of physiology, genetics and neuroscience at Yale University, was unconvinced by the findings.

“Without knowing about the cell phone use of any of the people whose head X-rays were analyzed, it is impossible to draw conclusions about correlation between cell phone use and skull morphology,” he said.

That the bone growth develops over a long period of time suggests that sustained improvement in posture can stop it short and even ward off its associated effects, the authors said.

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How can we use technology without it taking over our lives? See expert advice on how to be a smarter you with technology. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

Sayers said the answer is not necessarily swearing off technology. At least, there are less drastic interventions.

“What we need are coping mechanisms that reflect how important technology has become in our lives,” he said.

Shahar is pressing people to become as regimented about posture as they became about dental hygiene in the 1970s, when personal care came to involve brushing and flossing every day. Schools should teach simple posture strategies, he said. Everyone who uses technology during the day should get used to recalibrating their posture at night.

As motivation, he suggested reaching a hand around to the lower rear of the skull. Those who have the hornlike feature can probably feel it.

By Michael Scherer

Michael Scherer

National political reporter covering campaigns, Congress and the White House

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June 17 at 6:00 AM

After 23 campaign launches, 33 televised town hall meetings, hundreds of campaign events and tens of thousands of candidate selfies, the Democratic primary has started with a bang this year — busier and bigger than any other in recent memory.

But the Democratic circus still can’t compete for attention with the spectacle of President Trump. The country remains far more focused on a ubiquitous commander in chief than on all the Democratic presidential candidates combined, a major concern for party strategists preparing for the general election in 2020.

“Donald Trump has managed to control the media cycle on a daily basis in ways that have made it difficult to communicate our message,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, who will begin his party’s official answer to the Trump Show on June 26 and 27, with the first of 12 televised prime-time Democratic debates.

New data compiled by The Washington Post shows just how steep a climb the party faces. Through the first five months of the year, Trump has received about three times as much Google search interest in the United States, on average, as all his Democratic rivals put together.

He has been having about 75 percent more social media interactions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram than his rivals combined since February.

And when it comes to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel, Trump was mentioned nearly twice as often as the 23 Democrats last month.

Democratic Party leaders remember all too well the overwhelming attention that Trump, then a celebrity and colorful TV personality, attracted during the 2016 campaign, allowing him to sell his defiant appeal to independents and drum up enthusiasm in the GOP base.

“You will find yourself jerked around on Donald Trump’s chain unless you are creating fights,” said Brian Fallon, who served as the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

By the end of the 2016 primaries, the 12 Republican debates had been watched by 183 million viewers, more than double the 72 million that tuned in to the nine Democratic faceoffs, according to the liberal think tank NDN.

As president, Trump will have even more power to seize the spotlight this time, enabling him to eclipse Democratic events almost at will. “Think I will do many more Network Interviews, as I did in 2016, in order to get the word out,” he announced Saturday on Twitter.

Party leaders fully expect a media blitz. The question for Democrats is whether there’s any way to counter Trump’s media barrage. Few public figures are willing to be as provocative, insulting or outrageous as he is, and arguably few have his flair for it.

For now Democrats are groping toward a strategy of shooting for higher ratings — recognizing they may never match Trump — while also teeing up a slew of advertising campaigns on issues such as health care and jobs to get out their message.

Perez has made ratings a top priority for the debates, some of which will unfold over two consecutive nights. To increase interest, he allowed even candidates who are polling below 1 percent to qualify if they could attract 65,000 donors, in hopes of encouraging those donors to watch the debates because they will have a stake in the process.

Perez says that he’s optimistic and that the public has soured on Trump’s antics, but he also argues that news organizations are to blame for much of the attention given Trump over the years. “I think the media needs some soul-searching,” he said. “Too many media outlets and journalists wake up in the morning, look to his Twitter feed and that dictates their day.”

Whatever the reason, the party’s candidates have drawn modest ratings. The highest-rated cable town hall session for a Democrat — Sen. Bernie Sanders’s appearance on Fox News Channel — topped 2.5 million viewers. At least a dozen others were unable to break 1 million, with six falling below half a million.

In contrast, the first Republican debate in August 2015 drew more than 24 million people eager to see Trump’s debut as an unorthodox presidential contender.

Democratic strategists note that it’s early in the process, and they contend that Trump’s combative tactics have alienated many supporters while energizing opponents. More voters will tune in to Democratic events in the fall, they say, as the presidential field narrows and candidates begin their sprint toward the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses.

Democrats also have sought to learn lessons from their 2016 defeat. In the 2018 congressional campaigns, Democratic candidates battled daily with a news cycle dictated by Trump or dominated by his controversies — such as the Russia investigation, his alleged sexual encounter with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, and his near-daily Twitter grenades on everything from migrant caravans to alleged corruption at the FBI.

The key to Democratic success this time, some party strategists argue, will be to focus on issues that affect voters’ lives, such as health care, education and wages. But news organizations often view those issues as less flashy, they say, so their candidates will have to buy ads to spread the word.

“We have a culture that rewards the clown show at the expense of real issues,” said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, a super PAC that plans to spend heavily to defeat Trump.

“One of the biggest challenges” for Democrats in the midterms, Cecil said, “was a huge disconnect between what was being covered on cable news and what campaigns were being run on in the states.” He added, “The way that Democrats got attention on health care was they paid for it.”

Democrats outspent Republicans in the 2018 election on broadcast ads, running more than 1 million spots that mentioned health care over the course of the cycle, according to an analysis by Kanter Media.

It will be harder to follow that same playbook in 2020, given Trump’s substantial early fundraising advantage and the fact that he will be on the ballot, not just commenting from the sidelines.

“We had the luxury of Trump not being a candidate,” said Dan Sena, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which coordinates the party’s House races. “We had things like the tax fight and the health-care fight that directly impacted people’s lives immediately.”

This year, Trump has continued to create storms of media coverage that have often blotted out reporting about the Democratic campaign — attacking the royal Duchess Meghan and actress Bette Midler on a recent trip to England, siding with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over his national security advisers in Japan, trumpeting tariff showdowns with China and Mexico.

Even when it comes to one-on-one conflicts, Trump has found a way to come out on top, at least in terms of media attention. When former vice president Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, traveled to Iowa last Tuesday to deliver a speech declaring Trump an existential threat to the nation, Trump responded with his own inflammatory comments.

That night, on the evening newscasts by NBC, CBS and ABC, Trump was rewarded for his quotes, which were if anything more jarring and aggressive. “He’s a dummy,” Trump said of Biden, while also calling him “mentally weak” and suggesting that he has lost a step as he has aged.

“Trump’s sound bites are more incendiary, more unseemly, more crudely insulting — and therefore spicier for TV news to use,” said Andrew Tyndall, who runs a newsletter that tracks network news broadcasts.

Long before he entered politics, a key insight of Trump’s career was that public attention, even if negative, could translate to power. As a real estate developer and celebrity, he courted controversy and conflict for decades, showing little capacity for embarrassment.

“The show is Trump, and it’s sold-out performances everywhere,” he told Playboy magazine in 1990, when asked about the criticism he got for ostentation.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump expanded upon the theory. “News outlets around the world are covering Trump. The key word is covering,” he told a Time magazine reporter at one point. “It’s not the polls. It’s the ratings.”

There is no doubt that he dominated the ratings in 2016, even though most of the news coverage about him was negative. Between the start of his campaign and winning the nomination, Trump received 63 percent of the coverage in a field of 17 candidates, according to a 2016 study by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, which used data from Media Tenor, a firm that tracks print, cable and broadcast news content.

In the general-election campaign, Trump received 15 percent more coverage than Clinton after the party conventions, the same study found.

More important, his voice dominated many of the stories no matter the subject.

“When a candidate was seen in the news talking about Clinton, the voice was typically Trump’s and not hers,” wrote Harvard professor Thomas Patterson, the report’s author. “Yet when the talk was about Trump, he was again more likely to be the voice behind the message.”

Members of Clinton’s campaign say her strategy of attacking Trump’s character in television ads, while focusing on her own policy plans, did not work and will have to change in 2020 for a Democrat to win. Trump understood better how creating conflict, outrage and even debates about his truthfulness would lead to more coverage and ultimately benefit him, they say.

“I think what separates the people that truly could break through in their own right are people who are willing to stake out positions even when they come with a lot of controversy attached,” Fallon said.

The current Democratic candidates have latched onto a wide array of tactics as they attempt to break through the crowded field. Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper has structured his campaign around attacks on “socialism,” Sanders has renewed his assault on the “billionaire class” and Biden has focused his campaign squarely on denunciations on Trump himself.

Others, such as Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., have tried to replicate Trump’s approach of constant media exposure, albeit in their own ways.

“One of the reasons Donald Trump thrived in 2016 was he was fearless and went in and did interviews everywhere and didn’t even care if he bombed,” said Lis Smith, a senior communications adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “He knew if he sucked up all of the oxygen, no one else would have a chance to rise. Good attention, bad attention — all of that fed his candidacy.”

Concern that Trump will continue his dominance of the American imagination has given Buttigieg a key part of his stump speech, a promise that he could dislodge Trump as the focus of attention as the campaign continues.

“The biggest question is, ‘How are we going to win?’ ” he said June 9 at a state party gathering in Iowa. “The only thing we can do is to look at that show this president has created — whatever you want to call it, a reality show, horror show, game show — and we are going to change the channel to something completely different.”

Anu Narayanswamy and Christine Loman contributed to this report.

Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world.

America is the land of freedom, as any politician will be happy to tell you. What you don’t hear quite so often is that the stuff under the land is also apparently made of freedom as well. That is, at least according to a news release this week from the Department of Energy (DoE).

Mark W Menezes, the US undersecretary of energy, bestowed a peculiar honorific on our continent’s natural resources, dubbing it “freedom gas” in a release touting the DoE’s approval of increased exports of natural gas produced by a Freeport LNG terminal off the coast of Texas.

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy,” he said.

The concept of “freedom gas” may seem amorphous, but it’s actually being measured down to the smallest unit.

“With the US in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world,” said Steven Winberg.

It’s unclear if members of the Trump administration attempting to assign patriotic intentions to natural gas are aware of the silliness of the concept, but Rick Perry seems to believe in it.

“Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent,” the energy secretary said earlier this month, according to EURACTV.

“And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”

Photo: Roger Askew/REX/Shutterstock

In the pantheon of nightmares, somewhere between “falling into an endless pit” and “back at high school but naked” is “going on national radio and learning, on-air, that the book you wrote and is to be published in two weeks is premised on a misunderstanding.” Naomi Wolf, unfortunately, is living that nightmare.

When she went on BBC radio on Thursday, Wolf, the author of Vagina and the forthcoming Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, probably expected to discuss the historical revelations she’d uncovered her book. But during the interview, broadcaster Matthew Sweet read to Wolf the definition of “death recorded,” a 19th-century English legal term. “Death recorded” means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.

Wolf thought the term meant execution.

Everyone listen to Naomi Wolf realize on live radio that the historical thesis of the book she's there to promote is based on her misunderstanding a legal term pic.twitter.com/a3tB77g3c1

— Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019

There’s a shocking silence on-air after Sweet says he doesn’t think Wolf is right about the executions Outrages delves into. Sweet looks at the case of Thomas Silver, who, Wolf wrote in her book, “was actually executed for committing sodomy. The boy was indicted for unnatural offense, guilty, death recorded.” Silver, as Sweet points out, was not executed.

“What is your understanding of what ‘death recorded’ means?” Wolf asked him on-air, mere moments after he had already explained to her how Old Bailey, London’s main criminal court up until 1913, defined it. Sweet pulled up his own research — news reports and prison records — showing the date that Thomas Silver was discharged.

Death recorded, he says, “was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.” And then the blow: “I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

Before Sweet delivered the punch, Wolf was audibly ready to speak about the “several dozen” similar executions she noted in her book, many of which rely on her completely wrong understanding of the term “death recorded.” But there is no historical evidence that shows anyone was ever executed for sodomy during the Victorian era, Sweet said on Twitter. Which means … much of the premise of Wolf’s entire book is just false.

Wolf cited on Twitter historical findings from a peer-reviewed article written by A.D. Harvey, a historian who’s been labeled a hoaxer. (He deceived the public into thinking that Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky met once and created several online personas and an entire fake community of academics.)

The book hits U.S. stands on June 18, according to the Amazon listing. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson offered this statement: “While HMH employs professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking. Despite this unfortunate error we believe the overall thesis of the book Outrages still holds. We are discussing corrections with the author.”

To her absolute credit, Wolf is taking this on the chin. On Twitter, Wolf and Sweet appear cordial. There’s a tweet from Sweet that indicates Wolf is going to look into her research and make necessary corrections. And a thread in which Wolf thanks Sweet for correcting her and promises to review “all of the sodomy convictions on Twitter in real time so people can see for themselves what the sentences were and what became of each of these people.”

What I thought I would do is pick a short passage from the book (pp. 71-2) and go through it in detail. @naomirwolf is taking a second look at her work, and, I think, with great generosity, has offered to share her findings as she goes. This is pretty decent of her, I think.

— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) May 23, 2019

Outrages has already been released in the U.K. under Virago Press, a division of Hachette Book Group that publishes feminist works and supports women authors. Virago hasn’t returned a request for comment.

The offical single, Captain Of The Mount is now available at the iTunes store.
Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, why is he climbing a mountain?

Official single "Captain Of The Mount" now available at the iTunes store

Shatner's "Rocket Man" condensed to just the performance.

Hanover, N.H., Deputy Fire Chief Michael Hinsley in the woods with Mink the bear.

Courtesy of Michael Hinsley

For years, an elderly resident of Hanover, N.H., fed one particular female black bear. The old man's food offer of choice? Birdseed and maple-glazed doughnuts from a diner down the street.

Then the man died, and the bear started venturing out farther in search of more delicious treats.

She had become comfortable around humans, and people in town grew to love her — a lumbering, strong but gentle animal that would come right up to your door. She's named Mink, after a local natural area called Mink Brook.

"She's a beautiful bear. She's an amazing bear," said Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin. "Anybody that likes animals was enchanted by her."

But others were scared, and state wildlife officials decided, for safety's sake, the bear needed to go. They planned to shoot her, but local news outlets picked up the story and a petition to save Mink got thousands of signatures.

Then New Hampshire's governor intervened, and had Mink relocated instead.

Mink had to move

Just under a year ago, officials dropped Mink off with a tracking collar far north, near the Canadian border.

Mink the bear's travels from April through October 2018, as tracked by New Hampshire Fish and Game.

Courtesy of New Hampshire Fish and Game

But she immediately started making her way back.

"She was going 30 miles a day," said Ben Kilham, a biologist who has been tracking Mink's location. "If anything, we should get her into a triathlon."

She has logged thousands of looping miles, crossing Interstate 91 and the Connecticut River multiple times.

The lead bear official for the state of New Hampshire said he's never dealt with an animal that's traveled so long, hibernating for the winter and then continuing on. He now checks her progress first thing every morning.

He's not alone in his interest. Even the governor asked to be included on the data. "And he's clearly been watching," Kilham said. "Probably the whole office down there has been watching, because it's fascinating the way she moves."

Bears are known to be able to find their way home, or at least try to. That's why wildlife officials believed killing Mink was more humane than putting her through an arduous journey.

"To see how far she traveled, and how thin she was last fall, we all felt like — oh boy — what have we done to this sow?" Griffin said.

Until recently, though, the general public didn't know Mink was getting close. But earlier this spring, a woman named Patricia Campbell spotted a bear outside her house, less than 20 miles from Hanover.

Campbell took a bunch of photos, and Mink once again ended up in the local news.

Biologists now say she could be back in Hanover anytime. From there, her future is unclear.

"If she comes right back as our nuisance bear in Mink Brook corridor," Griffin said, "I don't know what more we can do."

At this point, wildlife officials are taking things day by day. There's no plan in place if Mink makes it back. They're just hoping she'll lie low in the woods.

The One-Income Trap

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

• May 7, 2019
• • 582

Recently, under the somewhat unlikely inspiration of Elizabeth Warren, some conservatives have revived an old debate: Did millions of women entering the work force actually make families worse off?

In her lost days as a heterodox public intellectual, Warren made the case that indeed it did, because instead of getting richer, dual-earner households found themselves in what she and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, called the “two-income trap,” bidding up the price of real estate and child care, losing the division-of-labor benefits of homemaking, and generally working harder for little or no economic gain.

This argument, now almost 15 years old, has been picked up lately by social conservatives worried about the decline of marriage and childbearing and frustrated by the Republican Party’s longstanding inattention to family policy. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson has become a tribune of the idea that the G.O.P. should try to help families live on a single income. And two weekends ago in these pages, Helen Andrews argued that American politics desperately needs a prominent spokeswoman for the desires and interests of mothers who prefer to stay home.

[The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence-based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week.]

In response, another group of conservatives has sprung to the two-earner household’s defense, with arguments distilled in a new op-ed by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. First, Strain argues, Warren’s old analysis exaggerated the costs borne by dual-income households and understated their economic gains; in reality, most two-earner households in the 2000s are better off than equivalent one-earner couples in the 1960s, and the American economy has benefited immensely from women entering the work force.

In addition, Strain continues, nothing prevents today’s households from opting to live on one income, and if women don’t make that choice, it’s a sign that they find work advantageous and empowering. “In the end,” he concludes, “the good things about family life that social conservatives rightly celebrate are perfectly compatible with two-earner households.” And a conservatism that seems opposed to them will be purely reactionary, speaking for a traditionalist subgroup rather than the needs and aspirations of most women and most men.

Let me try to play mediator between these camps. I’ll start by agreeing with Strain’s two strongest points. First, he’s right that some of the calculations that Warren made appear dubious in hindsight, and her argument that households with two earners are worse off in a strict material sense seems weak. Where they spend more, as on housing, they seem to get more — houses are bigger than 50 years ago, for instance, and more likely to be air-conditioned — and while the cost of child care has risen, the average two-earner income has risen fast enough to compensate.

Second, Strain is right to emphasize that part of dual-earner culture reflects understandable female ambition, the desire of half the human race to use its “talents, ideas and energy” in ways that sexism and unjust discrimination long prevented or forestalled. A pro-family politics that assesses this liberation purely in terms of socioeconomic gains or losses is missing something; a pro-family politics that treats it as a cultural disaster will never persuade many accomplished women to give conservatism a second look. If cultural conservatism isn’t compatible with two-earner households (households like my own, for the record), it isn’t compatible with American culture in any plausible near-future form.

However, now I’ll switch to the Carlson-Andrews side, and suggest that Strain’s tone is too sanguine about where our culture of work and parenting has taken us. If it’s true that the two-earner economy reflects the genuine desires and interests of many families, it’s also true that lots of families would like to opt out of it, even temporarily, and can’t, precisely because they would fall behind in the “bidding war over middle-class amenities” that Andrews describes in her Op-Ed.

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This is the real “trap” created by two-earner culture. There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.

That pressure has major human costs. If you look at expressed female desires in our society, there is both a substantial unmet maternal preference for part-time work over full-time work and a general desire for more children than American women are currently having. These two desires are intimately connected: No matter how gender-egalitarian society becomes, the physical realities of gestation and childbirth make it natural for most families to desire at least a temporary division of labor during the years when their kids are young, a temporary period of male breadwinning to balance the burden borne by mothers. And a working world that doesn’t accommodate this natural desire will end up with, well, what we increasingly have in the West — a lot of well-off dual-earner couples but fewer successful relationships and fewer children than either sex desires.

Part of the problem here is that in reacting against a social conservatism that seems hostile to female ambition, much of feminism has subjected itself to corporate capitalism instead, and embraced a “lean in” norm that essentially asks women to accommodate themselves to career paths made for men. This leads to angst when professional women have children and the demands of corporate life push them back into the old division-of-labor patterns. But worse, it requires a lot of cultural deception about how easy it is to postpone having kids, joined to a crude, “freeze your eggs” form of corporate patriarchy (draped in wokeness, but no less anti-woman for all that) that’s good for Apple and Google but lousy for long-term female happiness.

Nor is the existing liberal answer to some of these dilemmas — universal day care of the kind that Warren now champions — a sufficient response. Day care can be great for families (again, for the record, our own kids have been in wonderful programs), and to repurpose Strain’s line, the good things about family life that social conservatives rightly celebrate are perfectly compatible with pre-K and nursery school and early-childhood care.

But there are many families that don’t want full-time day care just as there are many families that don’t want two full-time jobs, and their desire can be entirely reasonable. Great preschools are no easier to build than great high schools, and if you think your kids might be better off in the care of a parent or with some extended family member, then a system designed around a dual-income plus day care norm will likewise feel like a burden, or a trap.

The better way here, as I have argued with tedious frequency, would be for conservatives skeptical of the two-earner norm to make common cause with feminists skeptical of the corporate bias against female biology and for both to unite around supports for family life that are neutral between different modes of breadwinning. Don’t subsidize day care, don’t subsidize stay-at-home moms; just subsidize family life, and let the sexes figure out how best to balance work and life, their ambitions and their desire for kids.

The practical obstacles to this kind of feminist-conservative centrism may seem substantial, but the practical case for odd alliances is just as strong. As Lyman Stone recently argued in First Things, the evidence from Europe suggests family policies are most effective when they’re understood as part of a flexible pro-family consensus, rather than as attempts to impose a single normative model on women and families. In other words, a pro-family conservatism that simply rejects the two-earner household as a failed experiment won't be able to establish a successful policy consensus. But neither will a feminism that writes off the aspects of traditionalism that reflect what many women want.

As I’m trying to mediate between conservative factions here, I’ll end with this thought: The turn toward skepticism about two-earner households will change conservatism for the better to the extent to which it encourages a certain skepticism about how corporations treat families and an awareness of how government ignores them.

But to win the political battles that Carlson and Andrews envision, social conservatism needs not only visible female champions but also a rhetoric and a program that persuades women who are largely happy with their working lives that its fight can be theirs as well.

• March 26, 2019
• • 45

During the June 1788 convention at which Virginia ratified the Constitution, Patrick Henry, a critic of the proposed government, accused James Madison, its foremost defender, of failing to protect against corrupt or lawless politicians. “Is there no virtue among us?” Madison replied. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.”

That exchange is worth recalling as the House of Representatives prepares for a vote scheduled for Tuesday on whether to override President Trump’s veto of a congressional resolution to nullify the national emergency he declared to build a border wall. The House is almost certain to fail to muster the two-thirds majority required of both legislative chambers to override a presidential veto. It seems likely that the Senate, for its part, will not even do its constitutional duty and try. Republicans, especially Republican senators, are being justifiably excoriated for failing to defend congressional authority.

But blaming them alone misdiagnoses the constitutional problem. Congress’s impotence indicates an appalling failure of constitutional awareness and education in the United States. The Republican base — like the Democratic base during President Barack Obama’s tenure — is demanding, and getting, a constitution of expediency rather than of law.

As many observers have noted, the Republican senators who criticized the emergency declaration and then voted to uphold it — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina foremost among them — all face re-election in 2020. Mr. Trump is popular in their states, and their constituents are evidently more concerned with building a border wall than with the constitutional niceties according to which it is funded. These senators’ failure to “refine and enlarge the public views,” in Madison’s phrase, is a dereliction of their duty under Article I of the Constitution. But the root problem is the constitutional views that elected officials are supposed to refine.

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One Republican senator who voted against the emergency declaration, Roy Blunt of Missouri, was disinvited from a political event in his state by a local party official who demanded of him, “Why could you not support my president in the emergency declaration?” So long as the public does not care whether Congress protects its institutional turf — or, worse, is hostile to it doing so — the constitutional architecture cannot stand.

Madison understood this. One of the most consistent themes of his writings is that the public always governs eventually in the United States. “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law,” he wrote before the constitutional convention. Alexander Hamilton, too, explained that liberty in the United States “must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government.”

The constitutional imperative is to slow down policymaking so that passion can dissipate and reason can take hold. That requires civic virtues that constitutional education must teach. They involve not merely knowledge but ultimately temperament. The foremost is patience: Constitutional mechanisms work slowly by design. Another essential virtue is public-spiritedness: In a sprawling republic, those with strong views must recognize that they share the political community with fellow citizens whose competing views are equally intense. Both patience and public spirit entail caring not just what happens, but also how it happens.

If, by contrast, civic education focuses solely on outcomes at the expense of process, it will produce a politically entitled people immune to these virtues or to any civic quality other than demanding what you want when you want it. Yet this is substantially how civic education — which occurs in schools but also in the public square, when the news media reports on issues and when public figures discuss them — treats the constitutional order.

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In schools, civic education tends to accord outsize importance to the Bill of Rights at the expense of the more complex topics of separation of powers, federalism and other pillars of the constitutional edifice. Hamilton had opposed a Bill of Rights in part because he thought these mechanisms safeguarded rights better than protections inscribed on paper could. Journalists and politicians equally obsess over winners and losers. The public hears whose ox is being gored, but too rarely the importance of the constitutional process by which the goring occurs.

A Madisonian people, by contrast, will care about constitutional integrity in addition to political outcomes. This is for constitutional reasons but also for selfish ones: The power whose use one celebrates today will be wielded by a leader with whom one disagrees tomorrow, a lesson Democrats who endorsed Mr. Obama’s unilateral executive orders are now learning. Such citizens will also understand that they occupy the country along with more than 325 million fellow citizens whose views must be accommodated.

Crucially, they will not tolerate members of Congress who surrender legislative authority, even for results to some voters’ momentary liking, because they will prioritize enduring constitutionalism over transient policies. They will realize, too, that maintaining legislative authority, which is more immediately responsive to local concerns, serves their own interests as well.

Finally, some group among a Madisonian people will have the foresight to step off the cynical and anti-constitutional carousel according to which President George W. Bush did it so Mr. Obama could do it so Mr. Trump might as well, too.

None of this excuses members of Congress from their duties, which sometimes include withstanding public opinion. Even the Democratic justification for an override vote sure to fail is, as the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, put it, to create a record so the issue can be resolved by the courts.

To her credit, Ms. Pelosi did say that “we are Article I, the first branch of government.” But she was less reticent about executive power when Mr. Obama acted unilaterally on immigration. In both cases, the House should have defended its constitutional turf. It is no solution — on the contrary, it presents its own constitutional problems — for one party to ask the courts to provide the institutional protection the whole House declined to provide itself.

As for the Senate, one purpose of its members’ six-year terms is to enable what Madison called “great firmness” in resisting public whims and defending constitutional principles. So much for that. Every legislator is accountable for how he or she votes on the emergency declaration, but Madison expected those immediately facing re-election to capitulate more easily to public opinion. There are worse political sins. Harsher criticism should be reserved for senators who caved without facing immediate electoral consequences.

But their constituents who demanded this constitutional surrender — especially those who profess fidelity to the Constitution as the bedrock of their politics — deserve the sternest rebuke. It is an axiom of republican politics that everyone incurs criticism sooner or later, except the people. Yet if the people care solely about expediency at the expense of law, we are in a “wretched situation” from which the Constitution will not rescue us.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

• March 21, 2019
• • 16

The people of the Gaza Strip are protesting again, and soldiers are shooting again, and civilians are being victimized again. Only this time you may have missed the story, because these protests barely rated a buried paragraph in most Western news accounts.

That’s odd: Some media outlets are prepared to devote months of journalistic effort in order to trace the trajectory of a single bullet that accidentally kills a Palestinian — provided the bullet is Israeli.

The difference this time is that the shots are being fired by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, when it usurped power from its rivals in the Fatah movement in a quick and dirty civil war. Since then, no genuine elections have been held, and no dissent brooked.

The current round of demonstrations, which began last week, comes in reaction to years of Hamas’s economic mismanagement, price hikes and recent tax increases. This is not for lack of funds on Hamas’s part: Since 2012, the group has taken in over a billion dollars from Qatar alone to pay the costs of fuel, humanitarian aid and civil-servant salaries.

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Where that money goes is another question. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas had spent some $90 million building attack tunnels into Israel, at an average cost of nearly $3 million a tunnel. The material devoted to each tunnel, the Journal reported, was “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Three wars against Israel, each started by Hamas, have also taken their toll in lives, injuries, infrastructure and isolation.

All this has meant suffering and deprivation for the people of Gaza, irrespective of anything Israel does. In February, Amnesty International reported that the Palestinian journalist Hajar Harb had been tried in absentia by Hamas for publishing a report on al-Araby TV detailing alleged corruption in the Ministry of Health. Hamas officials have also reportedly enriched themselves by controlling the underground trade in goods, from poultry to furniture to cars, between the Strip and Egypt.

And so Gazans are making their despair known. Hundreds took to the streets last week, only to be shot at, clubbed and arrested by Hamas security forces.

“The crackdown on freedom of expression and the use of torture in Gaza has reached alarming new levels,” noted Saleh Higazi of Amnesty. Incidents include the arrest of human-rights activists, the beating and jailing of more than 15 local journalists, and violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators “using sound grenades, batons, pepper spray, live ammunition and physical assaults.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hamas bills itself as a “resistance” movement, and such movements, from the Irish Republican Army to the Viet Cong to Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, tend to behave in strikingly similar ways: fanatical, thuggish, militaristic, hypocritical and corrupt.

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To such groups, liberation rarely means more than the replacement of some form of foreign occupation with local despotism. They avow democracy but never hold a truly fair election. They create secret police, parallel security services, politburos, inner- and outer-party structures. They make war on their neighbors to distract from their inevitable failure to create prosperity at home. Their leaders preach struggle and martyrdom while living lavishly.

Nor should you be surprised by the scantiness of Western coverage: It would complicate a convenient narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that holds that the former isn’t just the principal oppressor, but the only one. That feeds into the larger progressive fiction that the great crimes of the post-World War II world are the ones the West perpetrated on the rest of the world. In fact, far worse were the crimes of non-Westerners — Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Nicolás Maduro — perpetrated against their own people.

The same goes for the Palestinians. More have died in Syria in the last decade, mainly on account of the depredations of the ostensibly pro-Palestinian regime of Bashar al-Assad, than have been killed by Israel. And Palestinians continue to be the victims of leaders who see no reason to subject themselves to regular elections, or financial audits, or criminal investigations, or any other mechanism of political or moral accountability.

That lack of accountability is chiefly a Palestinian failure. But it’s abetted by Western journalism that, with some honorable exceptions, for too long has been depressingly incurious about any form of Palestinian suffering for which Israel cannot be held responsible. That is sometimes a function of ideological bias, but it is also a failure of basic reporting.

Israelis and their friends abroad often complain about slanted coverage that seems to find fault in everything they do, while finding excuses in everything their adversaries do. If the protests in Gaza demonstrate anything, it’s that Palestinians hardly benefit from the coverage, either.

Palestinian lives and livelihoods should matter despite who harms them. A world that shrugs at Hamas’s abuse of its own people merely licenses the abuse to continue, unchecked.