Charles M. Blow

He has confirmed, publicly, the major details of his voluminous report. Our 2016 election came under massive attack by the Russians, and those efforts continue. The goal was to help Donald Trump’s electoral prospects. People in the Trump campaign welcomed the efforts. Trump stood to gain financially from relationships with Russia through the building of a Trump Tower in Moscow.

He also confirmed the multiple ways that Trump sought to obstruct his investigation. He clarified that his office had not made a determination as to when Trump had committed a crime, because of internal Department of Justice guidance that states a sitting president couldn’t be indicted. He affirmed that Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice.

And, in what may be the most resonant sound bite, he underscored, contrary to the lie Trump keeps telling, that Trump was in fact not fully exonerated by his findings.

This is the hearing the Democratic leadership seemed to suggest they were waiting for and needed to determine whether or not to move forward to open an impeachment.

Even though they knew that Mueller would not go beyond the finding and scope of his report — he said as much before being summoned to the hill — they made Americans believe that the mere act of him saying out loud and on television what most Americans refused to take the time to read would massively move public attention.

I’m not sure how or to what degree Wednesday’s theater will sway the public. I suspect that the impact will be negligible. Republicans are fully in the tank for Trump. There are a sizable group of people who identify as independent but in fact are not.

Most independents lean right or left, consistently so, and vote that way. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey report released in March found that of the 38% of self-described independents, only 7% declined to lean right or left.

And, the Democratic leadership has basically left liberals in a lurch. They refused to say upfront, forthrightly and consistently that Trump had committed crimes in office that rose to the level of impeachable offenses. They never made that case to the American people, particularly those in their base.

They wanted someone or something to force their hand. They waited on the Mueller report. That wasn’t enough. They waited for Wednesday’s hearing. I doubt that will be enough.

They told us that there was such a thing as a “failed impeachment,” meaning that if the Senate was unlikely to convict and remove, an impeachment vote in the House was meaningless.

They told us that impeachment was too “divisive” and should not be undertaken unless the impetus was “overwhelming and bipartisan.”

People were told that opening an impeachment inquiry would be a mistake because that’s what Trump wants to energize his base — particularly a failure to convict in the Senate — and that it would virtually guarantee his reelection.

None of this washes with me. While Democrats worry about tearing the country apart, Trump is doing just that in real time. His base doesn’t need further energizing; they’re juiced up on sexism, xenophobia, racism and nationalism.

The truth is that the Democratic leadership has no intention whatsoever of opening an impeachment inquiry unless they are literally forced to do so. They know that Trump deserves to be impeached, but principle is being made to take a back seat to politics. They are scared of unsettling the people who voted for their newly elected moderates. They are scared that they might upset the white people who voted for Trump’s racism but might be open to considering a Democrat.

They think that there is a way to acquiesce their way into acceptance. They think that if Democrats are simply quiet and don’t make a fuss that this fever will break and voters will be relieved of Trump’s corruption.

To me, they look like sniveling tacticians, more concerned with gaming things out that light us up.

Our political establishment has a moral duty to chastise this president for his corrupt and criminal behavior, even if it doesn’t lead to his removal. The Republicans have long ago made clear that they have abdicated their moral responsibility. But the Democratic leadership is dangling the possibility of moving forward before its base, which is hungry for action.

The leadership is conducting a long-term tease as a way of dampening a revolt. In truth, this is precisely where they want us to be: riled up but not in full revolt, angry that Trump is still in office without feeling that there is any option to remove him other than at the ballot.

Maybe history may judge this political calculation to have been a savvy one. Maybe. Or maybe, history will judge the anemic response to Trump’s steamrolling our laws, rules and conventions as setting the most dangerous of precedents for the future of the country, all out of fear.

Which of those historical judgments would look most devastating when committed to the page and entered into the record?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/mueller-impeach.html" id="487b12e3-356c-39a3-ad42-4b3d7271d0e6">The New York Times</a>.

Well folks, there you have it. Special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his testimony. There are no more shoes to drop.

Mueller Testified. Now What?

How is it that America insists on knowledge of the unknowable — what lurks in the heart — in order to assign the appellation?

Why are so many Americans insisting that racism requires conscious, malicious intent in order for the title to be earned?

Last week, much of America wrestled with whether to label the president racist after he published racist tweets about four congresswomen of color, demonstrating once again in the most overt terms that he is indeed a racist.

And yet many, including those in the media, struggled with whether or not to label his tweet, and by extension Donald Trump himself, as racist.

As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, some outlets did label the tweets as racist, but “On the whole, however, the news desks of mainstream news organizations did not call the tweets racist, or at least did not do so consistently across their output.”

In many cases it was up to critics, pundits and columnists to be the loudest voices in the chorus willing to call a thing a thing. And many of those voices were people of color who have been properly labeling Trump what he is from the beginning.

But, this raises a very serious question, particularly for our white colleagues in journalism and our fellow white citizens: What took you so long? Were these tweets really your racial Rubicon? Or, were they simply your last straw? Did nothing else in his decadeslong track record earn him the designation? Or, do you simply reset the racism dial every few months?

It seems to me that white journalists in particular — and white citizens, in general — have done a tremendous injury to truth and honesty by providing the dangerous illusion that racism was hard to define and racists were hard to designate.

This newspaper is not exempt from that critique.

And specifically, by leaving people of color out on a limb as the primary voices of truth on these racial issues, you have created the impression that the use of these terms is born of personal grievance rather than professional assessment.

By refusing to add your white voices you gave the defining of racism a black face. You allowed people to believe that the telling of truth and bearing of witness by some, we black and brown few, has the appearance of being corrupted and compromised by ignoble motive.

A USA Today/Ipsos poll published July 17 found that more than twice as many Americans believe that people who call others racist do so “in bad faith,” compared with those who do not believe it.

This all contributes to whittling away at the reality of racism itself, that it even exists in nearly the proportions which social scientists have documented. This refusal to properly and consistently call racism racism allows the pro-racists and the racism deniers to proclaim nearly unopposed that labeling something or someone racist has simply become a weapon, and that the words themselves have lost meaning by overuse.

In truth, the opposite is true: Racism is actually under-identified and labeled in America.

And, I believe that too many of our white neighbors are choosing to be intentionally blind to the enormous breadth and scope of racism in this country, because to acknowledge it would be to condemn self, family, friends and community. It would be to recognize that much of their existence is privileged, and conversely blackness is oppressed.

Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress and the first to seek a major party nomination for president, once put it: “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”

There is racial bias embedded in nearly every aspect of America life: financial, medical, judicial, political, nutritional, environmental, educational, you name it.

Racism in America is like air — all around us, being constantly inhaled and exhaled, and if you are white, proving very beneficial to your health and survival.

It is precisely for that reason that many white people are incredulous when they see a person of color heaving, gasping for breath, complaining that the air is poisoned.

How is it that this invisible thing that sustains me simultaneously causes you grievous injury?

And so begins the mental gymnastics to assign another cause, to accuse the asphyxiated of histrionics.

Make no mistake: Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist. You cannot claim to be egalitarian and anti-racism and choose to be closeted among family and friends or even in your community for fear of rejection and ostracism, or as is often used as an excuse, to keep the peace.

There is no peace for the targets of racism, so your choosing of personal comfort and the comfort of racists supports the commission of racial injury.

If you are just coming to call Trump’s behavior racist — or, worse yet, if you still can’t bring yourself to do so — you are part of the problem. You are supporting that architecture of white racism.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/opinion/trump-racism.html" id="8df208f6-a991-341c-a2cc-008dd66f6fbd">The New York Times</a>.

When did we arrive at the point where applying the words racist and racism were more radioactive than actually doing and saying racist things and demonstrating oneself to be a racist?

Denying Racism Supports It

This young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, officially kicked off his presidential bid at a rally this week in that city.

Buttigieg said to the adoring crowd: “I recognize the audacity of doing this as a Midwestern millennial mayor. More than a little bold — at age 37 — to seek the highest office in the land.”

As Alex Burns of The New York Times noted: “This line is an almost explicit invocation of Mr. Obama’s 2007 announcement speech, when he said, ‘I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity’ to a junior senator like him seeking the presidency. Mr. Buttigieg uses Obama-esque flourishes throughout, including more than half a dozen references each to ‘hope’ and ‘change.’”

But alas, Buttigieg isn’t Obama. No one is. The swelling crowd of Democratic hopefuls consists of candidates who are their own people with their own strengths and weakness. And, one of those weaknesses, for many, is how to appeal to black voters.

As former Obama campaign manager and White House adviser David Axelrod tweeted about Buttigieg’s announcement speech: “Watching the @PeteButtigieg announcement from South Bend. Crowd seems very large, very impressive but also very white — an obstacle he will have to overcome.”

In a follow-up tweet, Axelrod explained: “And by obstacle I mean deficiency. He will need to build out his coalition in a very diverse party.”

A quarter of the population of South Bend is African-American. Where were they?

And, it is not that candidates like Buttigieg haven’t attempted outreach to African-Americans. This month he went to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference and told the crowd, “I believe an agenda for black Americans needs to include five things that all of us care about: homeownership, entrepreneurship, education, health and justice.”

(Cory Booker, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang also spoke at the conference.)

The problem of course is connection, and connecting with a voting base that people too often think of as monolithic when in fact it is multifaceted and fractured.

The day after Buttigieg’s announcement speech, he addressed on CNN his campaign’s issue with attracting and appealing to a black voter, pledging to “do better” and saying in part: “I’ve been on the trail, we found, to some extent, it depends on geography. We had a very diverse crowd at my first stop in Nevada, but less so in South Carolina.”

Among the many different ways the African-American population is diverse in this country is geographic. There is the South, where most black people in this country still live, and there is everywhere else.

In a way, I think that you could make a case that there are two black Americas among the people descended of the enslaved in this country: The sons and daughters of the Great Migration and the sons and daughters of the people who stayed in the South.

I was born and raised in the South, but have lived the last 27 years in the Midwest and Northeast, and I can tell you that those are not the same black Americas.

One difference is religiosity. While black people in general are more religious than the overall population, black people in the South are also appreciably more religious than black people in other parts of the country, according to Gallup data. The data reveals that the percentage of black people who were deemed “not religious” (based on how important attending church was to them) was 13 percent in the South. It was twice that number in the West, and around 20 percent in the Midwest and East.

The Pew Research Center found a similar difference in 2009: While only 9 percent of black people in the South were religiously unaffiliated, that number nearly doubled in the Midwest to 17 percent and was 14 percent in the Northeast and 15 percent in the West.

This religiosity translates into a form of social conservatism. Taking that into consideration, a more progressive view may have more resonance among black people outside the South than in it. Messaging, policies and appeals won’t necessarily work the same in these different areas.

This is important to understand, since black voters are critically important for securing the nomination, particularly in the South, and can make the difference in the general election, particularly in the Midwest.

In 2016, African-Americans were the majority of Democratic primary voters in Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia, according to exit polls. (There were no exit polls for Louisiana.) All of those states were early on the primary calendar, voting by the second week in March. This gave black Southerners a stronger hand in shaping the direction of the race for the nomination.

In the general election, these voices were drowned out by their Republican neighbors, almost all of whom are white. No Democrat has won one of these states in 23 years, when Bill Clinton won Louisiana in 1996.

Another division is age. Young black voters do not necessarily align their interests with their parents.

These factors, in part, explain the performance of the black electorate in the 2016 contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Sanders struggled to attract older black voters, particularly in the South, and Clinton struggled to excite young black ones.

A 2016 study from The Associated Press and the University of Chicago found that 60 percent of young African-Americans chose Sanders over Clinton as “the candidate who best understands the problems of people like them,” and “among African-American young adults who indicated they voted in the primaries, a majority, 54 percent, said they voted for Bernie Sanders.” And yet Sanders still lost all of the states in which black voters were the majority during the primaries.

Lastly, there is a division that I believe is harder to grasp, more ephemeral but also more profound: the difference between the black activist and the black traditionalist.

This overlaps with religion and age, to be sure, but I believe that it also speaks to the differences in the black political cultures of the North and South. We have seen this split for generations in the different approaches taken by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers.

This is not a judgment about which approaches were right or more effective, but rather an acknowledgment that they were different, and informed by place. An issue like reparations can have a particular potency in some areas and not nearly as much in others.

Buttigieg and the rest of the field would do well to recognize these differences when setting out to woo black voters. The loudest voices in the biggest cities are not necessarily representative of the whole African-American community. Topics trending on Twitter may not be top of mind in Mississippi.

If you want to win more of the black vote, recognize that there are a variety of different black voters and fight for their votes individually rather than believe that it’s a one-size-fits-all approach.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/pete-buttigieg-black-vote.html" id="d4c23c12-6d8b-33e1-a96f-04f5ad8c6635">The New York Times</a>.

Pete Buttigieg gives me Barack Obama vibes.

The Complexities of the Black Vote

In that speech, Omar invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, saying the council was created “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

(As The New York Times pointed out, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.”)

The congresswoman could have used different, more severe language to describe the attacks, but she didn’t. Maybe we could judge her use of language as inartful, but we all succumb to that occasionally, me included. Error is inevitable among the loquacious. But, the Omar of the speech stands. I saw nowhere in ita thread of terror apologia.

And yet, conservative media has pounced on four of Omar’s words — “some people did something” — as just that. Brian Kilmeade, one of the dull and delusional on “Fox &amp; Friends,” questioned her patriotism, saying, “You have to wonder if she’s an American first.”

Donald Trump upped the ante, retweeting a video of Omar saying, “Some people did something,” interspersed with the still-chilling video of the 9/11 attacks. Some things should be too sacred to exploit for political gain, but Trump is an amoralist. Nothing is beyond the pale.

While the unrelenting attacks on Omar are newsworthy unto themselves as a conservative peculiarity, I believe that the attacks should be viewed through a wider and longer lens. Omar is only the most recent minority woman onto whom conservatives have trained their fire.

While white supremacy has historically tried to paint minority men as physically dangerous, it has routinely painted minority women, particularly those strong and vocal, as pathological and reprobate.

There is a pattern here. It is expressed not only in the attacks on, and in elevation of, Omar, but also on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Before them, Trump and his cohorts demonized Rep. Maxine Waters, who Trump dubbed “Low IQ,” and Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida.

And before they tried to make Omar and Ocasio-Cortez the face of the Democratic Party, they did the same to Wilson and Waters. In October 2017, Trump tweeted about Wilson:

“Wacky Congresswoman Wilson is the gift that keeps on giving for the Republican Party, a disaster for Dems. You watch her in action &amp; vote R!”

In June, Trump said, “The face of the Democrats is now Maxine Waters.”

The strategy is simple: While sexism and racism are potent individually, they are devastating in combination, particularly when appealing to a party dominated by white men and which exalts white supremacy and white patriarchy.

The only women they truly honor are white women who obsequiously condone or actively participate in the oppression.

All manner of inhumanity and barbarism have been conducted under the guise of protecting the honor and purity of these white women. There are untold rope-burned necks and fully burned bodies in American history to attest to this.

There is a reason that Trump launching his campaign by calling Mexicans murderers and rapists had such resonance among the people who came to support him.

One of the most memorable scenes in “The Birth of a Nation” was a white woman throwing herself off a cliff to keep from being raped by a black man.

There is a reason that many white people viewed slavery as the guard against the vulnerability of women, and black freedom as the gateway to white woman victimization.

As Binghamton University historian Diane Miller Sommerville put it in her book, “Rape &amp; Race in the Nineteenth-Century South”: “Black-on-white rape figured prominently in these historical treatments of Reconstruction. Portraying Freedmen as intoxicated with new political power, historians like Claude Bowers described how ‘an awful fear rested upon the [white] women of the communities.’ ”

Sommerville would quote Bowers saying, “Rape is the foul daughter of Reconstruction.”

To advance their oppression, these white men treated white women as victims, and many white women reciprocated by playing the role of victim. In that way, barbarity could be passed off as chivalry.

But for the women who fall outside this constraint — minority women, lesbian and transgender women, liberal women, “nasty” women — the rebuke is brutal. They didn’t need protection, but rather, suppression.

These women herald calamity — both the dislodging of white supremacy and the subversion of male supremacy. Conservatives attack these women because the threat they pose is existential.

We can fuss over the language any of these women have used, and whether some remarks crossed lines of propriety, but to have them as the only arena of discussion about why conservatives are so offended is to be intentionally blind.

These people hate women like Omar because they see them as omens.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/opinion/ilhan-omar-minority-women.html" id="6cdd0499-b5f0-39b3-aff8-3eb3760b45f2">The New York Times</a>.

Last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, delivered a speech in which she correctly derided Islamophobia, a real and persistent problem in this country and others.

Demonizing Minority Women

He tweeted that Puerto Rico’s government “can’t do anything right” and that the island’s politicians are “incompetent or corrupt” and only “complain and ask for more money,” which they spend “foolishly or corruptly, &amp; only take from USA.” He specifically called the mayor of San Juan “crazed and incompetent.”

Point of fact: Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It is a territory. Its citizens are U.S. citizens. The structure of Trump’s comments leaves open the possibility that he doesn’t know that, or conversely, knows it but doesn’t fully accept it or care about it.

If this were a one-off spat with politicians opposed to his conduct, one might reasonably write Trump’s comments off as politics as usual. Instead, this questioning of the competence of black and brown leaders is not anomaly but motif.

Trump has spent nearly a decade now trying to paint Barack Obama as not only an illegitimate president, but also as an inept, lazy, embarrassing one. He has called him a “sick,” “weak,” “incompetent leader” with a “horrible attitude” who “looks and sounds so ridiculous,” “has disastrous judgment,” is “a total failure” and was “perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”

Worse than the white supremacist Andrew Johnson, who did his best to obstruct Reconstruction, opposed the 14th Amendment and was impeached? Worse than Trump’s slave-owning hero Andrew Jackson, whose Indian Removal Act led to the Trail of Tears? Worse than slave-owning John Tyler, who during his time in Congress argued against the Missouri Compromise, which would restrain the spread of the “peculiar institution”? Worse than Millard Fillmore, who backed the protection of Southern slavery in the Compromise of 1850, which delayed Southern secession? Worse than Richard Nixon, who was forced from office? Worse than George W. Bush, who lied this country into the war in Iraq? Worse than Trump himself?

Let’s submit that Trump has in some ways been an equal opportunity offender and gone after all his political opponents to some degree — he incessantly called Hillary Clinton “crooked” and Bernie Sanders “crazy.”

Still, that doesn’t fully account for the particular consistency with which he attacks minority leaders and minority-led entities as inadequate, ineffective and incompetent.

According to Trump, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was “totally unqualified” and would “destroy” the state of Georgia. Abrams is a star, and the way that state’s election was handled will do more to destroy it than Abrams ever could.

According to Trump, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was “a Dem who is a thief and who is Mayor of poorly run Tallahassee, said to be one of the most corrupt cities in the Country!” There is no evidence of theft by Gillum, and Tallahassee isn’t the most corrupt city.

According to Trump, legendary Congressman John Lewis’ district “is in horrible shape and falling apart.” It is not. PolitiFact rated Trump’s claim “mostly false.”

Even majority-black and majority-brown countries around the globe have been condemned and dismissed by Trump in this way. Haiti, El Salvador and African countries are “shithole countries.” Mexico has a “totally corrupt gov’t,” and it is sending “animals” and “rapists” across the border.

Yet he has lobbed praise at strongmen — mostly in Europe and Asia — for being great leaders. Think Russia and North Korea.

(Western nations have also piqued his anger when they have not been sufficiently ruthless with their minority populations. He said that Britain was “trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem,” and Germany “is going through massive attacks to its people by the migrants allowed to enter the country.” But Trump still maintains “a great feeling for Germany.” That feeling is apparently so great that he keeps lying that his father, Fred Trump, was born there, like he did again this week. Fred Trump was born in New York.)

To me, this marking of minorities as incapable of good governance harkens back to the Reconstruction period, when white supremacists promoted racist caricatures of newly elected black legislators acting uncouth as a way to fuel an angry backlash. This shows up in newspaper illustrations and in the film “The Birth of a Nation,” in which black legislators — eating, drinking and some without shoes — are shown in a state of chaos.

These white supremacists, many wealthy and powerful, used the threat of “black domination” to scare poorer whites into allegiance, warning them of race-mixing, miscegenation and the rape of white women and girls. They also warned about the crude attempt of black people to be civilized and judicious.

This is very similar to what Trump tweeted this week, trying to pit suffering farmers in the Midwest against suffering Puerto Rican hurricane survivors.

Trump tweeted that “Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before.”

That, of course, was just another lie. As The New York Times reported:

“In fact, FEMA and other agencies have so far distributed $11.2 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Some $41 billion in aid has been allocated, while $91 billion is the budget office’s estimate of how much the island could receive over the next two decades.”

The farmers are mostly old, white men. As Modern Farmer pointed out in 2014:

“More than 92 percent of the country’s 2.1 million farmers are non-Hispanic whites, and more than 86 percent of those farm operators are men. The average age of farmers, which has been rising for decades, continued to inch up. In 2012, the average farmer was 58.3 years old, up from 57.1 years in 2007.”

Puerto Rico is 99 percent Hispanic.

Trump made his point clear: The mismanagement and incompetence of these brown people amount to stealing resources from these white people. As he tweeted: “Cannot continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments, and so little appreciation!”

The brown people were supposed to be thankful that white daddy in “the States” was helping them at all. As Trump tweeted, “The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump.”

This is the kind of paternalistic white supremacy that doesn’t even require open hostility, although plenty often accompanies it. The logic goes this way: Everyone is better off, even minorities, when white people are in charge and calling the shots.

This is part of what drew so many white voters to Trump, whether they admit it or not: He promised to destroy, erase or replace everything Obama had done, thereby fixing the glitch in the narrative that the only true and good leaders of America were white leaders. In the white supremacist imagination, even this horrendous white leader is better than the most educated, articulate and erudite black man.

That logic also says to people like the Puerto Ricans that even in their suffering, minorities are better off being part of this country.

This reminds me of a letter Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife in 1856 in which he said:

“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially &amp; physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”

For all minorities in America, the subjugation continues, particularly now that Trump wants to dictate who is worthy of assistance and who should be allowed to suffer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/trump-puerto-rico.html" id="3a519f95-d9fa-34dc-ae16-db071f937a30">The New York Times</a>.

Donald Trump’s lie-filled rage tweets about Puerto Rico this week over disaster aid continue a Trump pattern that mirrors a method that white supremacists have used throughout American history. Particularly present since Reconstruction, this method involves proclaiming that minorities lack the character and capacity to create effective government, and therefore minority-led jurisdictions are a hopeless drain on resources.

Trump to Puerto Rico: Who's Your Daddy?

No, it’s not about Donald Trump, just in case you were wondering. But since I have written almost exclusively about Trump for more than two years, please allow me this parting assessment: It is so much worse than I thought.

My original objections to Trump, the things that pushed me into the Resistance, were his immorality, dishonesty, fraudulence and grift. I freely admit now that I was seeing only the pointy edge of an enormous machine. I had no idea how immoral Trump actually is.

The same month that Trump pulled the outrageous stunt of inviting women who had accused Bill Clinton of inappropriate sexual behavior to his debate with Hillary Clinton, his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, apparently under his instructions, facilitated a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from telling America that she had a sexual encounter with Trump, who was married with a small child. This payment was a few months after Cohen had helped arrange a $150,000 deal between American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, to buy the story of Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed a sexual relationship with Trump.

According to prosecutors, both were campaign finance violations — federal crimes — and now a judge has sentenced Cohen to three years in prison for that and other crimes. The fact that Trump would be directly implicated in a federal crime that took place on the verge of the election and may have helped hand that election to him is mind-blowing to me.

Trump, for his part, lied about these payments and denied them — while also having those around him lie about them on his behalf — until he could simply no longer lie about them anymore. Then came the roulette wheel of revolving explanations that makes one dizzy because of their silliness.

Just this week, the Trump Foundation agreed to dissolve under pressure from the New York attorney general, who found that the foundation functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests” and engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality,” including coordinating with Trump’s presidential campaign.

How can a family that can’t run a charity run a country?

But of course, that is not all. Nearly every aspect of Trump’s life is now under investigation for wrongdoing, something I could not have foreseen.

I could not have predicted the extraordinary lengths to which the president would go to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law, nor that he would do these things in full view, for everyone to see.

I could not have predicted, when I first wrote that Trump was a pathological liar, that his rate of lying would increase with his time in office, rather than decrease. As The Washington Post Fact Checker put it in September:

“Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days — since our last update — the president has averaged 32 claims a day. When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. He passed the 2,000 mark on Jan. 10 — eight months ago.”

Just this month, the newspaper’s Fact Checker was forced to create a new category of lying just for the Trump era: the “Bottomless Pinocchio” for “when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.”

I could not have predicted the overwhelming number of contacts that would have existed between people in Trump’s orbit and the Russians during the campaign, or the number of people who would take plea deals and ultimately be charged, indicted or convicted of lying about those contacts.

I couldn’t have predicted any of it, but here we are, and the president, his congressional backers and his citizen supporters are continuing to tell us that this doesn’t matter as much as we think, that this is a politically driven prosecution, that everyone does what Trump has done.

They are all wrong. This is huge, and the longer we pretend that it isn’t, the more damage we do to the health and stability of our own country.

While I am away, I will enjoy not having to follow the hourly insanities too closely, but every day I will worry about the republic in which we live. Trump has the capacity to damage or even destroy it. That’s not hyperbole. That’s an observation informed by a close reading of history.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/opinion/trump-russia-michael-cohen-charity.html" id="2e8ea5b8-79e5-3d65-a2a0-8c2fce153961">The New York Times</a>.

I will be going on book leave soon — today is my last column for a while because of the holiday schedule — to write what I believe to be the most important thing that I’ve ever written.

It Is So Much Worse Than I Thought

That much was clear Thursday when I sat down with him and his identical twin brother, Joaquín, for an interview over dinner in a midtown Manhattan steakhouse.

Julián, a self-described progressive, is the former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the former mayor of San Antonio, who last week announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee. Joaquín is a congressman in Texas who would be Julián’s campaign chairman.

When we begin the interview, Castro is careful with his answers nearly to the point of being cagey. You can see him doing the calculations in his head, trying not to overstate a position or appear too absolute on a topic that he has not fully considered.

Can a sitting president be indicted?

“Well, I think we’re going to find that out.” Later he adds, “I know what I hope. I hope we can bring anybody to justice.”

Do you believe that Trump should be indicted?

“I believe the walls are closing in on him.”

If you were president and prosecutors attempted to prosecute a then former President Donald Trump, would you pardon him as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon?

“That is a tough decision. My inclination is to say no, that I would not, but I think some of that also depends on where we’re at as a country.”

But, as the dinner wears on, he loosens and his quickness to laugh emerges. He dispenses with the knife and fork he has been using to negotiate his roast chicken and, in a move that would have made Emily Post squirm but makes me smile, he hoists it with his hands. He is comfortable now, and this man I like: imperfect but not impertinent. Human. Relatable.

We discuss Castro’s rather standard Democratic stances on major issues: in favor of common-sense gun regulations, wants to roll back the Trump tax cut, and wants to take a multinational approach to the issues driving Trump’s tariffs. He’s in favor of universal pre-K, free public college across the board, and Medicare for all.

I’m listening for something enlightening, something arresting, a vision and a vocabulary that will rally and inspire. It never fully manifests. He talks of summoning a “common sense of purpose, of common national identity.” He chides Donald Trump’s divisiveness and churlishness. But somehow, it all flattens for me. I’m too familiar with the framing.

And yet, there is something genuine about Castro, a nice guy who made it. He’s not straining to impress, and that, in and of itself, is impressive.

Because Castro’s relative youth is so apparent in his appearance and comportment, it occurs to me that if elected, Castro, who is now 44, would become one of America’s youngest presidents. And this gives me pause. There is a young man’s ease and airiness about Castro, a disarming charm that arrests the attention because of its counterintuitiveness, but I struggle to imagine it in the Oval Office.

Thinking about the campaign, too, it is hard to imagine Castro in a bare-knuckled brawl with Trump and the Republicans.

For instance, how would he respond when confronted with what he told The New York Times Magazine in 2010? “Joaquín and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action,” Castro told the magazine. “I scored 1210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquín. I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life.”

Trump would have a field day with this.

It is important to note here that Castro is unlikely to be the only young candidate this cycle. Indeed, there may be a whole raft of hopefuls in their 40s, and even 30s, who throw their hats into the ring.

But youth has a way of making itself known, of peaking through the curtain of the mature persona one tries to craft.

Castro’s first task is to secure the nomination. One could see a scenario in which this Southern Hispanic would have particular advantages on the primary calendar, but it remains to be seen how an incredibly diverse party will respond to an incredibly diverse slate of candidates. Will people hew to tribalism and regionalism in their choices, or will those things be of little consequence in the end?

Castro has been talked about for years as a rising star in the Democratic Party, one who could someday become this country’s first Hispanic president.

One question for me is whether this is that moment for Julian, or if interest in him peaked before his opening appeared. There are now other stories and educational pedigrees just as compelling as Castro’s and they are attached to people with higher profiles, access to more donors and, quite frankly, more of a craven desire to rise to power.

This nice guy may not always finish last, but can he come close enough to the top in Iowa and New Hampshire to confirm his viability?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/opinion/julian-castro-democrat-2020.html" id="5a216959-8c58-340a-a418-f5169c0b66f5">The New York Times</a>.

Julián Castro really wants to be president.

Julián Castro and the Cordial Candidacy

But youth has a way of making itself known, of peeking through the curtain of the mature persona one tries to craft.

<h1>When our children are young, we work doggedly to foster in them a deep and abiding sense of morality, ethics and character.</h1>

We try to teach them to always tell the truth, to be kind and generous, to be brave enough to do the right thing even if others aren’t as brave.

We try to teach them empathy and compassion, that caring about the less fortunate betters society and is also self-edifying.

We teach them to be gracious and thankful and not to brag or bully. Also, don’t lie, cheat or steal.

We teach them to have self-respect and to respect others. We teach them that everyone is equally worthy and valuable, no matter who they are, what they look like, how much or little they have or to which God they pray, if they pray at all.

We do all this as our children are coming to know how honor and integrity are constructed, maintained and defended. We want to raise good people and good citizens, people who respect society and follow the rules, though not blindly. We want them to question the world, and if they identify injustice, work to eliminate it.

We as parents are the first teachers, the most important ones, but there are many tangential teachers as well, at family gatherings, at school, at places of worship, on playgrounds, and also in literature, on television and on social media.

The president of the United States is one of those teachers. I don’t think many children follow a president or the politics around that presidency on a routine basis, but the sense of the president sinks in.

They know that the president should be one of the best of us, not the worst. When children do well, adults often say, “You could be president someday.” The presidents who children are taught to venerate are those who are judged to have been honorable men who changed the country for the better.

This is on some level hagiography — scratch the surface and the flaws are revealed — but there is also value in the lessons.

Donald Trump is exploding all of that. He is everything we teach our children not to be. In Trump’s world of immorality, the lessons being taught undo all the principles parents struggle to instill.

He is teaching our children that there is no absolute truth; there is “alternative fact.” It’s not what you say but how you say it and how vociferously you can defend it.

Charles M. Blow

Articles written by the author

Mueller Testified. Now What?

Denying Racism Supports It

The Complexities of the Black Vote

Demonizing Minority Women

Trump to Puerto Rico: Who's Your Daddy?

It Is So Much Worse Than I Thought

Julián Castro and the Cordial Candidacy

Julián Castro and the Cordial Candidacy

What Trump is teaching our children

Trump's tweets prove that he is a raging racist

Trump detests apologetic men

The bro-iness of Joe Biden

Trump's 'concentration camps'

Reparations: Reasonable and right

It got better, that's my testimony.

The princess vs. the demagogue

An ode to 'desperate don'

White supremacy beyond a white majority

An imperial presidency?

Defending the free press